Anthropology, Tech & the Developing World
This post was largely inspired by the views of Ken Banks, the man behind FrontlineSMS and Kiwanja. I only recently discovered him via Twitter, and feel that I’ve met a kindred spirit. His essay on anthropology’s “technology-driven Renaissance” is something everyone engaged in development should read, whether or not your interest lies in ICT.
I took my bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Washington, with a healthy dose of computer science mixed in for good measure. Lucky for me, I was able to convince my advisor—a young, open-minded Dr. David Tracer—to let me try applying genetic algorithms to modeling the theoretical evolution of cooperative behavior. Computer models of macroevolutionary processes were still relatively new then, and genetic algorithms were exotic animals to a hacker, so my independent study with him was a rare gift. I’ve never forgotten it.
Although my focus was more on the computational/physical side of anthropology, my coursework on its sociocultural foundations left a deep mark on me. Learning to understand social groups from “within”, as the anthropologist is trained to do, is something that’s stuck with me ever since. Classic works by Boas, Malinowski and Lévi Strauss along with ethnographies like Smadar Lavie’s The Poetics of Military Occupation were as influential as Code Complete, The Pragmatic Programmer and my O’Reilly books on Perl and C++.
It’s surprising how often this training came in handy later during my years in the software industry. Exchange their culture, artifacts and language and there’s striking functional similarities between a Microsoft product group and, say, a group of Kalahari bushmen, or a forest tribe from Papua New Guinea. This isn’t a value judgment—it’s simply human nature. That’s one of the great goals of anthropology, after all; by studying the contrasts between human societies we’re able to subtract the differences and, ultimately, glimpse what it means to be “human”.
It’s interesting to note how often anthropology falls in and out of vogue in the eyes of the tech world. Though it mostly catered to professional, PhD-holding anthropologists (which I am not) for many years I followed a Listserv devoted to job-seekers in the field. In retrospect, I wish I’d archived the posts so I could graph the trends in technology companies looking for anthropologists to study a small segment of their market. For example, Nokia once sought to understand how 12 to 16-year-old girls in communities of a given size used their mobile phones.
What Ken Banks advocates is an integration of the modern practice of anthropology into development work. This isn’t a new argument. In fact, it’s an idea that’s been supported by both academics and practitioners for some time. One of the great oversights of Western aid in the developing world (eloquently treated by William Easterly, among others) is the failure to measure both the positive and negative impacts of these efforts on their target communities.
Borrowing the previous example of Nokia, why not turn this study to users of mobile phones in the rural areas of Cameroon’s Northwest province which, coincidentally, is affected by the highest rates of HIV infection in the country? Imagine the impact a human-centered ICT development project might have if the social groups inhabiting these regions were regarded not merely as passive recipients of top-down Western aid plans, but rather as “customers” in the traditional business sense.
In order to apply a technology like SMS, social media, or whatever to its full potential in the betterment of other peoples’ lives, it helps to first understand what the intended beneficiaries need or want from it. It sounds like common sense, and there’s surely much emphasis placed on “needs assessments” prior to implementations in development work, but too often this seems (in my experience) to be an afterthought—a solution looking for a problem, as it were.
To be truly effective, the 21st century development worker stands to benefit from some old-fashioned lessons in cultural relativism, structuralism and participant-observer fieldwork.
Thoughts on this? Comments are welcome.
[Edit: As it happens, this post coincides with the 100th birthday of Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the greatest thinkers in anthropology. Happy birthday, Mr. Lévi-Strauss.]
Great post and some nice personal context, which always helps. =)
I’m not particularly academic in my approach to anthropology, and often get confused by the language of some of the more senior members of the community! But what I do see, when I’m out in the field studying the “social mobile” space, is how anthropology applied on the ground, and not necessarily in the library, can be incredibly useful and valuable.
Very little of this is new, as you say, but at the same time knowledge of what anthropology has to offer the technology world still seems a little sparse. My PC World article was an attempt to demystify this a little…
Ken
P.S. Great to also ‘meet’ a kindred spirit!
I have taken one class in anthropology in my university but it stopped short of baboons and chimpanzees’ evolution. Are there any good books to start off with anthropology?
Hi Divya
Small world, isn’t it?! The answer is, in short, that it depends on which specific areas you’re interested in. If you want a general introduction to the topic then there are plenty of books out there (best flick through them in a local bookshop to get a sense of which one “talks to you” best).
If you’re interested in ICT and anthropology more widely then there are some interesting sites out there such as:
http://anthropology.wetpaint.com/page/ICT+Links
If you’re more into mobiles then:
http://www.jonathandonner.com
http://www.janchipchase.com
And one specific book which I quite enjoyed reading:
http://www.amazon.com/Cell-Phone-Anthropology-Communication/dp/1845204018
Bill can probably add some of his favourites to those. There’s quite a lot out there, but getting to relevant stuff, depending on your interests, is the challenge!
Ken
Oh, I had this bookmarked, too:
http://www.k-state.edu/sasw/anthro/anthlinks.html
Most university anthropology departments will have similar pages. I studied at Sussex University in the UK, which has a great anthropology department (I’d say the best, but then I would, wouldn’t I!?). =)
Ken
Great post. At Skylight Pictures we’ve been working with applying available digital technologies in a socio-cultural context to extend the reach of our documentary films. We recently launched a Quechua-language version of State of Fear, our film based on the work of the Peruvian Truth & Reconciliation Commission’s examination of Peru’s 20-year war on terror with Shining Path. The TRC determined that 70% of the victims of the conflict were Quechua speakers from the Andes, but most of this population had never had access to the findings of the TRC. So we made a Quechua version and created a website, edmquechua.com, to go with the launch that incorporates embedded video commentaries from FLIP cameras we distributed to human rights activists, SMS messaging through an adaptation of Twitter, a google map to track the screenings, and a photo gallery. During the launch we had public screenings in village plazas in the high Andean regions around the city of Ayacucho, and encouraged audiences to take ownership of the film and make copies of the DVD – our human rights activist partners told people that if they brought a blank DVD to their offices they would make them a copy. So far, in the past 2 months, hundreds of copies have been made and the DVD has essentially gone viral in the Andean region. That, coupled with the video commentaries in Quechua and Spanish being uploaded to the site, has provided an extraordinary example of human rights work being taken over by those affected at the local level. It will also create an amazing archive.
I completely agree with the importance of “needs assessments” and understanding the dangers of the “solution looking for a problem” trap. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to secure the funding necessary to do the up-front, “anthropological” work (at least that has been my experience).
As the Learning Technology Advisor for Jhpiego (http://www.jhpiego.org), part of my job is to identify opportunities and propose ways to support health systems strengthening (e.g. pre-service education, in-service training) in limited-resource settings using ICT. As you can imagine, I find it awfully difficult to do so effectively without having a fundamental understanding of the existing ICT infrastructure and the use of these technologies by the target audience (e.g. faculty, students, clinicians). But as I mentioned, it has been difficult to get the funding necessary to do the research. Not only is there not a lot of support for these sorts of activities from our major donors, but there is also a lot of resistance on the part of my coworkers to even write them into proposals. We have had some minor luck with including ICT surveys and analysis into traditional learning needs assessments but this is not always an option in every program.
So while I too am somewhat of a “kindred spirit,” I am one in need of some assistance and guidance. How can I make the case for funding the “anthropology”? And who might be most receptive and willing to provide it? Where might I look for existing research? Or who might I most effectively partner with to do it? I guess this comment is a first step toward hopefully finding some of these answers.
I look forward to your reply. And you, Ken, or anyone else reading this who might be able to help, should feel free to contact me directly: jbontempo_AT_jhpiego_DOT_net.
James
Kalawalai! I get very frazzled when I see or hear the word “anthropology.” What is anthropology anyway? No one knows. Where does it come from? The Ken Banks essay and your essay were excellent reads but they left me dangling above some churning, foamy rapids.
For starters, I agree completely when you say, “To be truly effective, the 21st century development worker stands to benefit from some old-fashioned lessons in cultural relativism, structuralism and participant-observer fieldwork.” But where do these development workers go to get this training? I suspect they learn it the way anthro grad students learn it. They get thrown into “the field” and they “sink or swim.” Is it even possible to learn about a “culture” when one is so busy trying to accomplish certain goals? Goals that hang over one’s eyes like rectangular, opaque blinders.
I don’t know if putting archaeological and biological and linguistic and cultural anthropology together can really give us a nice “holistic” discipline and then a nice “holistic” picture of the world, as anthropologists proclaim. And consider this, if four-field anthro has yet to save the world, then I cannot imagine that taking it and adding it to ICT (or anything else) will now fix certain things. But that’s just my opinion. And who knows, maybe technology is powerful enough to save the world, a world mind you that is getting quite flooded with the debris of technology. Please see: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/11/06/60minutes/main4579229.shtml
I really don’t know that participant-observation and surveys and interviews can create humans that understand cultures beyond their own. Or provide good answers to questions and then also provide good solutions to problems of the cultures beyond the researcher’s own. And I don’t know if cell phones can be the way to collect Cameroonians’ thoughts. I might be wrong; I hope I am wrong, because maybe you are right and it can be a good way to save lives, in my NWP homeland.
I hope I am not being discouraging but I really don’t know about this anthropology thing. I’m not convinced. Yes, some things about anthropology are useful and helpful. But other things just seem to perpetuate old problems. For instance, what is meant by tribe, whether a forest tribe or a desert tribe? Does it matter? And to whom would it matter that such terms are not spelled out? And that they are used too casually? Who does it benefit?
I think Marshall Sahlins and Evans-Pritchard said some things about tribes (in their ethnogrpahic works on the Pacific and Africa) that anthropologists believed in for a time and then found out were not correct categorizations of groups of people. (See: http://classes.yale.edu/03-04/anth500b/projects/project_sites/00_Busbee/500b_evans-pritchard.html)
I am sorry for being so, so, so vague. It is just that I could not make myself read some of the things I was expected to read in order to become a good anthropologist. So please, feel free to read what I write with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Ah, here we go. There were “bands” and “clans” and, well, still “tribes.” And segmentary societies. There were the nomads, the pastoralists, and the agriculturalists. Mostly, there were the categories of barbarians and savages and the civilized, all according to the almighty Lewis Henry Morgan and Edward B. Tylor. Mogran’s stages stood on a neat corridor of “unilineal evolution” (which was just all a way of saying some people were primitive and backward, while some were more developed, evolutionarily speaking, and thus superior). And then we have the neatly bounded and discrete linguistic groups to be discovered and documented. And now there are what? Ethnic groups. A better categorization maybe. Less loaded with old stereotypes. Maybe. But fraught with other problems. Like how they just go about killing each other for silly reasons. So who created these ethnic groups? Or were they just groups? Plain and simple.
And now we have new groups and groups and groups and I am not sure why is creating all of them. Anthropologists? Technologists?
I cannot tell you how much it bothered me to see someone call groups on twitter “twibes” and say there are now leaders and followers and maybe even bounded collectivities on twitter. If I follow you on twitter and you follow me on twitter, well who is the leader and who is the follower? And what makes you more of a visionary than me? Please see: http://www.thesocialreformer.com/2008/11/twibes-follow-leader.html
Take a look at the above link and the first thing you see is a picture. The picture represents something. Are we now just like the most cool and exotic tribesmen and women of the old days when authentic cultural individuals roamed the earth? Well, we are so modern on twitter but we are totally tribal, too. Or am I getting it all wrong? I am confused. I wonder if soon, on twitter, we’ll have cults and sects and… just anything else we humans need in order to be human. I mean the things anthropologists once said all humans had to have in order to be human. We’ll have kinship. And religion. And history. And marriage. And dangerous, exotic practices. All this will take place on twitter! Already is taking place, maybe?
I know it makes sense to compare a group of Microsoft programmers to a group of hunter-gatherers. Groups are groups. There are office symbols and practices. There is the ritual of the morning commute and the stop at Starbucks. There is a culture of anthropology-the beaded earrings and statues side by side with books by Boas and Mauss. There is a culture of computer technology, the philosophies of creativity and the shared desires for wealth (ah, we’re young scientists and visionaries in Silicon Valley, so lets try and make a billion dollars before we get to age 35). Yes, there are new cultures. And these cultures have languages with their own idiosyncratic vocabularies.
But something seems missing. What could it be? Hold on, I am still figuring it out. Grrrr. The thought eludes me. But I think there is a good reason why these “cultures” (if you will) are so transient. Maybe it is that, like it or not, they are so very linked to capital and perhaps much more so than they are linked to community. I’m not sure, still figuring it out.
So, speaking of “tribes,” for the groups you mention in your essay, you say Kalahari bushmen. You mean the !Kung. Or the San? Or the Basarwa? All of the above? Hunter-gatherers, foragers? Or bushmen? I mean, which name suits us right now? And what do we know? What don’t we know?
This is my problem with development. Words. You are right. Solutions fly out of the air for “problems” and “groups” that haven’t even been “problematized.” But, more importantly, I think, we have the whole problem of language, the words we use to talk about people. This is the main problem of development work, and the main problem of anthropology. The problem of language. In my humble opinion.
Then we have the problem of HIV.
Notice how we have so many “problems.”
So which problem do we prioritize? Obviously, if lives can be saved, then that is of the utmost importance. But lets be clear. What I am saying is, for those of you out there engaged in development work, engaged in solving the “problems” of Africa or the so-called developing world, I am saying to you, let us be clear. Let’s stop throwing “words” around that are more tied to power and money and destructive hierarchies. If you are going to help people, then please find a way to help them without feeling the need to resort to language that does more violence to the very people you seek to help.
I am not saying you should be paralyzed by what word choice is best and then find that you are too tired, too mired in language, to do good deeds. I am saying, just take a few minutes, stop and ask yourselves a few questions:
1) What does the word poverty mean? In Africa.
2) What does the word disease mean? In Africa.
3) Why is it that these terms are used a great deal in talking about Africa? When you map out your definitions, ask who creates these definitions and why? Does money flow more easily for your cause when you use words like “poor” and “child” and “HIV”? If this helps a good cause, OK, fine, but please use the terms carefully, bearing in mind that they can easily come to define you and the people you seek to help, that these definitions can work against you and those whose lives you wish to save. Everywhere I look I see that people are saying that Africa is, in effect, a poor child in need of rescuing, Africa is a sick woman or a sick man in need of curing. Africa, it seems, is a broken continent. Broken by disease and poverty. These things may be true but I firmly believe that they are also just a thin slice of the myriad representations and realities of Africa.
By the way, I am worried, while Africa is being rescued, who will rescue Broken America? This society that supposedly is not broken but really is quite beyond fixing and in need of so much rescuing. Will Africa send a few of its best to come and save the West?
For anything to “change” in Africa (in the world) then the kind of language we use to talk about people and places must change. This again is my opinion but is one I stand by.
In graduate school I was blessed to take a few courses in African studies which built up my undergraduate background in African history & Africanist anthro. I feel that, perhaps, this is what development workers truly lack, a foundation in something that can pull one’s thinking back to what Africans are saying about the world and not what westerners and their academic disciplines are saying. How do Africans come to understand their own worlds? How does, say, a man like my Cameroonian father come to be multilingual and multicultural, versed in the ways of his home and the homes of others in his area of the NWP? I am guessing he did not grow up with or rely on Malinowski’s participant-observation or philosophy of isolation from one’s own society.
The most valuable thing I took away from my graduate program in anthropology, in the belly of the Ivory Tower, was the theorizing of Michel Foucault on “discourse.” It was the only theory my mind gladly wrapped itself around, in those days when I sat in graduate seminars and attended workshops/presentations and heard Africa talked about with words I could not recognize or relate to. I felt alienated. Ignored. I could not speak about “My Africa” in a discipline that claimed to care about “my” perspectives (or all perspectives). I could not speak until I was an expert, until I’d learned the words (theories) of the old founders and how to use them properly, until I was a PhD holder or a book author or a funded researcher. In the meantime, I had to shut up and learn. I learned that anthropology was a field of “silence.” A field about words and writing and power and prestige. About being a hero when what the world needs is not more superheroes but more people who know how to love as brothers and sisters. Anthropology seeks to create a new and positive discourse about parts of the world that have suffered historical abuses but for some reason, anthropologists cannot sit down and work out a discourse of LOVE. A discourse of friendship and mutual needs met.
While development workers “assess needs” maybe they should check their own hearts and why they are doing what they are doing. And talk openly about their own needs. Altruism is never completely selfless (this is something I learned, paradoxically, in my graduate course in biological anthro). The so-called development work one does is just as much about the love one gets as it is about the love one gives. But in anthropology, in technology, we don’t talk about love. Do we? Why not? And where does one go, what school, what academic field, what career, what culture, what language, what religion, what place, what book, where does one go to learn how to love and to speak about love?
Wow, some outstanding comments to this post! Thank you all.
@kiwanja, applied anthropology is an incredibly valuable tool to be sure, particularly in the “social mobile” space that you’re involved in. Part of the popular misconception (aside from the “Indiana Jones” persona, which you noted) is that it’s a purely academic pursuit with little purpose beyond producing dry monographs. It has utility and big potential for practical applications in many fields, not only ICT in the developing world.
Witness the resurgence of anthropology for market research and “immersion” study, which is of course another way of saying ethnography, or the art of living inside another social group. This has been a strong methodology since the early 20th century. Businesses are coming around to grasping that society is fragmenting and moving away from mass-marketing, so ethnography is in the spotlight again.
Some outstanding links you provided there. The ‘Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication’ is one I haven’t seen before.
@Divya, as Ken said, there are so many sub-fields that it really depends on your personal interests. That’s one of the things that attracted me to it originally. The field is broad enough that you have to specialize in the kind of research you want to do, whether it’s a focus on linguistics, human ecology, forensics, archaeology, ergonomics, human computer interaction (HCI) or whatever.
If your local bookstore has a limited selection, you might start by browsing Amazon’s anthropology Listmania group just to get a feel for what’s available. If socio-cultural stuff is your bag, try picking out an ethnography that looks interesting. Some of the better ones make for unforgettable reads.
I’d be glad to recommend individual books, if you want. Check out Ken’s links as well.
@Paco, that sounds like an unbelievable project! I was fortunate to visit the Cordillera Blanca region of Peru over a decade ago and stayed in Huaraz for a short while. It sounds like you used an ideal mix of tech and socio-cultural context to make the project a success. Man, I’d love to watch that film.
@James BonTempo, you pose some very, very good questions. I’ll confess that I’m still figuring things out here “on the ground” in Cameroon and it was only recently that Ken’s views got me re-thinking the role of anthropology in what people in our space are doing. Hence this post.
As one who’s drafted many funding proposals (taking a break from writing one right now, actually!) I can see how a line item for up-front anthropology work might be a tough sell.
I think it requires that you educate your potential donors, perhaps with a cost/benefit analysis of what you gain by studying your target community before rushing to implement a project plan. The big foundations are chaired by CEOs who understand business, so you need to frame your approach in these terms. You might try pointing out that industries are increasingly funding so-called “consumer ethnography” to better understand their customers before marketing a new product. You may not have the time or money to put a professional anthropologist in the field for 6mos to a year, but you could benefit from a partnership with a group that’s already done work in your area of interest, or leverage existing studies.
One example web resource (for African journals) is African Journals Online. I found several African Anthropologist articles on Cameroon that are free to download. Here are some other good starting points:
http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/loi/anthro – Annual Review of Anthropology
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/ca/current – Current Anthropology
http://artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/journals.html – index of journals
http://www.doaj.org/doaj?cpid=124&func=subject -directory of open access journals
I wish I had answers to all your questions, but I suppose we’re in the process of figuring this out together.