1,721,152 research outputs found
New media technologies in everyday life
No full textDomestic life constitutes one of the primary concerns of the discipline of anthropology. Beginning with Lewis Henry Morgan’s classic study Houses and House Life of the American Aborigines (Morgan 1966), Levi-Strauss’s (1983, 1987) notion of house societies and Bourdieu’s structuralist approach to understanding the symbolism of the Kabyle house, understanding domestic life emerged a way through which anthropologists began to formulate theories around kinship, lineage, social organization and reproduction (Bloch 1998; Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995). As anthropology has broadened its inquiry from small-scale societies and the focus upon traditional or non-Western lives to the urban, Western and the middle class, anthropological attention also shifted from outlining social structure to the interpretation of processes underpinning social change. Indeed, Bourdieu’s formulation of the habitus and social practice in shaping taste and aesthetics in French homes (Bourdieu 1972, 1984) and Moore’s (1986) analysis of the ways in which gender is structured and restructured in domestic space through practice represent seminal work on the ways which gender and other forms of difference become inscribed and reinscribed in domestic space
The digital and the human : a prospectus for digital anthropology
No full textThis introduction will propose six basic principles as the foundation for a new sub-discipline: digital anthropology. While the principles will be used to integrate the chapters that follow, its larger purpose is to spread the widest possible canvas upon which to begin the creative work of new research and thinking. The intention is not simply to study and reflect on new developments but to use these to further our understanding of what we are and have always been. The digital should and can be a highly effective means for reflection upon what it means to be human, the ultimate task of anthropology as a discipline
Introduction
No full textOver the past decade, Pacific Islanders have witnessed remarkable growth in the presence and adoption of mobile telecommunications. For example, average mobile coverage (2G) in Fiji, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu jumped from less than half of the population in 2005 to 93 per cent of the population in 2014 (Pacific Region Infrastructure Facility 2015). A 2015 Groupe Speciale Mobile Association (GSMA) report notes that unique subscriptions across the entire region increased from 2.3 million in 2009 to 4.1 million at the end of 2014 – a 12.6 per cent annual growth rate. This ‘mobile revolution’ is one result of the liberalisation of the telecommunications sector that opened national markets to competition in the 1990s
Navigating mobile phone infrastructures on the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic
No full textThis chapter investigates how mobile phone infrastructures are made and unmade in a border region. Borders themselves are constituted in and through everyday practice. Nicholas Long (2011) has described this as a process of “bordering.” Rather than focusing upon borders as spaces of difference or a “third space” set apart, the notion of “bordering” enables us to understand “the affective charge and powerful symbolic weight that our informants’ claims about bordering have, even when they seem to be inconsistent and contradictory.” Bordering acknowledges the ways in which the border may become more or less significant and, indeed, have greater or lesser material “effects” in people’s everyday lives. This is especially evident on the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where Haiti shares a 224-mile geographic border with the Dominican Republic and Haitians have migrated to the Dominican Republic since the early 20th century to work in Dominican sugar plantations (bateyes) and the construction industry. Living on and crossing the border makes life easier for thousands of Haitians who move across the border into the Dominican Republic on a regular, if not daily, basis to work, access health care and education, and use services such as the internet, pay bills, send money, buy phone credit, and travel. Nevertheless, this dependency upon the Dominican Republic has contributed to structural inequality between the citizens of the two nations. In particular, antihaitianismo (anti-Haitianism) by Dominicans has led to discriminations against Haitians and, at particular times in history, the deportation of Haitians living and working in the Dominican Republic. In effect, the border, and the unequal power relations between Haitians and the Dominicans, can be understood as a porous space created through state formation and materialized through laws, regulations, and social relations
Creating consumer-citizens : competition, tradition and the moral order of the mobile telecommunications industry in Fiji
No full textThis chapter examines the ways in which liberalisation and the promise of competition has shaped the telecommunications landscape in Fiji by analysing the branding strategies leading up to and immediately following the launch of Digicel Fiji in 2008. Through close attention to these campaigns and the discourses of change that surrounded them, I argue that liberalisation transformed Vodafone Fiji and Digicel Fiji from mere mobile telecommunications companies providing products and services into moral actors responsible for articulating their responsibilities towards Fiji and Fijians as consumer-citizens. Focusing upon the different forms of moral order created by companies engaging with state agencies as well as consumers, I begin by outlining the ways in which Digicel framed itself as a monopoly breaker that would disrupt existing moral relationships between the incumbent and consumers by offering better and more widespread coverage and
affordable prices. I then turn to the incumbent Vodafone Fiji’s efforts to
both anticipate and respond to the call for a new moral order (Callon, Méadel and Rabeharisoa 2002; Foster 2007, 2011; Slater 2011). In the final section I examine the ways these market conditions and the moral orders associated with them were depicted to the company’s current and future mobile consumers
Nah leavin' Trinidad : the place of digital music production among amateur musicians in Trinidad and Tobago
No full textThroughout the world digital media technologies have contributed to the transformation of music-especially its production, distribution, circulation and consumption-across different scales. At the micro-level, the experience of music sharing and listening has altered consumption. In contrast to the circulation of cassettes and CDs, music listeners now circulate MP3 files over Bluetooth networks via mobile and laptops, through the exchange of SD cards and flash drives and even through the increasing number of accessories that enable the sharing of music through multiple earbuds and small, portable speakers connected to smartphones and laptops (Sterne 2012; Bickford 2014). Designated music distribution sites such as iTunes and Spotify and video content aggregation sites such as YouTube or Vimeo are also shaping how, when and where people are able to listen to music (Gopinath and Stanyek 2014; Wasko and Erickson 2009)
Introduction
No full textIn this Editor’s Introduction we outline the nine rubrics and the attendant 44 chapters that constitute the current state of digital ethnography research. We conclude by introducing three provocations for the future of digital ethnography. The Companion begins with a section dedicated to Debating Digital Ethnography that contextualizes contemporary debates about the consequences of digital media technologies for ethnographic practice from different disciplinary vantage points. The first chapter by anthropologists Mike Fortun, Kim Fortun, and George E. Marcus provides a short history of computers in anthropology that stems back to Clifford and Marcus’ Writing Culture (a seminal text in defining the politics and practices of ethnography and fieldwork) to contextualize new modes of ethnographic research, collaboration, and expression. Similarly, sociologist Christine Hine draws from a decade and a half of ethnographies focused on the Internet to consider how digital media cultures have shaped ethnography as a practice, reflecting upon the changes and continuity within the academy. Science and Technology Studies scholar Anne Beaulieu follows Hine with a discussion of how computationalization shapes some of the adaptations of ethnographic methods, a framework that ethnomusicologist Wendy F. Hsu also explores through her discussion of performance. Hsu further questions “the purpose of writing as the predominant expression of ethnographic knowledge” within the context of digital media
The worlds of location technologies
No full textThis book offers the first international account of location technologies (in an expanded sense), and brings together the best of the available international scholarship on these technologies and their various cultures of use within the Global South. A key aim of this collection is to open up discussion on what location technologies are exactly, what forms they take in different places, what their uses and patterns of consumption are, and what implications they might hold for research, policy, businesses, organizations, governments and communities. The pieces gathered together here prompt us to ask, how, within the Global South, do location technologies differ across national markets, geo-linguistic communities and cultural contexts? What are the contrasting, or shared, meanings and practices associated with location technologies in particular societies, or among particular groups of users? And, what innovative practices and new, or reinvigorated, theory may emerge from attention to the Global South? In exploring these questions, the collection seeks to contribute to our understanding of social, cultural, gendered and political relations on a global and local scale. It also seeks to encourage further, future work that continues to examine how location technologies have developed in different national contexts, what their different histories are that have influenced and continue to influence their present forms, and what the specific cultural, economic and political economies are that have shaped location technologies in countries within the Global South
- …
