1,720,957 research outputs found
Between smart images and fast trucks: Digital surveillance and obscured labour in Hyderabad, India
No full textIn Hyderabad, India, the growing information technology (IT) sector relies on ensuring safe and efficient movements of people and objects, and the city government and private actors have embraced the promise of digital surveillance to reach these goals. The new Telangana State, created in 2014, has built a new city-wide network of smart cameras, and at ‘hackathons’ programmers develop new digital tools, often connected to this network, that will technologically ‘solve’ social problems. In this article, I examine the system of CCTV cameras and programmers’ investments in these systems, and explore how migrant Vaddera stonecutters use cellphones to evade patrolling officers monitoring the streets where they carry the granite stones that they cut and load to construct the city’s buildings. Expanding on what Gilbert Simondon calls ‘the margin of indeterminacy’, this article reveals gaps in the digital infrastructure of surveillance—even as its integration and completion combine human and technical elements
Cameras at work: Dusty lenses and processed videos in the quarries of hyderabad
No full textEthnographic filmmakers have always looked for new ways to record lives. Drawing from Gilbert Simondon’s ideas on technology, this article explores the technical conditions of filmmaking through the materiality of environments, digital and optical devices, recording formats, and human actions. It considers the work of cameras as participants in the stone quarries of Hyderabad (Telangana, India), and discusses how infrastructures of digital videos are hacked and acted upon. This article suggests that to contribute to theories in visual anthropology, and understand practices of ethnographic filmmaking, we need to reveal how cameras work with filmmakers, but also through them
Pratiques médiatiques et préservation culturelle sélective dans la province de Lào Cai, Vietnam (note de recherche)
No full textIn Lào Cai province (Vietnam), the Hmong and the Yao have to negotiate with social, cultural and economic development initiatives of the Vietnamese state as well as with its selective cultural preservation policy which defines the appropriate behaviours for ethnic groups. One branch of the Vietnam Television (VTV5) has been founded in 2002 to support those national development projects. In collaboration with VTV5, the Minister of Sport, Culture and Tourism (MSCT)’s provincial department organizes projections in villages and produces audiovisual material that depict ethnic minorities representing the image of development as envisioned by the Vietnamese state. Within this process of politicization of culture, this article analyzes the capacity to act (the agency) of actors in these organizations which vary according to their position in the political and media structure influenced by the social and cultural relation between the majority and the ethnic groups
Introduction—Building infrastructural lives: Mobile and creative livelihoods in India and Vietnam
No full textArticles in this special issue compare and contrast how secondary roads and wireless communication devices shape mobility and connectivity for four communities affected by economic, political, and ethnic marginalisation in socialist Vietnam and democratic India. Drawing on the concept of ‘infrastructural lives’, two urban case studies explore the ways by which marginalised migrant communities in India’s Hyderabad and Vietnam’s Hanoi use, adapt, or resist their states’ desires for all residents to embrace secondary roads, greater internet and cellphone interconnectivity, and digital monitoring. In parallel, and by comparing the realities of the Sino-Indian and Sino-Vietnamese borderlands, two rural case studies explore whether upland ethnic minority groups similarly modify or adapt their livelihoods to the expanding secondary roads and wireless communication technologies across the rural highlands of northern India and Vietnam. Taken together, this issue asks: How do the creative engagements of marginalised communities with these infrastructures shape infrastructural lives
Citoyenneté programmée au Télangana: Infrastructures des TIC et rituels d’un nouvel État
No full textOn June 2, 2014, workers in Hyderabad celebrated the creation of the 29th State in India. Chanting “Victory for Telangana” in ‘HITEC City,’ a neighborhood constructed through ‘special economic zones’ (SEZ) and ICT parks (Information and Communication Technologies), computer engineers of the association Engineers for a New State (ENS) wore the colors of the “Party for Telangana”. Following strikes and agitated protests, members of ENS enjoyed the official recognition of the new state. Born in Telangana, and anticipating the economic benefits promised by the new political entity in formation, these engineers projected that they would also enjoy a revitalization of Telangana culture promised by local politicians. Based on 19 months of fieldwork research between 2012 and 2019, the ethnography focuses on the observation of Hindu rituals named “State Festivals” – Bonalu and Bathukamma – as they act upon other mediatized activities supporting high-tech development (conferences and hackathons) in Hyderabad. These rituals propose a cultural cohesion legitimized by the new state and supporting the emergence of a regional identity – a process which reinforced the privileged position of ICT and the types of skills that are sought after by this industry. The article suggests that the renewal of these state rituals by these engineers is integrated into a set of sociotechnical strategies for an engaged citizenship. These strategies shape but also emerge from the construction of ICT infrastructures for the new Telangana state
Digital futures: Aesthetic stability and the fictional infrastructure of hyderabad’s special economic zones
No full textIn Hyderabad, digital videos help produce a “fictional infrastructure” for Special Economic Zones (SEZs). Expanding the concept of “infrastructure as spectacle” to encompass projections of unbuilt and even purely imaginary infrastructures, this article examines how digital online videos and 3D computer-generated imagery (CGI), are the standard means of representing future infrastructures and promoting new developments in the Indian IT sector. Building on Gilbert Simondon's view on “beauty,” I suggest that the aesthetic stability necessary for a technology to operate can also be supported by its fictional creation as something imagined and futural. The videos analyzed here create the aesthetic stability necessary for future infrastructures in Hyderabad's SEZs: the feelings of comfort, safety, cleanliness, efficiency, predictability, and integration sought after by potential investors and workers
‘The nice culture and the good behaviour’ state media and ethnic minorities in Lào Cai province, Vietnam
No full textIn the northern highlands of Vietnam, a very specific official vision of culture is at the core of the modernisation projects of Vietnam Television VTV5 (Đài Truyền hình Việt Nam), a channel dedicated to educating ethnic minorities, and of the Lào Cai provincial branch of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST, Bộ Văn hóa, Thể thao và Du lịch). These two state institutions jointly organise film screenings – for instance condemning the production and consumption of opium and heroin – in remote villages where they intend to modify cultural practices. These state social actors also produce films that represent what are deemed exemplary minority traditions for public consumption. Our observations of these media processes lead us to suggest that the subjects of these exogenous initiatives are adjusting strategically, activating patterns of quiet resistance to maintain their identities and subvert marginalisation
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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