Media culture in Nomadic Communities

KEYWORDS:

• ICTs
• post-Colonialism
• Nomadology

Review of: media culture in nomadic communities

To call this work under any other epithet other than necessary would be an understatement. Allison Hahn has produced a volume that is based on rigorous fieldwork, and whose primary function is as a call for the alignment of perception with reality. Hahn deals with the crude bare concepts: Media is communication. A communication that is versatile, instantaneous, and serves to bring people in contact, to get ideas fast into the open. Be it through a humble radio, a text message over a mobile phone, or a video posted on social media, all these Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are tools. The ways that these tools are used reveal that it is not only to the average Western reader that the ethnographies that Hahn draws from are unfamiliar. It is also academic analysis which reads them in semantic blindness. These are ways which – to paraphrase and invert Audre Lorde (2018) – do put the master’s tools at the very task of dismantling the master’s house. This work discusses communication media empowering nomadic populations: The subaltern does speak through them, without the need of the Western intermediary.

The opening chapters predominately set the tone for the above. These people are not poor, not backwards, just different. This is a difference located not only in their ways but also in their aspirations. These are people that aspire to the nomadic lifestyle. Even when they are integrated inside an urban environment, within a 9 to 5 job, they aspire to return to nomadism. They are vastly knowledgeable on the discourse that goes on about them, and are revealed as dynamic, evolving communities. They have devised novel ways to use ICTs. Ways which address the peculiarity of both their living conditions (these are communities that mostly reside off the electricity grid), but also their cultural backgrounds. The narrative that sets these populations as technologically illiterate proves false, as they demonstrate a successful employment of the very latest technologies.

Chapter three turns to the East African Maasai, who utilised the online activist network Avaaz, in order to oppose the state trying to evict them from their lands, for the benefit of tourist developments. They visualised their cause through “image testimony” (p. 56) and testified to the “realness” (p. 66) of their claims. The Maasai used technology to fill in the parts of discourse that were erased by official sources, and drew the attention of the outside world to the plights of their community. The Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region (IMAR) of China occupies the next chapter and predominately reiterates the same story with different actors. A state which does not acknowledge the voices that speak a different narrative to the one it sanctions. ICT’s push all those unwanted deliberations to visibility. In this chapter, technology helps communities transcend the artificial segregations imposed on them. The use of both Mongolian and Chinese script brought together Mongolians who are integrated inside the Chinese system and communicate in Chinese text, with Mongolians who live outside the borders of the Chinese state and use their mother tongue. The IMAR case highlights that the digital space is another land, and like land, it is over its ownership that battles are won and lost: The Mongolian posts were quick to be censored or discredited, either directly by the government or by nefarious, state-controlled bloggers.

The fifth chapter turns to the Bedouin herders of the Middle East and North Africa, and the oral tradition of Nabati poetry. The 2010 appearance of Hissa Hilal, on a television song contest, challenged several taboos of Saudi society. Not only a woman, but a Bedouin woman, appeared on television and recited poetry. This was poetry not only in a traditional form particular to the Bedouins, but poetry that run contrary to the themes encountered in such shows. Poetry that critiqued societal ills, instead of describing the mundane everyday life. The Bedouins—widely perceived as stateless peoples—have little access to the benefits of citizenship, as citizenship is directly correlated to being settled within the borders of a particular state. These problematics become even more pronounced in the case of Bedouin women, who are exiled from public face-to-face presence. An exile which becomes exasperated for those that settle within urban cities, and give up their traditional roles. Social networks allow these women presence. And this presence they use to demonstrate that their invisibility is not so much ingrained in tradition, but is the result of modernity: “Bedouin women have always been poets” (p. 107).

Chapter six focuses on Mongolian herders and how ownership of a cell phone signaled visibility as far as political decision making is concerned. In 2015, a referendum regarding mining rights against herding space was held. This referendum featured the peculiarity of allowing one vote per cell phone SIM. Thus, in Mongolia, ICT was pivotal in making democracy inclusive for all. Even marginal groups can and should influence policy. This represents a reversal in the flow of information. ICT’s in the Mongolian region, where originally introduced on the premises of dispensing information from the state to the citizen. In this case, the flow of information was reversed. ICTs facilitated a bottom-up communication, from the people to the decision-makers. The 2015 referendum was an utter failure as far as results and participation are concerned, yet it set a precedent. People now expect to be asked on matters that concern them. Again, in ways similar to the IMAR case, the problematic of who controls the digital turf, made itself present.

Chapter seven turns to the Sámi people of the Arctics. A trans-border peoples, who span the region of three distinct countries. The Sámi found themselves in the paradoxical position of being displaced on grounds of ecologically friendly (sic) developments. A glaring antinomy makes itself present when what is presented as environmentally friendly on paper – oil extraction and rail network expansion – is pitted against the actual eco-friendly traditional herding lifestyle of the Sámi. ICTs, in this case, were pivotal in the blocking of rail and oil expansion over native pasture lands, by embodying protest. The Sámi and their regions are remote and scarcely populated. The herders themselves cannot stop their day-to-day activities and assemble in the rallies and protests that the West needs to see to acknowledge. The internet helped gather widespread support, and protesters from international groups rallied in the place of the herders. The effect of digital channels of communications can be summarised in the words of a Sámi elder: “we now have a voice and we are going to use it” (p. 137).

The case of the Standing Rock protests and the Lacota Sioux, which follow, is where the concept of togetherness most shines. With the Sioux, the reader is presented with the axiom that the idea a society is organised under, is what governs the means. Deeply etched in the ways of the Sioux is the concept of inclusivity. For example, the inclusion of “two-spirit peoples” (p. 147), when addressing gender, demonstrates a much more progressive tradition than that of Western modernity. The Sioux coalesced the people of the earth, around a cause that transcends borders and continents. As the corporate world is connected, the Sioux managed to connect the voices that oppose it. A prime example is the lobbying of the Norwegian pension fund by the Sámi Parliament in order to sell the stocks of companies that wanted to build on Sioux land. Fellowships that still continue today were formed in Standing Rock. In the Sioux case information was disseminated widely, but not at the expense of their traditional values. An exemplary controlled use of ICTs as opposed to the usual flattening of everything under ICTs. For the Sioux, a face-to-face deliberation carries respect. To address a generic online audience is seen as demeaning. Things that matter, things that demand to be addressed towards a particular party, which is recognised as an intimate, deserving interlocutor, were discussed as such. ICTs were used to bring the interlocutors together, but not to be the sole mediums of discourse.

The book closes by identifying the particularly lacking presence of academia in the field of nomadic populations and ICTs. Hahn argues that academia is caught up in a form of “Social Darwinism” (p. 178), in which there is no place for those that choose not to settle. Nomads effectively are treated as not human. As needful lesser creatures which need to be cared for until they settle within a state and within a job. This is the point where the originality of this book shines, as it seamlessly entangles media studies, sociology and politics to highlight not only the problems and resistance mounted by these communities but also that our analyses begin and end in the 1970s. Still, we think in the terms described by Edward Said (2003): These populations are not really civilised, not really able to use a mobile phone, they are mere relics of a time of innocence, museum pieces rather than fellow human beings. Still, we equate humanity with being under a state (Clastres, 1989), still we see the Western way as the only way. This book, besides the invaluable addition to knowledge that it offers to scholars of media studies, also caters to the broader readership of Graeber and Wengrow (2021), as it locates the core values of egalitarianism, equality, and autonomy, not in our past, but in the very now, very much alive amongst the stateless peoples that are presented in this work. A highly commented engrossing read.

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Notes on contributors

Konstantinos Kerasovitis

Konstantinos Kerasovitis wrote his doctoral thesis is on Georges Bataille and digital labour. Influenced by Bataille, he has published on non-abstractive research methodology, and is also very proud to be featured in one of the first books that deal with the figure of the Zombie. His research interests are human centric and stretch from the philosophy of technology, to theology. He comes with a background in design and is currently employed in the Greek ministry of labour. Konstantinos Kerasovitis comes with a background in design and is currently employed in the Greek ministry of labour. He is a PhD researcher at the university of Wolverhampton, mentored by Dr Benjamin Halligan. His research interests pivot around employment, affect and the body in their philosophical implications.