Smartphone Cultures by Jane Vincent Leslie Haddon

Author:Jane Vincent, Leslie Haddon [Jane Vincent, Leslie Haddon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367332990
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

Part IV

Managing sociability

8 Collective uses of mobile phones in the global South

Cultural diversity among low-income groups in Brazil and in South Africa

Carla Barros

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss certain consumption practices relating to communication technologies among low-income groups in which collective uses emerge as a central aspect of the cultural dynamics in question. To do so, the results of an ongoing ethnography conducted in the city of Rio de Janeiro will be analyzed and then placed in perspective by making comparisons with studies conducted in South Africa. The search for a comparative dimension between the Brazilian and South African contexts first arose as an attempt to think about the discontinuity between how cultural forms, in this case artifacts, are anticipated in production and how they are experienced in consumption outside of the cultural experience of most economically developed countries. It is known that this discontinuity has a long tradition related to reception studies, be they of British or Latin American origin. Parallel to these studies, another type of research can be conducted that focuses on understanding different experiences with these technologies, which also emphasize the ways in which individuals create meaning in their interactions with communication goods. As some scholars (Sahlins 1976; Miller 1987) have emphasized, production “is completed” through consumption, since it is in the latter dimension that objects produced in series gain singularity through the appropriations made by them of individuals inserted in a given culture. Therefore, the ways by which goods were planned in the production sphere can be significantly changed in their everyday uses, through a wide variety of consumption practices.

The anthropological approach adopted here approximates, in certain aspects, the “circuit of culture” concept adopted by Du Gay et al. (2013). In this concept, the meanings of a cultural product are determined by the articulation of certain processes that, although distinct, are interrelated and overlapping. The perspective of Du Gay et al. allows the integration, among other factors, of the domains of production and consumption, which are perceived as mutually constitutive of each other. Thus, there is no fixed meaning for a cultural product that can be transported in a stable manner to different moments of the global process. This process has affinity with the anthropological perspective adopted in this chapter, which emphasizes that a series of contingent meanings will be attributed to a product in various situations. Another point of approximation of the concept of “circuit of culture” and the anthropological perspective is the central importance given to culture as an instance in which things “make sense” and where the “work of construction of meanings” takes place in the way that we represent them and how we construct our practices.

It is also possible to make a connection between Du Gay et al.’s concept and the vision of the cultural process of constitution of goods defended by Kopytoff (1986), which proposes the idea of a “cultural biography of things,” where the meanings and values of goods are resignified in circulation, varying according to the context.

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