F. Allan Hanson
F. Allan Hanson is an American cultural anthropologist and professor emeritus at the University of Kansas whose work has spanned Polynesian ethnography, the anthropology of testing, and the intersection of technology and culture. His 2004 essay 'The New Superorganic,' published in Current Anthropology, revived and extended Kroeber's superorganic thesis for the age of artificial intelligence. Hanson's central argument was that the incorporation of AI systems into social action — systems that make decisions, generate outputs, and shape outcomes — had rendered untenable the position of methodological individualism. If non-human agents participate in cultural production, then culture cannot be reduced to human psychology, and the superorganic is not merely a theoretical abstraction but the operationally necessary level of analysis for contemporary social science.
In the AI Story
Hanson's argument reframed Kroeber's thesis in terms the original essay could not have used. Where Kroeber had argued that cultural forces operate above individual psychology, Hanson argued that the relevant agents of social action now include composite human-machine systems whose agency is distributed across biological and non-biological components. The human working with an AI is not a traditional autonomous agent. She is a component of a composite whose outputs emerge from the interaction of human judgment and machine inference.
This framing anticipated by nearly two decades the central questions raised by large language models. The asymmetry of contribution in human-AI collaboration — the machine providing scale, the human providing direction — is precisely the distribution Hanson identified as characteristic of the new superorganic condition. The practical implications follow: if agency is distributed, then the individual-level analytical frameworks inherited from Enlightenment political philosophy are insufficient. New concepts are required to understand the composite agents that now populate social life.
Hanson's work drew Kroeber's framework into direct engagement with contemporary technology studies and actor-network theory. Where Bruno Latour's work had argued for the analytical inclusion of non-human actors without necessarily building on the anthropological tradition, Hanson connected the non-human-agent argument to Kroeber's older but more structurally precise account of cultural causation.
Origin
Hanson spent much of his career at the University of Kansas, where he served as Chair of the Department of Anthropology. His earlier work on Polynesia and on the cultural anthropology of testing established his credentials as an ethnographer before he turned to the philosophical questions of technology and culture. 'The New Superorganic' appeared in Current Anthropology in 2004 and has since become a touchstone reference for scholars attempting to bring classical anthropological theory to bear on contemporary AI questions.
Key Ideas
AI vindicates the superorganic. The operational participation of non-human agents in social action establishes the superorganic as the necessary level of analysis, not merely a theoretical option.
Agency is distributed. The human working with AI is not an autonomous individual but a component of a composite agent whose capacities emerge from the interaction of human and machine.
Methodological individualism is obsolete. The assumption that the ultimate unit of social action is the human individual cannot survive the demonstration that non-human agents participate in cultural production.
New concepts are required. The composite agents that populate contemporary social life demand analytical vocabularies that classical social theory did not develop and cannot supply.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- F. Allan Hanson, The New Superorganic (Current Anthropology, 2004)
- F. Allan Hanson, Testing Testing: Social Consequences of the Examined Life (University of California Press, 1993)
- Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford University Press, 2005)
- Alfred Kroeber, The Superorganic (American Anthropologist, 1917)