Abstract
Sirpa Tenhunen’s A Village Goes Mobile: Telephony, Mediation and Social Change in Rural India is a thorough and important study of mobile telephony in rural Bengal which offers wide-ranging scholarly engagement and adds valuably to the interface between media anthropology and development studies, in addition to contributing to Bengal ethnography. The book is a result of long-term ethnographic fieldwork (1999–2013) by the author in the Janta village in Birbhum, West Bengal.
The book is divided in eight chapters. In the first chapter, the author lays out the theoretical scope and describes her field. In the second chapter, she further clarifies her use of concepts such as domestication, mediation/mediatization, polymediality and remediation. In the third chapter, she demonstrates how mobile phones, which is one of the media in the media ecology of the village, became ubiquitous. In the fourth chapter, she shows the parallel and intersecting channels of social and economic communication via mobile phones, moving away from the excessive focus on the economy in the research of mobile telephony in the global south (p. 9). Placing mobile telephony in the context of the post-liberalization economy, she shows the limited effects of this technology on small-scale businesses and entrepreneurs. The economic logistics are further connected to social logistics in this chapter. For example, she points out that that kinship and the local economy are related not simply because of the financial reliance of poorer relatives on the richer ones in times of business-related crises, but that land use also follows kinship networks (p. 80). In the fifth chapter, she focusses on the intersection between gender and technology by pointing to issues of ownership of, access to and patterns of use of phones. She shows the positive yet ambiguous changes that mobile phones have brought in the lives of women by slightly blurring the home boundaries and making it possible to subvert some of the rules of the family. She narrates, for instance, the telling example of a young woman in Janta whose mother regularly advised her over the phone about how she could negotiate a more manageable share of the domestic labour in the family. Her access to her mother’s narrated experience, which trains her in the tactful art of disobeying the mother-in-law and negotiating her workload, is provided through mobile telephony. In the sixth chapter she contextualizes the use of mobile phones by examining the political context of Janta in the light of her larger scholarship on politics in rural Bengal. She shows the disruptive potential that is introduced by mobile technology, if by nothing else, then by the sheer speed and scale of communication it affords. Tenhunen contextualizes village politics in the social and cultural understanding of rajneeti—the political culture of the region—by connecting the translocal nature of rajneeti to its everydayness enactment in the village through the affordances of mobile telephony. In the seventh chapter, she shows how caste, class and familial hierarchies are both challenged and reinstated by mobile telephony. As cheap Chinese smartphones saturate the market, the affordances of the smartphone are accessible to a wider range of users. Yet, while wealthier users employ this technology to further their business or start a career, the poorer section, despite feeling empowered by the ownership of a smartphone, tend to use it for entertainment. In the final chapter, the author traces the connection between this ethnography and development anthropology to ground the production and use of technologies in social dynamics of a field by highlighting its multifaceted use.
As studies of social media have repeatedly pointed out, the context of offline worlds is essential to understand online worlds (see Miller et al., 2016; Udupa, 2017); similarly the effects and use of mobile telephony, as the author shows, are located within the everyday lives of users and a set of cultural practices that are both strengthened and ruptured by this technology. The main contribution of this volume is that the analysis of the effects of mobile phone technology builds on the author’s deep and intimate understanding of the village—its social, political, familial and cultural life. Second, Tenhunen, rather astutely, sutures the technological in the context of local hierarchies and social inequalities by focussing on the intersecting power dynamics of gender, caste, class and kinship. By using intersectionality, she brings a nuanced picture of how a new technology is domesticated, how and by whom it is accessed, and to what ends. Third, she locates mobile telephony in a rich matrix of polymediality—what she calls the media ecology—populated by radios, computers, televisions and landline phones. The allure of the visual media whether on television, or stored in memory chips in mobile phones, 24 hour news channels that played a major role in bringing down a three decade old Leftist regime, and even tele serials, contributed to the social life of the village. In addition, the precision with which she lays out the context of rural Bengal can also be very useful for teaching.
Overall, the literature review of existing scholarship on the topic of every chapter is extremely thorough and attempts to be exhaustive. Despite being an important resource, like every account that attempts to be exhaustive, it could exhaust some readers who are more broadly interested in South Asia. But it does offer an excellent resource for anyone studying ICTs in the Global South, in addition to adding a novel communications technology dimension to the field of rural ethnography. It is an extremely useful book for teaching given its meticulous and detailed theoretical overview of all the disciplinary terrains it traverses. However, as a reader with a particular taste and disciplinary orientation, I longed for more intimate portraits of the author’s respondents. Along with quantitative data on the number and type of phone calls, and the number and gender of the callers, the book could have been more evocative as it is informative, had it used some more intimate portraits of individuals, and if we could hear more of their stories, and their voices.
Some of the author’s research questions could have been answered more clearly if she provided more details about the content of the phone call beyond the taxonomy she creates. In the fifth chapter, she seeks to point to the changes in women’s agency in the family and in the village. While she does showcase examples of a women’s continued relationship to their natal village after marriage, or that of a woman travelling outside the village for work, most of the call patterns are understood in taxonomic terms—‘general news, study issues, greetings, grocery shopping’ and so on, where general news counts for 73 per cent of the calls. We know that the finer nuances of ‘general news’ might reveal a lot about the lives of women, and the social dynamics between them. The answer to ‘how are you?’ among women, in villages in the neighbouring district I have worked in, is hardly ever: ‘fine, thank you!’. It leads to talk about the husband’s wrath, the mother-in-law’s health, the son’s errant ways, recipes, a cat stealing a big piece of fish from the kitchen, a character dying on a television serial, an obstinate pain in the back and so on. The inner worlds and lives of women are revealed in these small details that are perhaps lost in the broad category of ‘khabar neua [sic]’. While she mentions this in her introductory chapter (p. 10), she does not develop this further in her chapter on gender and women’s agency. It is possible that these lengthy conversations I observed in a neighbouring district are made possible because of cheaper calling rates in the last few years.
Unfortunately, the use of WhatsApp and other social media is outside the purview of the author’s research. These social media, as we know both from academic studies and media reports, are crucial to building/influencing public opinion, provoking communal violence by spreading rumour or perpetuating fake news (Sinha, 2018). On the other hand, they are also being used to build resistance against these very rumours, and to build connections between urban and rural activist circles (Sen, 2019). Even though social media are beyond the scope of Tenhunen’s book, it is crucial for any study that looks at the proliferation of internet and social media through smartphones in rural India.
Overall, this book is an important resource for anyone studying and particularly teaching media anthropology and development in the Global South, among other things, because the author provides such a rich and exhaustive literature review of ethnographies from several countries, especially in the Global South, and studies of media technologies. In addition, this book is an important addition to anthropology in rural India, providing a powerful challenge to the idea of the ‘remote’ Indian village, by showing its translocal, globalized character.