An anthropology of death

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, Dec, 2005 by Tim Batchelder

Digital Archaeology

In humankind's search for solutions to the problem of death the next life-space to colonize is not the body and not the mind but the mind-body experience. Pills and priests are giving way to digital media in which a human's entire life experience is recreated and maintained virtually. As the body becomes fragile and one's social community recedes it is the memory of places, people, things that is increasingly cherished. The search for extensions for memory and language has long been a pursuit of humans. Natural language is extended by mathematics and programming languages, memory by storage, thinking by information processing, words by algorithms. The search is for a "universal language" from scientific taxonomy to calculus which are no more than schemes like memory systems intended to organize all human knowledge, or give names to all possible thoughts. Language became an object of study in the 19th century and a "graphic method" (grammophone, the cinematograph) was developed that today has become the "new media." The objects of this digital archaeology are artifacts that every human stores and maintains and it is the digital archaeologist who uncovers them and finds ways to model the terrain in which they existed. I have begun an archaeology of home which is an inventory using digital photography, video, and sound of everything important to a person that can be accessed when a person ages, as an ethnography of your life. The digital archaeologist is just as concerned with durability and accessibility as with detail, however, since most of today's computer systems create media that is obsolete, unreadable or otherwise short-lived (20 years at most) based on volatile magnetic or optical media in contrast to previous recoding methods which spanned centuries. Also, the media must be context-independent, much as a clay pot, broken into pieces at a site, can be reassembled. Today's software and hardware is virtually meaningless to anyone since it doesn't give any clues about the content of the file itself. In order to preserve 1,000 languages--the world languages for posterity--the Rosetta Project has relied on relatively simple technology of an analog disk that is readable by a microscope. It does not require electricity to access it. Nor is it on fragile magnetic media either. Digital Archeology also includes methods and procedures to rescue content from damaged media or from obsolete or damaged hardware and software environments.

Conclusion

An anthropologist might argue that in order to fully live our lives we must fully live our deaths. And yet modern hospital-based medicine--the dominant force in our healthcare system--is devoted to extending life and gives little thought to the experience of death. We must now shift our gaze to the experience of the end of life and anthropology has the tools to do just this. For periodic updates on this topic and others in the anthropology of science and technology see www.anthrocode.com or email tim@anthrocode.com