“The study of humanity is in its infancy.” From the pre-Socratics to today; and yes it still is. We’re only human and that’s not going to change. We’ll always make the same stupid mistakes.

I think the confusions about power and access come from treating networks as things, which effectively treats them like buildings, possibly with doors in the form of technology. This is a “transperency” and “open access” type discourse, and it is insufficient.

However, scale, centrality and and access are all predicated and constituted on networks as practices (pace Latour), that is webs of connection in terms of what people do and how they pass things and tasks to one another. I think that political economies emerge from this, in relation to the ways in which groups articulate their common practices and membership (Communities of practice) and this is a neat way of carrying out what is often called a “class analysis” but in a grounded and ethnographically coherent, and thus getting at a political economy.

So this moment may be remembered as the last phase of when ethnography could be carried out as if communities did not constitute their emic (which I see the C of P stuff as referencing – emic in practice) in relation to their etic (their positioning in relays of practice).

This moment of looking at the articulation of indiginiety and media will indeed look as Latour describes the division of material and cultural, like piling up naked people on one side and all their clothes and equipment on another and going “look, structure and agency”!

This, local the notion of the “Global” and the “Local” and the “traditional” and the “modern” will look dated when such a condition forms a ground for what people do, as it often does already. Will Anthropology finally shift gears at that point, and concern itself with public space and modernity, possibly from the position of particularity, but hopefully no longer in an exclusive way?

One can only hope…

For example, take the Borneo state of Sarawak where I’ve carried out ethnographic and historical research. Throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, its urban areas have expanded dramatically and become ever more diverse in their media and cultural practices. At the same time, Sarawak’s rural hinterlands have lost much of their linguistic and cultural distinctiveness as the subsistence economies of past centuries have given way to ever more monetised and bureaucratised economies. For instance, the Iban spoken by young people today is far more Malay-influenced than that of their grandparents. Their religious views are shaped by Christianity far more than by the ideas and practices of their ‘pagan’ ancestors. Their worldview is an urban Malaysian worldview, not a rural Sarawak one. Analogous processes are unfolding throughout the world.

“. . those materially able to exploit
networks and their associated resources continue to be urban elites and emerging middle classes, based on their relative ability to access networks of customers, capital, labor and physical resources, via multiple distributed ‘weak ties’ (Granovetter, 1973). Interestingly,
despite the mythologization of the loss of local place in an era of digital networks, those with greater wealth and opportunity have further concentrated in cities precisely because of Castells’ point that resources within networks are best accessed from points of centrality, and are located within cities because of better infrastructure, information access, collocation of different labor and economic sectors, and more. Alongside these elite, ‘network-wealthy’ populations, has emerged a new class of workers who, though better paid, have been subject to the peculiarities and performativities of networked time and geography (Aneesh, 2006; Shome, 2006), and occupy generally subordinate positions in transnational, horizonatally distributed companies who are managed by elites in the West (Sassen, 1998; Ansell, 2000; Castells, 1996). Indeed, today’s power divides today cannot be merely traced to inequities between nation states as units but instead around the uneven movement of high skill ‘digital argonauts’ (Saxenian, 2006) and their associated resources between cities worldwide, enabling the development of historically poorer nations to realize great economic benefits in specific, urban elite
spaces.”

Add global wifi infrastructure and it is going to be unlikely that identity will be moored to precolonial notions of place and history.

Is that really what you mean to say? Or do you mean to say “notions of the precolonial”?

@Samuel, thanks, Manneheim and the study of knowledge, cool.

@mccreery It is exactly those historical moments of technological appropriation that we can only understand in retrospect. I would love to read that report.

Follow me down this wormhole a few hundred years into the future, when anthropology, or its future incarnation, can no longer reasonably talk about an individual with self-identifying, linguistic, or material roots stemming directly from a pre-colonial origin.

If there are still humans a few hundred years from now the smart money says that a good many of them will still be self-identifying with pre-colonial groups.

Back to the old world for the rest of your lineage.