<div dir="ltr">Dear Colleagues,<div><p class="MsoNormal" align="left" style="margin:0in;font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:black"><span lang="EN-GB">Today on the blog, Vita
Peacock discusses her book, <i>Digital Initiation Rites: Joining Anonymous in Britain, </i>answering <strong><span style="font-weight:normal">Mikkel
Kenni Bruun's questions.</span></strong></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="left" style="margin:0in;font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:black"><span lang="EN-GB"><strong><span style="font-weight:normal"><br></span></strong></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="left" style="margin:0in;font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:black"><span lang="EN-GB"><strong><span style="font-weight:normal"><a href="http://www.campanthropology.org">www.campanthropology.org</a></span></strong></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="left" style="margin:0in;font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:black"><span lang="EN-GB"><strong><span style="font-weight:normal"><br></span></strong></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="left" style="margin:0in;font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:black"><span lang="EN-GB"><strong><span style="font-weight:normal">Best,</span></strong></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="left" style="margin:0in;font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:black"><span lang="EN-GB"><strong><span style="font-weight:normal">Ilana</span></strong></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="left" style="margin:0in;font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:black"><span lang="EN-GB"><strong><span style="font-weight:normal"><br></span></strong></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="left" style="margin:0in;font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:black"><span lang="EN-GB"><strong><span style="font-weight:normal">Press blurb: </span></strong></span><span style="font-weight:700;color:rgb(74,74,74);font-family:FreightSans,sans-serif;font-size:16px;letter-spacing:-0.27px"><em>Digital Initiation Rites</em></span><span style="font-weight:700;color:rgb(74,74,74);font-family:FreightSans,sans-serif;font-size:16px;letter-spacing:-0.27px"> is an ethnography of Anonymous in Britain between 2014 and 2017, in the context of government austerity.</span><span style="color:rgb(74,74,74);font-family:FreightSans,sans-serif;font-size:16px;letter-spacing:-0.27px"> Drawing on testimonies of dozens of participants, for whom digital technologies enabled and articulated a political transformation from being "asleep" to being "awake," Vita Peacock narrates the process through which these technologies have become implicated in profound subjective changes. The book joins a wider return of the comparative method in anthropology by placing these accounts in direct conversation with studies of traditional initiation rites—ritual sequences of symbolic death and rebirth—that charge the initiand with knowledge about a society to produce a moral responsibility for it. Through this juxtaposition, Peacock conceptualizes the historically novel form of digital initiation rites, in which digital communication and information technologies play a substantive role in these sequences.</span><em style="color:rgb(74,74,74);font-family:FreightSans,sans-serif;font-size:16px;letter-spacing:-0.27px"> Digital Initiation Rites </em><span style="color:rgb(74,74,74);font-family:FreightSans,sans-serif;font-size:16px;letter-spacing:-0.27px">presents another angle to contemporary debates around "conspiracy theorizing" and shows how the consumption of digital media connects to the deep history of humankind.</span></p></div></div>