Maxime Le Calve - "Augural Anthropology: Staging Retrieval-Augmented Generative Conversations Beyond AI's Illusion of Scientific Understanding"

 

CAIEF (NEH Award RAI-301512)

 

 

This talk introduces "Augural Anthropology," a novel approach that positions AI as a generative conversational partner in anthropology, reframing knowledge production as a dynamic, divinatory engagement rather than mere documentation. Drawing from retrieval-augmented generative (RAG) conversations developed in collaboration with Studio Olafur Eliasson’s EER project and Berlin’s Excellence Cluster "Matters of Activity”, this project explores the use of AI chatbots as augural agents participating in recursive, iterative dialogues with a community of interdisciplinary scholars. In contrast to prevailing critiques of AI as an oracle that flattens epistemic diversity and underlines the illusions of understanding in scientific research (Messeri & Crockett 2024), this field method aligns itself with Andrew Pickering’s notion of knowledge as performative enactment, emphasizing uncertainty, emergence, and adaptability. By integrating AI within a symbiotic epistemic ecology and taking inspiration from the pragmatic analysis of non-modern frameworks of knowledge retrieval such as traditional divination practices, this experiment challenges individualistic assumptions about cognition and creativity, offering anthropology an open-ended epistemological framework attuned to the dynamic interplay between humans, machines, and the material world.

 

The talk will be followed by a hands-on workshop with a RAG platform currently in development, focusing on the prompting of efficacious chatbots interviewers adapted to ethnographic inquiries.