Innovation: transforming hierarchies in South Asia

This special issue examines innovation as social change in South Asia. From an anthropological micro perspective, innovation is moulded by social systems of value and hierarchy and simultaneously potentially transforms them. The articles in this special issue examine a number of innovations in South Asian contexts: the printing press's changing technology and its intersections with communal and language ideologies in India (Peterson); mobile telephony, gender, and kinship in West Bengal (Tenhunen); microcredit and its relationship with social capital in Bangladesh (Uddin); imbalanced sex ratios and the future of marriage payments in north-western India (Jeffery); and how alternative dispute…

Mobile media, gender, and power in rural India

This article traces the diffuse connections between mobility and power by exploring how mobile phone use contributed to gendered power relations in rural India. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork on the use of mobile phones, conducted periodically between 2005 and 2013 in the village of Janta in West Bengal, India, and compared to earlier fieldwork in Janta, before the village had any phone system. Analysis of the increased mobility reveals how mobile phone use emerges within interconnected, changing fields of power. The political sphere earlier perceived as predominantly local was replaced by translocal political practices characterized by increasing mobility. Although new political pra…

Mobile phone use and social generations in rural India

This article avails the concept of social generation to explore how intergenerational differences contribute to the diversity in the appropriation of mobile telephony in rural India. Rural India has experienced numerous social changes such as the decline of agriculture, changes in caste and gender relationships, and rising levels of education which have influenced different age groups in distinct ways during recent decades. The article is based on interviews, observation, and survey data on the use of mobile phones in a village in rural West Bengal during 2005, 2007–2008, 2010, and 2012–2013. peerReviewed

Elämää ilmastonmuutoksen keskellä Bengalinlahdella

Digital Inequality and Relatedness in India after Access

The scholarship on digital inequality and divides has relied mainly on quantitative data and such general criteria for digital inequality as access, motivation, skills, and the autonomy of use to measure the empowering effects of internet access. This chapter develops a novel way to understand digital inequality based on ethnographic fieldwork on smartphone use in rural and urban India among low-income and little-educated people. It analyses digital inequality through the concept of digital relatedness exploring how people’s digital media use is embedded in social relationships and how media use serves to refashion relationships and hierarchies. The chapter argues that the focus on autonomo…

Digital ethnography of mobiles for development

This article avails the concept of social generation to explore how intergenerational differences contribute to the diversity in the appropriation of mobile telephony in rural India. Rural India has experienced numerous social changes such as the decline of agriculture, changes in caste and gender relationships, and rising levels of education which have influenced different age groups in distinct ways during recent decades. The article is based on interviews, observation, and survey data on the use of mobile phones in a village in rural West Bengal during 2005, 2007–2008, 2010, and 2012–2013. peerReviewed

After cyclone Aila : politics of climate change in Sundarbans

This article compares the politics of climate change in the Sundarbans region in Bangladesh and India based on ethnographic fieldwork in four villages and among migrants from these villages in Kolkata and Khulna city by focusing on the long aftermath of cyclone Aila. The comparison highlights different policy options and framings of extreme weather events . Ten years after the cyclone, the aftermath of Aila continues in both regions we studied in Bangladesh and India, but partly for different reasons. In our study areas in Bangladesh, the aftermath of Aila reinforced the neglect of coastal livelihoods, whereas, in the communities we studied in India, Aila spurred new investments in the affe…