Balca Arda and Murat Guney
Can you give us and our readers, general information about CTheory?

Arthur & Marilouise Kroker:
CTheory(www.ctheory.net) is an electronic journal of theory, technology and culture. It has been described by Le Monde as “one of the three leading intellectual electronic reviews in the world.”

A unique intellectual project, CTheory is made possible by the age of the Internet, on-line 24/7 thanks to the web and streamed globally in a format that celebrates open-systems, open-architecture and open-file sharing. Resisting attempts to close down the utopian possibilities of the Net, CTheory does the opposite. It speaks and writes and publishes in a way that explores the possibilities of electronic culture for forms of thought, forms of publishing, forms of communication that are equal to the best democratic, critical and communal tendencies of digital culture. CTheory is a digital community.

Launched in 1993 as an ascii listserv that immediately attracted an international network of readers and writers, expanding quickly as one of the first publishing web sites due to the programming assistance of Carl Steadmann (the web designer who did the encryption protocols for Wired), CTheory now publishes in a variety of net formats: ascii, web, multimedia as well as a digital archive of books and journals stretching across three decades of collective reflection on key issues in technology, culture, politics and theory.
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“The most certain of all philosophical problems is the problem of the present time and of what we are”
—Michel Foucault, in ‘Subject and Power’

Throughout this paper, I will try to discuss the political role of the contemporary anthropologist while questioning how she positions herself against present problems of contemporary world and how she distinguishes her position from other kinds of occupations. Briefly, this paper is about the question concerning the characteristic, the specificity and the peculiarity of contemporary anthropologist.
In her text ‘The Ethnographic Present’, Kristen Hastrup defines contemporary anthropology (quoting Scheper-Hughes) not only as a field of knowledge, but also as a field of action (Hastrup, 13). Thus, the anthropologist has to deal with the present, with a world in motion and with a continuous flux, which she both gives shape to and is shaped by. Thus, as Hastrup and Foucault imply, the search for the present is also the search for what we are as both anthropologists and human beings.
This inextricable relation between the world, the present and the anthropologist (the writer/the being) let us rethink the questions concerning representation, translation, objectivity, reflexivity and relativity in order to reconsider the role and the very existence of anthropologist as a witness, as an agent, as an activist, as a writer and so on.
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