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Anthropotek was founded in 2013 as the commercial arm of an applied social science laboratory based at the National University of Malaysia.

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The brand name is the combination of two root words: “Anthropos”, which is Greek for “human” and “tek”, which is the altered contraction for “technology”. The choice of spelling “tek” with a “k” instead of calling upon the usual “tech” idiom refers to the field of anthropology: by rusticising with a , we first touch on the cultural area where our headquarters are located: the Malay archipelago.

 

In Malay language, the letter “K” is used predominantly and pronounced phonetically as the British “C”, as in “car”. Secondly, the phoneme “tek” also alludes to the anthropological understanding of “technology”.

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In Anthropology, that can be defined as the particular domain of human activity, immediately aimed at the action on the matter. Techniques are therefore a social production, which also means that technology is embedded with social relations, practices, and representations.

 

From a global outlook, we can safely state that every technology is culturally conditioned.

The purpose of anthropology then becomes dual: understanding technology’s impact on the material life of society and making sense of the social relations surrounding their application.