Ethnographic Monograph on West Africa

Ethnographic Monograph on West Africa

Introduction

Whenever and wherever individuals and groups deploy and communicate with digital media, there will be circulations, reimagining's, magni?cations, deletions, translations, revisioning, and remaking of a range of cultural representations, experiences, and identities, but the precise ways that these dynamics unfold can never be fully anticipated in advance. In some instances, digital media have extended their reach into the mundane heart of everyday life, most visibly with cell phones gadgets now vital to conduct business affairs in remote areas of the world, as well as in bustling global cities.

In other instances, digital artifacts have helped engender new collectivities: Web-cam girls, gamers, hackers, and others, whose senses of self, vocation, and group sociabilities are shaped signi?cantly, although not exclusively nor deterministically, by digital technologies. The diversity and pervasiveness of digital media can make them dif?cult to study, but also can make them compelling objects of ethnographic inquiry. Still, anthropologists have been slow to enter this terrain at least until recently, when the trickle of 1990s publications became a steady stream. Here I survey and divide this growing ethnographic corpus on digital media into three broad but overlapping categories.

The ?rst category explores the relationship between digital media and what might be called the cultural politics of media. This work examines how cultural identities, representations, and imaginaries, such as those hinged to youth, diaspora, nation, and indigeneity, are remade, subverted, communicated, and circulated through individual and collective engagement with digital technologies. The second category explores the vernacular cultures of digital media, evinced by discrepant phenomena, digital genres, and groups hackers, blogging, Internet memes, and migrant programmers whose logic is organized signi?cantly around, although not necessarily determined by, selected properties of digital media. Attention to these rituals, broad contexts, and the material infrastructures and social protocols that enable them illuminates how the use and production of digital media have become integrated into everyday cultural, linguistic, and economic life.

Mapping the terrain

Just a little more than a decade ago, the study of digital media was marked by a notable division of labor. Although anthropologists published in?uential methodological and theoretical re?ections on the cultural implications of digital media many of which remain relevant even today few scholars attempted to conduct ethnographic research primarily in terms of emergent digital technologies. This is despite the explosion of scholarly and popular work that heralded the coming of a new post human subject residing in a digital age or network society. These technologies supposedly ushered in, according to Aneesh (2006), a historically new reality one that is fundamentally altering the way we are born, we live, we sleep, we produce, we consume, we dream, we ?ght, or we die.

By now it is well known that much of this initial literature was concerned with two problematic motifs: rupture and transformation. A few anthropologists were quick to challenge these kinds of broad claims, for instance, casting doubt on the autonomous power of technology to engender change. Others noted that, far from stimulating ...