A 2014 summary of holistic American anthropology intersections with cyborg concepts (whether explicit or not) by Joshua Wells explained how the information-rich and culture-laden ways in which humans imagine, construct, and use tools may extend the cyborg concept through the human evolutionary lineage.
[8] The word cyborg was originally coined in a 1960 paper about space exploration, the term is short for cybernetic organism.
Latour suggests that actors and the subjects they act on are parts of larger networks of mutual interaction and feedback loops.
[13] Similarly, Wells explain how new forms of networked political expression such as the Pirate Party movement and free and open-source software philosophies are generated from human reliance on information technologies in all walks of life.
[14] Recently, Stuart Geiger, a PhD student at University of California, Berkeley suggested that robots may be capable of creating a culture of their own, which researchers could study with ethnographic methods.
The prospect of a posthuman condition calls into question the nature and necessity of a field focused on studying humans.
Sociologist of technology Zeynep Tufekci argues that any symbolic expression of ourselves, even the most ancient cave painting, can be considered "posthuman" because it exists outside of our physical bodies.
[17] Neil L. Whitehead and Michael Welsch point out that the concern that posthumanism will decenter the human in anthropology ignores the discipline's long history of engaging with the unhuman (like spirits and demons that humans believe in) and the culturally "subhuman" (like marginalized groups within a society).
[17] Contrarily, Wells, taking a deep-time perspective, points out the ways that tool-centric and technologically communicated values and ethics typify the human condition, and that cross-cultural and ethnological trends in conceptions of lifeways, power dynamics, and definitions of humanity often incorporate information-rich technological symbology.