Anthropologists themselves operate within political economies of attention.

Evidence

As professors or students of anthropology, we too are embedded in broader political economies of attention—in academia, in our private lives, and among the people whose worlds we study and write about. We hope that, as the anthropology of attention grows into maturity, more of our colleagues will consider our own taken-for-granted attentional technologies and techniques within the field and beyond by turning their attention to the study of anthropological attention itself. — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 73

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s surveillance/attention field — the reflexive move of studying attention within academia parallels how attention-research tools treat researchers as data subjects.

Related

• Anthropology has studied attention mostly implicitly, not as an explicit topic (similarity 0.86)
• Attention can be anthropologically theorized as either technologies or techniques (similarity 0.82)
• Attention functions as a political economy embedded in specific temporal contexts (similarity 0.82)
• Attention has emerged as a site of political, economic, and moral struggle (similarity 0.82)
• Politics itself is being reshaped by attentional extraction industries (similarity 0.82)
• Attention-economy analysis must be reframed within a broader attention ecosophy (similarity 0.81)
• Collective political attention is structured by environmental agenda-setting mechanisms. (similarity 0.81)
• Attention’s slipperiness itself makes it a subject for ethnographic study. (similarity 0.81)
• Debates about attention are ultimately ontological, not political (similarity 0.81)
• Attention is a socially produced and politically governed resource, not merely a scarce one. (similarity 0.80)
• Attention has long been treated as valuable and manipulable, not only digitally. (similarity 0.79)
• Attention is an activity that forms persons, not a resource that platforms act upon (similarity 0.79)
• The line between forced and free attention is itself a political question needing investigation (similarity 0.79)
• Attention is socially and materially mediated, not just a scarce mental resource (similarity 0.79)
• Attention is the defining political and existential question of the current era (similarity 0.78)