[Linganth] Vita Peacock on her new book

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,

Today on the blog, Vita Peacock discusses her book, *Digital Initiation
Rites: Joining Anonymous in Britain, *answering *Mikkel Kenni Bruun's
questions.*


*www.campanthropology.org <http://www.campanthropology.org>*


*Best,*

*Ilana*


*Press blurb: **Digital Initiation Rites* is an ethnography of Anonymous in
Britain between 2014 and 2017, in the context of government austerity. 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.* Digital Initiation Rites *presents another angle to
contemporary debates around "conspiracy theorizing" and shows how the
consumption of digital media connects to the deep history of humankind.
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