Thursday 12 March 2026 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Edmund Leach seminar room
About
This talk examines how Anonymous—despite a sustained hacking campaign that involved disruption, arrests, and even sabotage—largely avoided being successfully labeled as cyber-extremists or terrorists. Drawing on long-term anthropological fieldwork and a recursive return to that material, I show how features that once seemed incidental later proved decisive. In 2012, even as the National Security Agency portrayed Anonymous as a serious security threat, the group was simultaneously embraced in popular culture, from Hollywood films and television to ballet. Seen recursively, this pairing raises an anthropological question about how legitimacy is produced, stabilized, and rendered recognizable over time. I argue that this reputational immunity was not accidental but emerged through Anonymous’s embrace of humor, fortuitous timing alongside the 2011 social movements, and above all the Guy Fawkes mask, which inadvertently became a powerful symbolic shield. Briefly tracing the mask’s and figure’s shift from treasonous villain to pop-cultural antihero, I show how its protective power arose from the accumulation of meaning, made visible only through recursive return across media, politics, and everyday use. More broadly, the talk highlights anthropology’s distinctive strength: its capacity to reveal how cultural and symbolic forms shift and sediment, and in doing so help determine what counts as legitimate or illegitimate political activity.
Gabriella (Biella) Coleman is the Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. Her scholarship and teaching explore questions at the intersection of science, technology, and medicine, with a particular focus on the politics, cultures, and ethics of hacking. She is the author of two books on computer hackers and the founder and editor of Hack_Curio, a video portal dedicated to the cultures and politics of hacking.