Zeitschrift for Ethnologie (ZfE) /Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology (JSCA): Special Section
Guest Editors: Konstanze N’Guessan, Jan Beek
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT, using it felt like dialing into the internet or writing an e-mail for the first time back in the 1990s – a sense of a new, exciting technological shift. Anthropology departments across the globe and journal editorial boards began discussing the usefulness, the uselessness or risks of generative artificial intelligences (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs) for academic writing and teaching. Not to be outpaced, universities have started developing AI literacy workshops, while guidelines on the use of generative AI are slowly being introduced into publishing and citation standards. GenAI and LLMs seem to be just another technology to which academia and anthropologists adapt.
Beneath this surface, new practices have emerged that feel unsettling. In classrooms, we can no longer be sure whether students’ writings, presentations or even spoken comments are the result of their engagement with anthropology – or just of a prompt. For journal editors, such paranoid sensibilities also have become reasonable, especially when it comes to peer review. In informal conversations with colleagues, we discuss whether and how we should allow students to use GenAI in class, or how to reconfigure teaching and exams to adapt to what is undoubtedly a watershed moment. Should we embrace this moment as a unique opportunity for anthropologists (Artz 2023)? Should we police the use of GenAI in academic practice? Or do we need some form of a Butlerian Jihad, a ban of machines in the likeness of the human mind?
This special section asks whether and how we must rethink anthropological practice in research, teaching, and writing against the backdrop of these technological developments. Key questions include:
• How does the use of LLMs and GenAi for ethnographic writing, the analysis of qualitative data with AI-assisted coding programs, and the design and teaching of anthropology classes and exams transform our knowledge practices?
• What new literacies and competencies emerge as necessary for AI-mediated societies, and how do we translate these into our teaching? Or do we want to hold on to the literacies and competencies that have served us well?
• Could anthropology, with its reliance not on texts but on ethnographic research – on relational knowledge production – be one of the disciplines that are most resilient to LLMs and GenAi? Can we embrace and further develop this resilience?
• What new career paths for anthropologists are emerging in tech industries?
• How do different cultural, class-based, and gendered contexts shape the adoption, adaptation, and resistance to LLM and GenAi technologies?
• What new forms of surveillance and social control emerge through GenAI, and how are they culturally mediated?
• How can ethnographic practice be adapted to study human-AI assemblages and co-authoring with machines? And do we want them as co-authors?
• Can we read the contemporary AI-present through the lens of speculative fiction, a genre that often can be read as fictional / imaginary ethnography?
Submission Guidelines:
Under the heading “Shortcuts,” the ZfE-JSCA publishes shorter interventions (1400-1600 words) that contribute to controversial contemporary problems and/or theoretical debates in anthropology and may be provocative in nature to stimulate debate within the discipline and beyond (https://zfejsca.org/ojs/index.php/jsca/about).
We are also looking for book reviews of one of the following or any other book in the realm of anthropology and emerging AI technologies. We welcome book reviews (1000-1200 words), portraits (800 words), literature review essays (1500-2500 words), as well as creative or playful formats of academic dialogue on the following works or any other books in the realm of anthropology and emerging AI technologies:
• Adams, R. (2024). The New Empire of AI: The Future of Global Inequality.
• Artz, M. & Koycheva, L. (Eds.). (2025). EmTech Anthropology: Careers at the Frontier.
• Benjamin, R. (2020). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code.
• Benjamin, R. (2022). Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want.
• Besteman, C. & Gusterson, H. (Eds.). (2019). Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World.
• Forsythe, D. (2001). Studying Those Who Study Us: An Anthropologist in the World of Artificial Intelligence.
• Helmreich, S. (2000). Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World.
• Koycheva, L., VandenBroek, A., & Artz, M. (Eds.). (2025). Anthropology and AI: Anthropology of Now.
• Moser, J. & Vepřek, L. (Eds.). Kulturwissenschaften und neue Technologien: Zwischen Technikentwicklung und öffentlichen Diskursen.
• Seaver, N. (2022). Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation.
• Zuboff, S. (2018). Das Zeitalter des Überwachungskapitalismus.
Proposals for shortcuts and reviews should be submitted to nguessan@uni-mainz.de by November 30, 2025. All contributions will be collected and submitted to the ZfE-JSCA by January 31, 2026.