A Village Goes Mobile: Telephony,

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A Village Goes Mobile
ii

STUDIES IN MOBILE COMMUNICATION

Studies in Mobile Communication focuses on the social consequences of
mobile communication in society.

Series Editors
Rich Ling, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Gerard Goggin, University of Sydney, Australia
Leopoldina Fortunati, Università di Udine, Italy

Haunting Hands: Mobile Media Practices and Loss

Kathleen M. Cumiskey and Larissa Hjorth

A Village Goes Mobile: Telephony, Mediation,

and Social Change in Rural India
Sirpa Tenhunen
A Village Goes Mobile
Telephony, Mediation, and Social Change
in Rural India

Sirpa Tenhunen

1
iv

1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

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© Oxford University Press 2018

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Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  vii

1. Introduction   1
Diffusion of mobile telephony in the Global South   2
Social consequences of mobile telephony   3
Cultural diversity of mobile telephony   5
The promise of mobiles for development   6
Challenging developmental optimism   9
Research foci   10
Ethnographic research in rural West Bengal   13
Overview of the book   17
2. Theorizing Phone Use Contexts and Mediation   22
Domestication: technology use in the home   22
Remediation: emergence of media from cultural contexts   23
Contexts in media-​saturated environments   25
Mediatization paradigm   26
The contested notion of media logic   27
Cultural perspective on mediatization   29
Mediation and interdependency between information
and communication technology–​based and face-​to-​face
communication  30
The materiality of media in open-​ended cultural contexts   32
Conclusions  35
3. Why Mobile Phones Became Ubiquitous: Remediation
and Socialities   37
Ethnographic fieldwork in caste neighborhoods   38
Connections  43
Mobile telephony and changing communication   45
Radio: untapped potential   54
vi

The allure of visual media   57

The last gadget to arrive: the computer   59
Conclusions  61
4. Mobile Telephony, Economy, and Social Logistics   64
Mobile phones and the market   66
Differing benefits of mobile phones for microentrepreneurs   70
Phones and labor relationships   74
Benefits of phones for agriculture   76
Coordinating kinship   79
Coordinating and arranging health care over a mobile phone   82
Social logistics and cultural meanings   86
Conclusions  87
5. Mediating Gender: Mobile Phones and Women’s Agency   89
Co-​constitution of gender and technology   90
Social change and generations   94
Gendered calling patterns   100
Changing gender and kinship relationships   105
Mediation of gendered space through mobile phones   109
Conclusions  117
6. Mediating Conflict: Mobile Telephony and Politics   120
Theorizing technologically enabled rebellion   123
Globalization and conflict   128
Activist phone use and local politics   130
Conclusions  140
7. Smartphones, Caste, and Intersectionalities   144
Changing village intersectionalities   150
Phone use barriers   156
Entertainment from memory chips   157
Internet browsing through personal phones   162
Conclusions  164
8. Conclusions   167
Analyzing mobile phone use in contexts   169
Gender and kinship: subtle changes   170
Economic benefits of mobile telephony   171
Political empowerment   172
Bridging the digital divide?   174
The promise of mobiles for development   175

References  179
Index  197

[ vi ] Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is a result of more than a decade of research in rural India, made
possible by numerous organizations and people. Among the most impor-
tant persons to thank are the villagers of Janta who welcomed me for ex-
tended periods of fieldwork. I began fieldwork in rural West Bengal in 1999
as a postdoctoral researcher with the Academy of Finland (Projects 42968
and 54485). The Helsinki Institute of Science and Technology supplied
funding for preliminary fieldwork on mobile telephony around the time
rural West Bengal received mobile phone network coverage. The same insti-
tute provided an excellent research environment for me to embark on tech-
nology studies. I am particularly thankful for Ilkka Arminen, Lucy Suchman,
Johanna Uotinen, and Marja Vehviläinen, who gave valuable comments on
my first papers on mobile telephony at institutional seminars. I performed
most of the research for this book as an academy researcher (Academy of
Finland) during 2007–​2011 (Project 118356). I was able to continue field-
work in 2012–​2013, particularly on the use of smartphones, as the result
of funding from a research project titled “Mobile Technology, Gender and
Development in Africa, India, and Bangladesh” funded by the Academy of
Finland and led by Laura Stark. Other project members included Perpetual
Crentsil, Jukka Jouhki, and Sanna Tawah. I am grateful to Kakali Das,
Asima Kundu, Rekha Kundu, Ashis Pal, Samik Pal, and Dana Sugu for their
research assistance. I thank Ilse Evertse for language editing.
I wrote this book at the Department of Social Research within the disci-
pline of social and cultural anthropology at the University of Helsinki and
the Department of History and Ethnology at the University of Jyväskylä.
I thank colleagues in both departments for many fruitful discussions.
Students from my 2015 technology course at the University of Jyväskylä
helped to hone my arguments. Thanks go as well to scholars at the Centre
for Studies in Social Sciences in Kolkata, with which I have been affiliated
during my fieldwork in India. A University of Western Ontario fellowship
vi

enabled me to write and present papers on my work in Canada in 2015.

I am grateful to Bipasha Baruah and Dan Jorgensen as well as my lec-
ture audiences at the University of Western Ontario for their insightful
comments.
Invitations to lecture and present papers were crucial in helping me to
develop my ideas, and I am grateful for all my hosts: Roger Jeffrey and Assa
Doron invited me to the National University of Singapore, Kalyanakrishnan
Sivaramakrishnan to Yale University, Ramaswami Mahalingam to the
University of Michigan, Uwe Skoda to Århus University, Jo Tacchi and
John Postill to RMIT University in Barcelona, Arild Ruud to the University
of Oslo, and Nadja-​Christina Schneider to Humboldt University of Berlin.
I have also benefited greatly from comments and discussions at confer-
ences during which I presented papers: International Communication
Association, London, 2013; Mobile Telephony in the Developing World,
Jyväskylä, 2013; NFU Conference, Oslo, 2012; Gendering Asia Network
Workshop, Copenhagen, 2010; EASA Biennial Conference, Maynooth,
Ireland, 2010; Globalizing South Asia Conference, Helsinki, 2010; Critical
Internet Research Conference, Milwaukee, 2009; Gendering Asia Network
Conference, Helsinki, 2009; All India Sociological Conference, Karnataka
University, 2007; XXXII All-​ India Sociological Conference, Chennai,
2006; XVI ISA World Congress of Sociology, Durban, 2006; and Annual
Conference of the Monash Asia Institute, Mumbai, 2004. I have also given
lectures related to this book at the Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki
Collegium for Advanced Studies, NIAS, in Copenhagen and the Institute of
Management in Kolkata. I thank the audiences for their comments.
Chapter 4 is derived, in part, from “Mobile Technology in the Village:
ICTs, Culture, and Social Logistics in India” (Sirpa Tenhunen, Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute 14, no. 3 [2008]: 515–​34, http://onlinelibrary.
wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.00515.x/epdf). Chapter 5 is
derived, in part, from “Mobile Telephony, Mediation, and Gender in
Rural India” (Sirpa Tenhunen, Contemporary South Asia 22, no. 2 [2014]:
157–​70, http://​www.tandfonline.com/​10.1080/​09584935.2014.899981).
Chapter 6 is derived, in part, from “Culture, Conflict, and Translocal
Communication: Mobile Technology and Politics in Rural West Bengal,
India” (Sirpa Tenhunen, Ethnos 76, no. 3 [2011]: 398–​420, http://​www.
tandfonline.com/​10.1080/​00141844.2011.580356). Chapter 7 is de-
rived, in part, from “Gender, Intersectionality and Smartphones in Rural
West Bengal” (Sirpa Tenhunen, in Transforming Gender in India, edited by
Kenneth Bo Nielssen and Anne Waldrop, London: Anthem Press, 2014).
Chapter portions are reprinted in revised form with permission from the
publishers.

[ viii ] Acknowledgments
 Special thanks go to the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript as
well as the founding editors of the Oxford University Press series on mo-
bile communication—​Gerard Goggin, Leopoldina Fortunati, and Richard
Ling—​whose comments helped me to improve the manuscript. I also
thank the editors at Oxford University Press for their help throughout
the editing process. Finally, I thank my partner, Juha Laitalainen, who has
enriched my life and whose support and care have helped me to finish this
book. I dedicate the book to the memory of my mother, Kaarina Tenhunen
(1932–​2011).

Acknowledgments [ ix ]
x
CHAPTER 1

Introduction

W hile much of the world was becoming media saturated around the
turn of the millennium (1999–​2000), I spent a year in an Indian
village in West Bengal doing fieldwork on women’s political participation.1
Like numerous other village ethnographers who have worked in rural India,
I faced the hurdles of living in a village without modern conveniences.
It was a year without computers and phones, not to mention e-​mail and
the internet; occasionally, visitors from other villages conveyed the local
news. When I left this village scene, which appeared quintessential, I had
little idea that it was on the verge of changes. On my return in 2005, a mo-
bile phone network covered the region. Although the phone density was
initially low, the village had started to resemble an urban neighborhood
crisscrossed by translocal networks. I could not help but be interested in
the changes that had occurred and were still occurring.
This book is the result of my long-​term ethnographic fieldwork (1999–​
2013) in the village of Janta in the Bankura district of the state of West
Bengal, where I observed the appropriation of mobile telephony since the
inhabitants started using phones. The book depicts how mobile telephones
emerged as multidimensional objects that not only enable conversations,
but also facilitate status aspirations, internet access, and entertainment
practices. The book also explores how the multifaceted use of mobile
phones has influenced economic, political, and social relationships and
how these new social constellations relate to culture, social change, and
development. I analyze social institutions as culturally constructed spheres
tied to translocal processes that, nevertheless, have local meanings. Using
a holistic ethnographic approach, I develop an understanding of how new
2

media mediate social processes within interrelated social spheres and local
hierarchies. I delve into the social and cultural changes to examine agency,
power relationships, and development issues: Who benefits from mobile te-
lephony and how? Can people use mobile phones to help them achieve the
goal of changing their lives, or does phone use merely amplify the existing
social patterns and power relationships? How are people as mobile media
users constrained by the different axes of their identity and social position
and can they refashion their identities through this use? My observations
of the changes that accompanied the appropriation of phones differ,
ranging from optimistic to pessimistic scenarios of mobile telephony’s im-
pact. Villagers told me that they had experienced their ability to use mobile
phones as a major change; nevertheless, the phones could not, for instance,
reduce poverty in the region immediately or drastically.

DIFFUSION OF MOBILE TELEPHONY IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

In Janta, the diffusion of mobile telephony corresponds to what has

happened in much of India and the Global South during the past decade.
In India, teledensity increased from less than 1 per 100 persons in 1991
to 81.82 per 100 persons in 2015 (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India
2012, 2016). Since mobile networks are cheaper to build than landline
networks and since communication by phone does not require literacy, mo-
bile phones have been increasingly adopted in regions with no extensive
prior form of communication technology. In developing countries, mo-
bile phone ownership nearly tripled between 2002 and 2006. By the end
of 2010, mobile networks covered 90 percent of the world (International
Telecommunication Union 2010). The worldwide number of mobile
subscriptions grew from one billion in 2000 to over six billion in 2012, of
which nearly five billion were in developing countries. Ownership of mul-
tiple subscriptions is becoming increasingly common; the number of mo-
bile subscriptions is therefore likely to exceed the world population figure
(World Bank 2012). The expansion of mobile telephony did not end with
the overtaking landline telephony; it is now extending to internet access.
Mobile broadband subscriptions exceeded the number of fixed connections
in 2008, and much of this growth now occurs in developing countries
(World Bank 2012, 11–​30).
As mobile telephony has triumphed surprisingly rapidly in the devel-
oping world, mobile phones are now used in all spheres of life worldwide.
Besides this book, three book-​length works have so far examined a spe-
cific population’s mobile phone use on the basis of ethnographic research

[2] A Village Goes Mobile

in developing countries: Horst and Miller (2006) studied mobile phone
use in Jamaica, Wallis (2013) among rural migrant women in China, and
Archambault (2017) among youth in Mozambique. R. Jeffrey and Doron
(2013) explored mobile telephony in India in its totality, drawing mainly
on secondary sources, but also on ethnographic research in Varanasi, India,
which includes policies, industries, and businesses.
This book focuses on phone use in a particular locality in rural India. This
village in rural West Bengal offers a fruitful microcosmos to develop and
broaden the scholarly discourse on mobile technology and digital media
in general. Although my research was mainly carried out in one village,
this book crosses village borders. In addition to the village’s social life,
I observed people’s translocal networks. Moreover, while the village has
unique features and by no means represents all of rural India, it exemplifies
many of the forces and processes that people elsewhere share.
I will next elaborate my research approach and introduce my research
questions, relating them to earlier research on mobile phone use. In just
three decades, the scholarly discussion on mobile telephony has grown into
a large, multidisciplinary field. I will therefore introduce the key issues of
this scholarly debate from a social science and an anthropological point
of view. My main focus will be on the scholarly discussions of mobile te-
lephony in developing countries. However, since the lion’s share of the re-
search on mobile telephony has focused on Western countries, I present
this discussion briefly as a starting point that will help readers to under-
stand and analyze the commonalities and differences in the cultural and
social aspects of phone use.

SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF MOBILE TELEPHONY

As Goggin (2006, 39) notes, scholars of society and culture largely ne-
glected the telephone2 until the 1990s. At this time, the role of telecommu-
nication in social policy and the economy started to expand and the onset
of mobile telephony increased scholars’ interest in studying telephony. The
first studies in the 1990s focused on Nordic countries, reflecting the early
start of mobile telephony in this region (N. Green and Haddon 2009). Roos
(1985), who analyzed mobile phone use in Finland, was among the first to
discuss how mobile phones help blur the boundaries between public and
private, thus allowing people to become unwilling witnesses of each other’s
private conversations in public places. Two pioneering edited volumes
(Katz and Aakhus 2002; Brown, Green, and Harper 2002) exemplified the
emerging academic discussion on mobile telephony, which centered on

Introduction [3]
4

the social consequences of mobile telephony in Western countries. Brown,

Green, and Harper (2002, 4) sought to explore the meanings people give
to their mobile technology, how they integrate the devices into their work
and home lives, and how they interact with those devices and with other
people through those devices. Katz and Aakhus (2002) based their central
argument on the observation that, since the onset of mobile telephony,
excuses for not being reachable no longer exist; mobile phones have created
a condition for perpetual contact, which Katz and Aakhus identify as the
contemporary Apparatgeist and a sociologic. Katz and Aakhus (301) state
that “whenever the mobile phone chirps, it alters the traditional nature of
public sphere and the traditional dynamics of private relationships.” These
volumes identified such social consequences of mobile telephony as the
improved coordination and flexibility of workplace and home activities and
mobile telephony as a tool for surveillance; these themes have proved en-
during research topics.
Ling and Yttri (2002) developed the concepts of micro and
hypercoordination to describe how Norwegian adults and teens use mobile
phones to coordinate their social activities. Microcoordination refers to
how, with the help of mobile phones, it is possible to adjust agreements
to meet as the need arises, instead of setting predefined meeting times.
The authors use the term hypercoordination to denote how mobile phones,
in addition to instrumental coordination, are employed in emotional and
social communication. Hypercoordination was found to be especially im-
portant for Norwegian teens’ relationships with their peers. Teenagers
elsewhere were also found to be among the heaviest users of mobile
phones. Kasesniemi and Rautiainen (2002) describe how Finnish teenagers
pioneered the development of texting as part of the youth culture. They
conclude that teens use texting to construct an identity and to fine-​tune
their social relationships. Mobile phones were found to enable teenagers
to overcome the spatial boundary of the home and to communicate with
their peers without direct parental control in Italy, Japan, South Korea,
and Germany as well (Fortunati 2001; Ito, Okabe, and Matsuda 2006; Yoon
2006a, 2006b; Höflich and Hartmann 2006).
Gergen (2002) elaborates on the concept of absent presence to ex-
plain how communication technologies have made translocal communica-
tion possible, thereby eroding face-​to-​face communication. He notes that
for the classification of communication, mobile telephony is an enigma,
since, unlike other media, it can strengthen the dyadic communication
from person to person. Gergen also notes that mobile phones can poten-
tially act as bridging devices across disparate enclaves of meaning. Ling
and Campbell (2010) argue that mobile phones help blur the boundaries

[4] A Village Goes Mobile

of social spaces. As Fortunati (2002, 615) concludes, mobile phones trans-
form social relationships and influence the meaning and experience of time
and space. Castells (1996; Castells et al. 2007) extends the work of social
analysts with regard to the consequences of mobile telephony by arguing
that mobile phones enhance a specific value, namely individualism, and by
maintaining that telephony helps favor individual projects and interests
rather than societal norms. His thinking inherently associates the triumph
of individualism with agency, while traditional social networks are seen as
obstacles to agency.

CULTURAL DIVERSITY OF MOBILE TELEPHONY

The rapid worldwide spread of mobile technology has led to substantial

variation in phone use, which has helped draw attention to the role of cul-
ture and meaning in its appropriation. Various studies (see, e.g., Stammler
2009; Ito, Okabe, and Matsuda 2006; Yoon 2006a, 2006b) have revealed
that no single mobile phone culture has emerged. Much of the anthro-
pological research on the use of new technologies emphasizes the way
technologies tend to reinforce existing structures and, especially, adherence
to kinship patterns (Horst and Miller 2006; Barendregt 2008; Archambault
2010; Doron 2012; Jouhki 2013; Lipset 2013). Horst and Miller’s (2006)
pioneering ethnographic study of mobile phone usage in Jamaica differs
from sociological studies through its emphasis on how particular cultures
can foster different patterns of the use of similar technologies, as well as
through its description of the appropriation of phones in Jamaica in re-
lation to local practices and categories. The authors describe how mobile
phones have fed into, and reinforced, local practices regarding the building
of extensive networks that keep lines open to as many individuals as pos-
sible. By emphasizing local meanings, these studies concur with those of
Miller and Slater (2000) that information and communication technologies
(ICTs) are media continuous with and embedded in other social spaces.
Instead of acting as a radical change agent, new media are perceived as
means of cultural reproduction.
Nevertheless, there is a growing interdisciplinary interest in how mo-
bile telephony growth induces change and impacts development in the
Global South.3 At the turn of the millennium, the discourse on ICTs for
development had envisaged that access to the internet and computers
would induce development in the Global South. The ideas that emerged
about the empowering capacities of computers and mobile telephony
echoed the debates of media and communication scholars on the digital

Introduction [5]
6

divide. The digital divide concept, which surfaced in the 1990s, referred
to the unequal access and usage of digital technologies. Castells’s (2001,
269) argument that not having access to the internet is tantamount to
marginalization in the global, networked system summarized the dig-
ital divide idea well. Discourses in ICTs for development have profoundly
influenced national development strategies. In India, the government’s
National e-​Governance Plan endeavored to provide all government serv-
ices at computer kiosks in 2006, and the Modi government introduced
the Digital India Plan with similar but more comprehensive goals in 2015
(Kapoor 2015). However, the National e-​Governance Plan, along with
other massive investments in computer-​based development initiatives,
has tended to fail to deliver on its promises. Sreekumar and Riviera-​
Sanchez (2008) note that although there are not many substantive studies
on the impact of ICTs for development projects, anecdotal evidence of
their success often crumbles when scrutinized critically. According to
Sreekumar and Riviera-​Sanchez, a typical success story refers to farmers
who, with the help of computers, are able to access market prices and im-
prove their incomes and lives. However, on closer examination, schemes
like this are usually only useful for a few wealthy farmers with storing
facilities, who do not depend on wholesalers or money lenders for credit
to cover the costs of cultivation. For instance, Cecchini and Raina’s (2002)
research in rural India (Maharashtra) shows that the elites were the main
users of public computers.
Mobile phones are more affordable than computers and do not require
a constant source of electricity. Moreover, mobile phone users do not need
much technological knowledge—​even those who are illiterate can talk over
the phone. Consequently, during the past two decades, mobile phones have
emerged as the first extensive electronic communication system in most parts
of the developing world. In 2015, 92 percent of the people in developing coun-
tries had mobile phone subscriptions, whereas only 34 percent of households
in developing countries had internet access (International Telecommunication
Union 2015). The rapid spread of mobile telephony revived many of the hopes
for development raised by the discourse on ICTs for development and gave
rise to the mobiles for development discourse, which addresses the use of mo-
bile technologies in global development strategies.

THE PROMISE OF MOBILES FOR DEVELOPMENT

In India, the rapid growth in phone density coincided with broader

economic reforms. A similar deregulation of the telecommunications

[6] A Village Goes Mobile

sector, which opened telephony to private operators, has accompanied
the growth of mobile telephony in most parts of the Global South.
Mobile telephony expansion is thus often celebrated as a showcase ex-
ample of how neoliberal globalization can promote development and re-
duce poverty, and mobile phone users in developing countries have been
depicted as iconic figures signifying change and progress. In turn, mul-
tinational companies have become infrastructure builders and, hence,
initiators of development policies, which had earlier been considered
the purview of governments (Horst 2013). In his review of mobile te-
lephony and development literature, J. Donner (2008a) distinguishes
three strands of the discussion: scholarly works on the factors that de-
termine the diffusion of mobile phones in developing countries, studies
on the impact of mobile phones on development, and studies on how
users actively choose to use their phones. Of these three strands, I dis-
cuss the latter two.
Most social scientists are critical of technological determinism, which
views technical innovation, or technology in general, as the sole or prime
cause of change in society. Nevertheless, economists have been inter-
ested in exploring the role of mobile telephony in economic development
(Bayes, von Braun, and Akhter 1999; Jensen 2007; Samuel, Shah, and
Hadingham 2005; Waverman, Meschi, and Fuss 2005; Esselaar et al.
2007). Jensen’s (2007) longitudinal study of sardine prices at various
landing ports in northern Kerala, India, over five years has become one
of the most cited examples of the economic benefits of mobile phones.
Jensen found that the arrival of mobiles brought significant and imme-
diate reductions in the price variability and in the amount of waste in
Kerala’s fishing system. These findings have been generalized to other
contexts and applied to the development of mobile technology–​based
applications that convey price information to small-​scale entrepreneurs
in the Global South. Popular journals like the Economist have regularly
reported about these business benefits. Like the global development
narrative used to depict a farmer who used a computer for economic ac-
tivities, the narrative now portrays a successful entrepreneur who uses a
mobile phone to increase business profits.
One crucial economic role of mobile telephony has been money transfer
by low-​income people. By 2012, mobile money transfer systems had more
than forty million users. The largest of these is M-​Pesa, which began in
Kenya and now operates in six countries. In 2011, twenty million users
transferred $500 million per month through M-​Pesa (World Bank 2012).
Morawczynski (2009) found that the M-​Pesa application was utilized
for the cultivation of livelihood strategies, which helped residents cope

Introduction [7]
8

with and recover from economic crises. It was used for the solicitation
and accumulation of financial assets and to maintain social networks.
Although the mere calling and texting functions of phones have given
users developmental benefits, an increasing number of studies (World
Bank 2012) have focused on the developmental applications of mobile
technology, such as M-​Pesa, which users must download on their phones.
Such applications allow users to receive information or services via the
internet or text messages. Based on examples from Kenya, India, and
Ecuador, Rea et al. (2017) describe how mobile money transfer systems
can become rails on which other financial products such as business-​to-​
person and government-​to-​person payment channels can emerge and
ride in regulatory contexts.
A World Bank (2012) report on the developmental applications of mo-
bile telephony starts with the assumption that mobile communications
offer major opportunities to advance human development and presents
various successful mobile technology developmental applications.
Nevertheless, the report’s overall stance toward M-​development (the use
of mobile technologies in global development strategies) combines tech-
nological optimism with skepticism. The report acknowledges that most of
the successful projects it mentions are small-​scale undertakings. It laments
the lack of a viable business model for developmental applications of mo-
bile technology and provides recommendations. The authors emphasize
the role of the government as a regulator; in addition, they recommend
careful consideration of the local context and the existing information sys-
tems into which new information services must be integrated before any
M-​development applications can be implemented.
The main challenges for developmental applications of mobile telephony
in low-​income countries are to continue delivering services once initial
funding of the pilot projects ends and to scale up or replicate effective
models in large-​scale implementations. Even the mobile money industry
has only achieved significant scale in a handful of countries, despite M-​Pesa’s
success in Kenya (World Bank 2012, 66). The low-​income people targeted
by educational services often choose to spend their income on other, more
urgent, priorities instead of educational text messages. Nevertheless, pilot
cases have proved that it is possible to use mobile technology to set up elec-
tronic marketplaces, banking systems, and labor banks, as well as to deliver
information on education, health issues, and women’s concerns via phone.
The technology exists, but the problem is whether the various telemarket,
government, service provider, nongovernmental organization, and in-
dustry stakeholders can cooperate to provide affordable developmental
applications in sustainable ways.

[8] A Village Goes Mobile

CHALLENGING DEVELOPMENTAL OPTIMISM

Ethnographic studies of mobile telephony have vigorously challenged the

technological determinism and optimism inherent in the M-​development
discourses. Horst and Miller (2006) observed that phones rarely helped
people in Jamaica start new businesses; instead, Jamaicans used phones
to solicit economic help, which burdens the well-​being of those from whom
assistance is frequently sought. Archambault (2011, 2017) found that, in
Mozambique, young people’s opportunities to use phones for development
purposes are limited because of a lack of jobs and business opportunities.
She broaches the idea that the link between ICTs and development might
be based on wishful thinking. By studying phone users’ positionality in var-
ious contexts in urban China, Wallis (2013) shed light on the reasons that
marginalized workers’ use of mobile phones did not necessarily lead to a
better income, a better job, or more autonomy. Phone use may also be det-
rimental as in a Dar es Salaam slum, where mobile phones afforded minors
the ability to conceal their sexual behavior from their careers, which is a key
element in the intergenerational transmission of female poverty through
early pregnancy and marriage (Stark 2013). Stark also demonstrates that
teenagers aiming to gain social capital with the help of mobile phones often
increase their risk of HIV infection and contribute to the fragility of family
bonds. Tawah (2013) points out that, although Cameroon traders receive
support from their mobile phone use, individual traders were still stuck in
poverty. These traders continued to cope as before, although they now have
phones to coordinate their trade, which has increased their business costs.
Tawah concludes that social and economic forces, such as the lack of cap-
ital, harsh market competition, vulnerability, and the gender hierarchies
in Cameroonian society, create barriers that cannot be tackled simply with
the use of phones. Ethnographic studies demonstrate that impact studies
have tended not to account for the many factors other than mobile te-
lephony that influence the well-​being of phone users. For instance, mo-
bile telephony is likely to strengthen economic growth in locations where a
sizeable market demand emerged prior to its onset.
Initially, interest in economic impacts dominated the M-​development
debate. However, most ethnographic studies on mobile telephony in the
Global South indicate that people tend to largely use their phones for
purposes other than mere narrow economic ones (J. Donner 2009; Horst
and Miller 2006; Sey 2011; Archambault 2011, 2017; Watson and Duffield
2016). Recent research on mobile telephony has sought to develop a
nuanced understanding of the role that mobile technology plays in de-
velopment by noting the range of benefits that users gain from mobile

Introduction [9]
01

phones. Burrell (2014) criticizes the overt importance assigned to mobile

phones as improving access to market information. For instance, the utility
of phones led to lively trade networks among market women in Ghana, in-
stead of them simply acquiring or exchanging information impersonally.
Burrell notes that price is often an important factor in decision making,
but it is just one of several variables such as long-​term relationships with
trade partners and individual attitudes toward risk. Oreglia (2014) discov-
ered unlikely ICT users in rural China, where older women had learned the
basics of mobile phone and computer use. These women pursued their goals
of maintaining relationships and accessing online entertainment after re-
ceiving training from their children, through collaboration and knowledge
sharing with their peers, and through frequent reliance on other people to
perform specific actions. Ling and Horst (2011) conclude that ethnographic
studies do not indicate that mobile phones can bring about revolutionary
changes in daily life, but do show that phones help people adjust to and re-
shape existing activities. The consequences of mobile telephony depend on
how users choose to use them, as well as on the terms that mobile services
are offered to their users. Nevertheless, this does not mean that mobile
technology plays no role in social change or that some changes could be
experienced positively.

RESEARCH FOCI

This study explores and analyzes the incremental and drastic changes
I witnessed in Janta over the course of the appropriation of mobile phones.
Indeed, this research project continued longer than I had planned, because
each visit to the village revealed more unexpected changes relating to new
aspects of mobile phone use. I argue that mobile telephony contributes to
social change and development by helping to diversify the cultural contexts
of social interaction. This book develops a research strategy to understand
the role of new media in development by exploring how different forms of
mediations interact as part of the local hierarchies when a powerful new
medium is appropriated. The book unveils mobile phone use as a multidi-
mensional process with diverse impacts by exploring how media-​saturated
forms of interaction relate to preexisting contexts by either clashing or
merging with them.
Throughout the book, I discuss mobile phone use in relation to ongoing
social changes in rural West Bengal. I thereby answer Postill’s (2012) call to
understand the role of media in social change by undertaking diachronic
ethnography that examines the actual changes instead of describing the

[ 10 ] A Village Goes Mobile

ethnographic present. In rural West Bengal, phones were adopted not by
a stagnant society, but by a changing rural society and culture influenced
by broad processes, such as political reforms, the introduction of new ag-
ricultural methods, economic liberalization policies, and the women’s
movement. These processes are not limited to the village, but are neverthe-
less locally articulated. The evolving features of mobile phones and mobile
phone–​based services are one source of change. Technological change is
not an independent factor that impacts society from the outside; instead,
technology and society are mutual components (MacKenzie and Wajcman
1985, 23). Technologies emerge through choice and negotiations between
social groups; they are designed in the interest of a particular social group
and against the interest of others (Webster 1995). Phone density in rural
India has risen as a result of state efforts to expand the networks and the
competition between service providers and phone manufacturers across
the rural market, which has led to a decrease in handset prices and to tariff
reductions. State and multinational companies play central roles in shaping
the mobile market’s recent expansion into new regions. Governments can
enable the business of private service providers by means of deregulation
and play a role by ensuring that new technologies also benefit the poorest
strata of society. Indeed, the Indian state has successfully contributed
to the growth of the telecommunications industry through government
deregulation and reregulation (Singhal and Rogers 2001; R. Jeffrey and
Doron 2012).
The theoretical framework of this book draws from three, largely sepa-
rate, scholarly discourses: media anthropology, mediatization/​mediation
scholarship, and development research. Since the 1990s, when the critical
school of anthropologists suggested that anthropology should be liberated
from the space mapped by the development encounter, the concept of de-
velopment has had a troubled relationship with anthropology. The work
of Escobar (1995), who views development as the West’s convenient “dis-
covery” of poverty in the Third World to reassert its moral and cultural su-
periority in supposedly postcolonial times, embodies this critical school of
thought. This criticism views development as a monolithic and uniform en-
terprise heavily controlled from the top. As Slater (2013) notes, critiques of
development have tended to mirror the grand narratives of those they cri-
tique. From the viewpoint of the critical school, ICTs could be interpreted
as yet another technological fix and modernist mythology that promise
accelerated growth. I concur with Wajcman (2002), who argues that ICTs
do not offer simple technological fixes for social problems, but are part of
social changes through the ways technologies are socially produced and
used. My understanding of development follows recent anthropological

Introduction [ 11 ]
21

formulations that show that development ideas are partial and heteroge-
neous. Slater (2013) argues that development is about strategic thinking
and acting on the basis of provisional and contingent values and know-
ledge, which all discourses and practices seeking to understand and act on
the future are. I also build on the work of Nussbaum (2000) and Sen (1999),
who take capabilities into consideration, that is, what people are effectively
able to do, instead of merely measuring wealth and poverty levels. I fur-
thermore draw on the work of Sen (1999), who views development ideas
as originating from contemporary local and global debates. Appadurai
(2004, 2013) has availed of Sen’s notions by coining the term the capacity
to aspire. He (2004, 2013) views the limited capacity to form conjectures
and refutations about the future as a hallmark of poverty. Hence, the ca-
pacity to aspire can be regarded as a key element for the empowerment of
the poor.
To frame my aim in anthropological terms, I am interested in how mo-
bile telephony influences and draws from local social, cultural, and polit-
ical processes as cultural practices and enables agency. The anthropology
of media emerged in the 1980s and 1990s during a historical conjuncture
when the reflexive turn challenged preexisting paradigms, thus enabling
new research foci (Ginsburg, Abu-​Lughod, and Larkin 2002). The disci-
pline of anthropology had evolved as the study of non-​Western cultures,
whereas media are identified with Western modernity; consequently,
anthropologists developed an interest in studying media relatively late.
When they turned to studying media, anthropologists explored the topic
as integrated into communities as parts of nations and states and as trans-
national networks. They have often challenged the work of communication
scholars and sociologists by emphasizing the persistence of difference and
the importance of locality (Ginsburg, Abu-​Lughod, and Larkin 2002, 25).
Anthropologists were also latecomers to the study of internet-​based soci-
ality and culture. Miller and Slater’s (2000) study of internet use in Trinidad
was one of the first ethnographic studies of digital media to challenge the
idea that people’s online lives and experiences could be divorced from their
offline lives, as proposed by Rheingold’s (1993) virtual community concept.
Horst and Miller (2006), who carried out the first ethnographic research
on mobile telephony, argue that the use of mobile phones in Jamaica led
to the reinforcement of preexisting cultural practices, instead of helping to
privilege individual projects and interests rather than the norms of society,
as Castells suggests (1996; Castells et al. 2007).
I follow media anthropologists in exploring local meanings and
understandings of mobile telephony. At the same time, I am interested
in exploring the intertwining of change and continuity. Issues of media

[ 12 ] A Village Goes Mobile

and change have been the key focus of the recent scholarly debate on
mediatization/​mediation. Mediatization refers to the interrelation be-
tween the change in media communication and the change in culture and
society (Hepp and Krotz 2014, 3). My endeavor has many aspects of the
mediatization paradigm in common, but there are also crucial differences.
To discuss how this book draws from and contributes to the mediatization
debate, I will introduce this broad and topical scholarly debate in Chapter 2
and build my theoretical approach.

ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH IN RURAL WEST BENGAL

Janta is a multicaste village with 2,441 inhabitants (Census of India

2011a) in the Bankura district of West Bengal in India (Figs. 1.1. and 1.2).
Agriculture is the main livelihood, although it has become less sustainable
in the past decade, and young men increasingly work in cities in other parts
of India. West Bengal, which lies in the eastern part of India, is considered a
middle-​income state in India. Unlike its neighboring states, it is not among
the poorest states of India. Poverty reduction in West Bengal, largely
attributed to land reform, was among the fastest in India between 1970
and 2000 (Planning Commission 2012). West Bengal has not fared as well
as other parts of India in terms of infrastructure and education and health
care, however.
My research materials from this village and its translocal connections
span more than a decade, illuminating diverse spheres of the social life and
providing a unique scope for understanding the role of technology in so-
cial and cultural change. I speak Bengali fluently, which has facilitated my
interaction with the villagers. I made several fieldwork trips to the area to
study the use of mobile telephony, which has made it possible to explore

Figure 1.1: Most of the ethnographic fieldwork was carried out in the village of Janta.
(Photo by author.)

Introduction [ 13 ]
41

Janta, West Bengal

Figure 1.2: Location of Janta in India.

the different phases of mobile technology appropriation, from shared

village phones in 2005 to when the villagers started using smartphones
in 2012. The book is based on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork
including interviews, observation, and survey data on the use of mobile
phones in rural West Bengal: two months in 2005, five months in 2007–​8,
two months in 2010, and two months in 2012–​13.
I gained some of the greatest insights into the role of mobile phone use by
interacting and chatting with the villagers and by noting my observations
in my fieldwork diary. I began my research on mobile telephony in 2005 by

[ 14 ] A Village Goes Mobile

interviewing the first ten phone owners in the village. My initial interview
questions delved into phone owners’ motivations to buy the phone, patterns
of phone use, and the perceived benefits and possible disadvantages of
the phones. I kept my interview questions loosely structured to explore
unanticipated aspects of emerging phone use. I retained the questions
I formulated for my first interviews as part of subsequent interviews but
I added new questions on such themes as phone use for political action,
gender relationships, economic activities, and the use of smartphone
applications in the course of observing new facets of phone use.
Initially, I had little success in eliciting long conversations about mobile
telephony. I consider these difficulties somewhat typical for ethnographic
fieldwork and interviews—​ethnographers usually increase their under-
standing of the cultural universe under study, gradually discovering the key
questions, the themes, and their meanings in the course of the research
process. These initial hurdles also had to do with the newness of phones—​
the ten persons I interviewed in 2005 had purchased their phones just one
or two months before the interviews; consequently, they had not yet gained
much experience with mobile phone use. Moreover, both phone ownership
and use were still rare and hence not a part of everyday life I could easily
observe. To gain a deeper understanding of phone use than was possible
with the help of interviews or observation at the time, I filmed one hun-
dred phone calls from communal phones in the village shops and discussed
these calls with the callers.4 The filming captured phone use as a part of
ongoing social situations, while discussions with the phone users helped
me understand the broader context of calls. In retrospect, the method I de-
veloped resembles sensory ethnography (Pink 2009) in that I used filming
to elicit discussions by asking people to reflect on their largely taken-​for-​
granted everyday activities. In 2007–​2008, I again interviewed all phone
owners of the village. The distribution of interviews reflected mobile phone
ownership in the village at the time of the interviews: of 72 interviews,
60 took place in the Tili caste (upper-​caste) neighborhood. In addition,
I interviewed 2 Tati, 2 Chasa, 6 Brahmin, and 2 Bagdi caste persons. Most
of the people I interviewed were men since men were usually considered
the primary phone owners in a household. However, during each inter-
view, I asked questions about the phone use of other family members.
When other household members and especially women were present, I also
asked questions directly of them. I carried out a few interviews in adjacent
villages, as well as in nearby towns and cities, to specifically understand
translocal political communication. When I returned to the village in 2012,
phone ownership had become ubiquitous, which, for the first time, made
it possible to interview several women and scheduled caste (low-​caste)

Introduction [ 15 ]
61

phone owners. During my fieldwork in 2012–​13, I interviewed 25 women

and 39 men who owned personal phones. Forty-​five of them belonged to a
higher caste and 19 to scheduled castes. In addition, I interviewed 32 polit-
ical activists about political phone use. In total, I interviewed 178 persons
about their mobile phone use.
When I visited the village in 2010, I concentrated on observing mo-
bile phone calls5; however, observation has been a key research method
throughout this project. For instance, interviews alone would not have
made it possible to study subversive phone use. Nevertheless, most calls
were not considered secret or private, and talking to people about their
phone use was relatively easy. However, calling gradually became a taken-​
for-​granted practice and, as such, it was harder to talk about than when
phones were still considered novelties. Phone use becoming a tacit part
of everyday life underlined the importance of observation as a research
method. I not only observed phone conversations, but also discussed the
calls with the callers. Often, I was able to listen to both parties of the phone
calls because people commonly used the phone’s speaker so that they could
share their calls with others present. My long-​term research enabled me to
observe changes in everyday life, and I describe many changes based more
on my observations than on people’s recollections of past events. In ge-
neral, it was not easy for people to reflect on changes in their everyday life
except for the latest transformations they had experienced and witnessed.
As Portelli (2002) has elaborated, oral history accounts, indeed, reflect
people’s perspectives at the time of their reminiscing. Had I not noted my
observations in my fieldwork diary, I would have forgotten many details of
the changing practices I encountered in the village.
The central goal of this study is to understand the cultural aspects of
phone use, so my main research data are qualitative. However, I also
wanted to obtain some understanding of the emerging patterns of phone
use—​such as who calls whom and how often—​through quantitative data
on calling patterns. A research assistant, Samik Pal, conducted survey
interviews in the neighboring villages6 of Janta. Another research assistant,
Rekha Kundu, collected phone diaries of 27 families in the Tili neighbor-
hood in 2011 and conducted a survey of 158 households in Janta in 2010.
Phone diaries offered quantitative data because they list the callers and
their kinship position and classify the topic of calls within a few categories.
My data are representative of the phone use in the village of Janta, and the
survey data helped me to make limited comparisons to nearby villages al-
though the survey sample is not statistically representative of the region.
I do not use a pseudonym for the village because it is generally known in
the region that anthropologists have worked in Janta and because people

[ 16 ] A Village Goes Mobile

from surrounding areas, for whom village identity matters, would recog-
nize the village even if I used a pseudonym. I protect the anonymity of
the villagers I interviewed, to whom I promised confidentiality. However,
I do not hide the identities of all the party representatives and the activists
who spoke to me as officeholders, many of whom are well known in the
village and in the region and would consequently be recognized from their
positions even if I were to hide their identities.

OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK

Chapter 2 develops a theoretical framework to understand the appropri-

ation of mobile telephony in Janta as a myriad of fluctuating contexts,
networks, and spheres of life extending outside the village. I draw from
paradigms and concepts, such as domestication, polymedia, remediation,
and mediatization/​mediation, to clarify my conceptual choices.
Chapter 3 describes and analyzes the incremental process through which
mobile phones became ubiquitous in Janta. First, I provide an analysis
of how different types of mobile technology remediated earlier channels
of communication. Second, I place mobile telephony within the broader
media ecology of the village. I introduce the village as the main setting of
the research and describe the changing patterns of connections and inter-
action among the villagers, as well as between the village and the outside
world. Mobile telephony invigorated and built on these connections that
influence the forms of socialities in the village. Mobile phones were neither
the first nor the only media in the village: radios and televisions preceded
mobile telephony, and by 2012 some villagers had acquired landline phones
and computers. I compare the appropriation of mobile phones to the adop-
tion and use of other media to understand why, of all the available media,
mobile phones became ubiquitous.
Chapter 4 gives a nuanced picture of the role of mobile phones in eco-
nomic activities in Janta village. Rather than juxtaposing economic and
social uses, it explores them in tandem. How are phones used instrumen-
tally and socially, and how do these different usages mesh and interrelate?
I delve into the interconnections between phone use for logistical purposes
within different symbolic domains, including the economic uses of phones,
as well as the micromanagement of kinship relations. How are phones used
within the various branches of rural economy and livelihoods as well as
for health care? And how does the ability of phones to increase logistical
efficiency influence social relationships? Chapter 4 analyzes how the social
production of mobile technology, as part of the economic liberalization and

Introduction [ 17 ]
81

market operations, conditions mobile telephony. I illustrate how—​with

the help of mobile telephony—​the enhancement of logistical efficiency
relates to development as economic growth and increased well-​being: the
small reductions in time and money required to run errands that phones
effect do add up.
The market rationality and cost-​efficiency that phones enable do not,
as such, guarantee economic growth and development. The level of com-
petition, the market’s size and growth rate, and government regulation, in
addition to the ability to communicate, crucially influence the profitability
of small-​scale businesses. Mobile phones have been more instrumental in
increasing the number of economic activities in Janta and the surrounding
region than in helping individual entrepreneurs earn better incomes. Many
opportunities have been missed to reap developmental profits from mobile
telephony as a result of the persistent idea that mobile telephony belongs
to the market realm; phones are rarely used to deliver public services in
India, although mobile applications could help improve the efficiency of,
for instance, public health care.
Mobile phones are widely used to increase the logistical efficiency of
the economy and social relationships, which influences culture in specific
ways. I introduce the concept of social logistics as a tool to develop our
understanding of the relationship among technology, culture, and social
structure. The term social logistics highlights that logistics is inevitably
socially mediated and not confined to economic life as separate from other
domains of culture and society. Janta villagers, like villagers in diverse
places such as Tanzania, Egypt, South Africa, Bangladesh, and Thailand,
mention the same mobile phone benefits: the ability to call for help, to
save time, and to find market information (Bayes, von Braun, and Akhter
1999; Bruns, Lamar, and Tiam-​Tong 1996; Coyle 2005; Samuel, Shah, and
Hadingham 2005; J. Donner 2006; Overå 2006; Abraham 2007; Jensen
2007; Aker 2008; Jagun, Heeks, and Whalley 2008; Frempong 2009;
Waverman, Meschi, and Fuss 2005). In all these places, phones are asso-
ciated with a form of social logistics characterized by the increased multi-
plicity of social contacts and the greater efficiency of market relationships.
However, in common with other ethnographies on the appropriation of
ICTs (Horst and Miller 2006; Miller and Slater 2000), I found that the use
of phones in rural West Bengal has accentuated kinship ties and village
solidarity. I argue that—​like other ICTs—​mobile phones mediate logis-
tical patterns that are responsive to market demands. These technologies
mediate cultural practices by selectively amplifying the ongoing processes
of cultural change, thus bringing about the homogenization of social
logistics.

[ 18 ] A Village Goes Mobile

 The remaining chapters demonstrate how mobile technology encourages
heterogeneity and the contest of meaning by mediating discourse and so-
cial interaction. Chapter 5 examines how mobile phones mediate gender
and kinship relationships. I illustrate the ways in which the physical quali-
ties of phones help strengthen the multiplicity of discourses by mediating
relationships. First, they enable translocal communication, helping callers
to transgress social boundaries. Women benefit because phones have
enabled the reconstruction of the meaning of the home and the outside
world. Second, phones give callers new possibilities to choose the con-
text for their phone calls and speech and thereby enable engagement in
critical and unconventional discourses. Instead of drastic improvements
or changes, for instance, in economic power relationships, the positive
impacts of women’s phone use appear subtle and ambiguous: most calls
are about the slight redefinition of home boundaries. Mobile telephony
amplifies dominant discourses in that calling patterns are gendered, but by
helping to blur cultural boundaries and providing unconventional speech
contexts, it also creates spaces for agency and critical discourse.
Chapter 6 continues to explore how mobile phones facilitate the multi-
plicity of discourses and social contexts with a shift in focus to the sphere
of politics. As media reports on political movements in various locations
have shown, mobile technology can be a powerful political instrument. This
chapter examines how political activists use mobile phones for their daily
political work. I seek ways to recognize the disruptive and political poten-
tial of mobile technology without ignoring its social and cultural rooted-
ness. I illustrate how riots and protests relate to the increase in translocal
communication that phones enable. I also demonstrate how the political
use of mobile technology for extraordinary events is grounded in the so-
cial and political processes of ordinary, everyday life and draws from the
local understanding of politics by emphasizing certain of its aspects. This
chapter confirms the cultural continuity amid the increase in translocal
relationships, but it also pinpoints how cultures harbor conflicts and alter-
native discourses, which translocal communication helps amplify with the
help of phones.
The village of Janta offers a microcosmos to explore how the appropria-
tion of widely accessible information technology relates to local hierarchies
and inequality. Throughout the book, I explore mobile phone use in rela-
tion to the intersecting class, caste, and kinship hierarchies in the village.
Chapter 7 focuses on the question of whether internet-​ready smartphones
disrupt local hierarchies. I illustrate how phones mediate intersectionality
in unanticipated ways, although mobile phone use hardly constitutes a
revolution. Phones offer opportunities and technical affordances that

Introduction [ 19 ]
02

challenge hierarchies. Contrary to their hierarchical position, young wives

and children may become the phone-​use experts in their families. As a re-
sult of the market being flooded with cheap Chinese smartphones, low-​
income people in the village have been able to acquire smartphones and
find that the ownership of such high-​tech objects is empowering. The wide-
spread ideology, according to which not being connected is a sign of ex-
clusion from the global currents and development, has made bridging the
digital divide a significant symbolic act.
However, the significant, life-​altering choices offered by the use of mo-
bile phones are mainly available to the wealthier and well-​educated section
of the village. Wealthy men use their phones for their businesses to increase
earnings. College-​educated men and women can use search engines to
access useful textual information on the internet by means of their phones.
Because of the high cost of calls, low-​income people find smartphones
more useful for listening to music and watching movies than for daily
calls. Less-​educated working-​class men and women, as well as small-​scale
farmers, download internet content on their phones’ memory chips; they
then use this content to restructure their leisure and work activities. Those
who are able to use smartphones independently have more scope to choose
the contexts of their phone calls because they do not need help with their
phones. With smartphones increasingly replacing simple phones meant for
making and receiving calls, education and wealth will benefit phone users
more than caste and gender will; consequently, the way smartphones are
used accentuates class and educational differences.
My aim is to understand how mobile telephony contributes to social
change to understand the role that mobile phones play in development and
power issues. In addition to summarizing my key findings and theoretical
arguments, the concluding Chapter 8 assesses the role of mobile telephony
in development by engaging with the anthropology of development.
Instead of offering simple technological fixes for social problems, ICTs are
part of diverse social change paths through the ways in which technologies
are socially produced and used. Ethnographic research on the multiple uses
and influences of ICTs can, in turn, help create development interventions
and policies that would account for the multiplicity of actors and ongoing
social processes.

NOTES

1. See Tenhunen (2009).

2. De Sola Pool (1977) is a notable exception.

[ 20 ] A Village Goes Mobile

3. The scholarly discussion on the developmental effects of mobile telephony is
expanding rapidly, and my aim here is to point out the key issues rather than
to give an exhaustive account of the entire debate. H. Donner (2008a) and the
World Bank (2012) provide extensive overviews of the discussion.
4. I also explained to each caller the purpose of my filming and asked for
permission. Similarly, I explained the purpose of my research to the people
I interviewed and observed and asked for their permission. It helped to explain
that I had carried out ethnographic research in the village since 1999 and
I circulated some of the publications among the few people who could read the
English-​language texts.
5. Filmmaker Mirja Metsola filmed these calls as part of her film project, and I used
the filmed calls for my research.
6. Survey questions gathered information on mobile phone usage, usage
motivations, attitudes toward mobile phones, and other media access and
usage information. The survey covered 117 respondents from the following
villages: Dhengasole, Satmouli, Ghugimura, Lego, Chatramore, Parairy,
Chandabila, and Pamua. Of the respondents, 79 percent were men and 21 percent
were women; 69 percent belonged to higher-​caste groups and 31 percent to
lower-​caste groups.

Introduction [ 21 ]
2

CHAPTER 2

Theorizing Phone Use Contexts

and Mediation

T his book explores the appropriation of mobile telephony within myriad

fluctuating contexts, including networks and spheres of life, which ex-
tend outside the village in rural West Bengal. In exploring mobile phone
use in differing contexts, I draw from various paradigms that have emerged
in technology studies, anthropology, and communication studies. I next
discuss the approaches that underpin this study, clarifying my conceptual
choices in relation to them.

DOMESTICATION: TECHNOLOGY USE IN THE HOME

The domestication paradigm has been a popular choice as a theoretical

framework to understand mobile phone use (Bolin 2010; N. Green and
Haddon 2009; Haddon 2003, 2011; Ling 2004; Lipset 2013, to mention
just a few). With this paradigm, I share my interest in exploring how tech-
nology is adapted to everyday life and how it contributes to changes in
everyday life through negotiation and social interaction. The domestica-
tion paradigm1 was developed to gain an understanding of how people ap-
propriate technology by examining the way artifacts are used, but also the
way they are adapted in use and subsequently interpreted (Mackay and
Gillespie 1992). Appropriation refers to negotiations that lead to the ac-
quisition of technologies: the placing of technologies in a home (incorpo-
ration), incorporating their use as part of routines (objectification), and
incorporating technologies as part of users’ identities (conversion). By
taking into account how users position technology in their homes and
make it useful and meaningful as part of a sequential process, the domes-
tication paradigm pertinently demonstrates that technology use must be
studied in relation to the contexts of use. Nevertheless, I found the domes-
tication concept of limited use for analyzing the multiplicity and fluidity of
the mobile phone uses I encountered in the village.
The domestication paradigm was developed to provide a framework for
thinking about ICTs in the home and among the interacting household
members in Western countries (Haddon 2001). Based on the Western notion
of the domestic, the domestication concept did not adequately help me un-
derstand the use of technology in the broad domain of Janta households—​
Chapter 3 demonstrates that most households in Janta are not private or
clearly separated from each other. Moreover, as Haddon (2001) points out,
it was always clear that ICTs are not used only at home—​schools, com-
puter clubs, and gaming arcades were already significant arenas of ICT use
in Western countries in the 1980s. Lie and Sørensen (1996) note the need
to apply the domestication concept to look beyond the home, and sev-
eral studies have applied the domestication approach to contexts outside
homes, such as computer courses (Hynes and Rommes 2006), universities
(Koskinen 2012), and mobile settings (Bolin 2010; N. Green and Haddon
2009; Haddon 2003, 2011; Ling 2004). Applying the domestication para-
digm to a variety of contexts other than the home does not, however, solve
the problem of how to understand the multiplicity of new media contexts.
Portable devices, like smartphones, can be used in various contexts to ex-
tend social networks across diverse social spheres, whereas the domestica-
tion paradigm tends to highlight one medium within one context of use.

REMEDIATION: EMERGENCE OF MEDIA

FROM CULTURAL CONTEXTS

As Chapter 3 will illustrate, the village experienced several types of phone

technologies within a short time. Technologies were adopted and then
discarded as new options became available, raising the question of how
technologies, which domestication theory suggests have become part
of their owner’s identity, can be so easily abandoned. Sørensen (1994)
suggests that this type of fluidity in technology use can be addressed as
re-​domestication, or de-​domestication, in the domestication paradigm.
However, I want to address not only how the villagers advanced from
using one technology to another, but also the changes in user preferences
and use contexts, as well as their interconnections. I thus make use of

T h e or i z i n g P h o n e U s e C o n t e x t s a n d M e di at i o n [ 23 ]
42

the remediation and mediation concepts. Bolter and Grusin (1998) de-
veloped the remediation concept to refer to a process in which each act
of mediation depends on other acts of mediation, with media constantly
commenting on, reproducing, and replacing one another. These authors
demonstrate how new visual media achieve a cultural significance by
rivaling and refashioning earlier media, such as perspective painting, pho-
tography, film, and television. Furthermore, they maintain that an ever-​
elusive attempt to generate communication technologies that erase their
presence from the viewer and create a virtual reality that is indistinguish-
able from the reality it purports to represent characterizes the history of
media in the West. To demonstrate their argument, Bolter and Grusin pro-
vide a broad analysis of Western culture; they discuss the way different
media forms have refashioned one another across the centuries, from the
Renaissance until the coming of modernism. Photography remediated
painting, film remediated stage productions and photography, and televi-
sion remediated film, vaudeville, and radio. While the authors acknowledge
that media refashion one another in socially shaped contexts, they do not
analyze ethnographic data or cases to explore how new media contexts are
created socially. Instead, they briefly analyze various media—​computer
games, digital photography, photorealistic graphics, digital art, film, televi-
sion, virtual reality, and the internet—​mainly using secondary data.
I share Bolter and Grusin’s (1998) assumption that media emerge from
cultural contexts and I explore how new media contributes to an increase in
the heterogeneity of cultural contexts. I explore the social creation of media
contexts by analyzing how people take advantage of new media by creating
novel communication contexts. Chapter 3 draws directly from Bolter and
Grusin’s remediation concept by exploring how people moved from one
technology and mode of communication to another. However, in the village
the first telephones, namely shared phones, did not remediate prior com-
munication technology; instead, the shared phones remediated the prior
practice of delivering other people’s news through visiting. I therefore ex-
tend the concept of remediation to analyze this continuity between calling
and face-​to-​face communication as one communication context among
many (see “Mediation and Interdependency between Information and
Communication Technology–​Based and Face-​to-​Face Communication”).
My understanding of remediation draws from Gershon (2017), who argues
that remediation is fundamentally about coordinating people’s space-​
and time-​bound experiences of media—​it is about people relating media
ideologies and practices associated with a recently introduced medium with
those of the older media. This interpretation of the concept highlights how
remediation is not about changing technologies per se, but about people’s

[ 24 ] A Village Goes Mobile

ideas and practices associated with communication via different channels.
My use of the term mediation is also not a complete departure from Bolter
and Grusin’s (1998) definition of remediation—​for instance, they included
theatre in their list of remediated forms of communication. While the sub-
sequent chapters also draw from Bolter and Grusin, they, nevertheless,
mark a departure from the authors’ concept because I explore how people
use new media to refashion communication contexts.

CONTEXTS IN MEDIA-​S ATURATED ENVIRONMENTS

The flourishing of handheld devices and internet-​based social media has

made the many contexts of media use worldwide obvious. New concepts
have been developed to tackle this new multiplicity of mediated contexts
in media-​saturated environments. Based on her research on the media
use of American college students, Gershon (2010) developed the notion
of media ideology to examine how people choose an appropriate medium
for their message. She argues that the medium shapes the message because
people have media ideologies that shape the ways they think about and
use different media, while media ideologies about one medium are always
affected by the ideologies people have about other media. Gershon also
acknowledges that people together devise how to use different media in so-
cially appropriate ways, a process she calls an idiom of practice. Madianou
and Miller (2012) introduced the polymedia concept to address similar
issues. Based on their research on new media use between migrant Filipino
mothers and their children who remain in the Philippines, they developed
the term polymedia to refer to new media as an emerging polymedia en-
vironment in which users employ new media as a communicative envi-
ronment of affordances, with the choice of medium depending on social,
emotional, and moral concerns. In other words, people choose certain
means of communication not only because it is convenient or available, but
also because it conveys a message. Madianou and Miller acknowledge that
the polymedia concept draws from scholars who have advanced the media
ecology concept to pinpoint that the technical, social, and cultural nature of
new media is not separable (Horst, Herr-​Stephenson, and Robinson 2010;
Ito et al. 2010; Slater and Tacchi 2004). The difference between the two
concepts is that, in comparison to the media ecology concept, the notion of
polymedia underlines the unprecedented plurality and proliferation of new
media: mobile phones, voice over internet protocol calls over the internet,
e-​mail, a variety of social media, web cams, etc. (Madianou and Miller
2012). Madianou and Miller point out that concepts such as polymedia

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62

and media ecology are relevant for environments in which the cost of a
wide variety of media use is low once users have obtained the hardware
and paid for the connection. In the Philippines, migrants and their families
tend to have both the motivation to communicate through new media and
access to new media as a result of overseas earnings. Yet, in large parts of
the Philippines, access to new media continues to be low; consequently,
Madianou and Miller describe polymedia as an emergent condition even
within their fieldwork sites—​for instance, mothers and children were usu-
ally not equally immersed in the polymedia environment.
Despite the worldwide triumph of mobile telephony, polymedia is not
the prevailing condition in much of the developing world. This was also
true of rural West Bengal during my fieldwork. Subsequent chapters of this
book reveal how most people must use their phones sparingly because of
the relatively high cost of communication. Consequently, I seek to under-
stand the role of mobile telephony in an environment that is not media sat-
urated. Accordingly, I develop the mediation concept to examine the role of
new media in an environment in which media use remains tangential as a
result of poverty, the high costs of communication, and illiteracy.

MEDIATIZATION PARADIGM

Two terms—​mediatization and mediation—​have been used to address the

general effects of media on social organization. I use the notion of media-
tion instead of mediatization because my focus is on a great variety of so-
cial and communicative contexts and their changes within a shorter time
frame, whereas mediatization commonly refers to long-​term changes by
which the society becomes dependent on the media. Since the two terms
are closely related, I next discuss the mediatization debate to clarify my un-
derstanding and use of the mediation concept. Couldry (2012, 134) notes
that mediatization is the prevalent term in Germany and in Scandinavian
countries, and mediation is more typical in English-​and Spanish-​speaking
countries. Couldry (2008) initially preferred the term mediation developed
by Silverstone (2002), which he saw as being the more flexible of the two
terms. Silverstone sees mediation as referring to open-​ended and dialec-
tical social transformations, in which institutionalized communication
media are involved in the circulation of social life symbols. He argues that,
instead of replacing the world of lived experience, media are dialectically
engaged with it, and one cannot inquire into one without simultaneously
inquiring into the other. However, Couldry (2012) subsequently switched
to the term mediatization because he finds it more unambiguous than

[ 26 ] A Village Goes Mobile

mediation, which carries multiple meanings (such as dispute resolution).
Many scholars (e.g., Hepp and Krotz 2014; Hjarvard 2008) ascribe different
meanings to the two concepts—​mediatization is used to refer to the study
of media-​related long-​term changes, whereas mediation is defined as the
use of any medium to achieve communication.
The main focus of the mediatization paradigm is change—​it refers to
the interrelation between the change in media communication and the
change in culture and society (Hepp and Krotz 2014, 3). In comparison to
communication scholarship, which focuses on the contents or effects of
a single medium, the mediatization notion offers a perspective to under-
stand changing media as a part of social and cultural processes. This topical
debate can be traced back to 1930s Germany, where Manheim (1933) first
used the term mediatization to analyze the changes brought about by mass
communication. The concept only reemerged in the 1980s and 1990s and
developed into a paradigm during the 2000s and 2010s. The mediatization
paradigm’s idea of culture and society as influenced by the respective
leading media of each historical phase resonates with the communication
scholarship of the 1950s, namely the medium theory such as that of Innis
(1950) and McLuhan (1994). J. B. Thompson (1995) introduced the term
the mediazation of culture to refer to the transformation that the onset of
printing technology brought about from the late fifteenth century onward.
Most contemporary mediatization scholars, however, use the concept to ex-
amine modern media-​saturated societies, thereby equating mediatization
with individualization, modernization, and globalization processes and as
connected to modern media, print, radio, film and television, and digital
media (Krotz 2007; Lundby 2009; Hepp 2013).

THE CONTESTED NOTION OF MEDIA LOGIC

Hjarvard’s (2008, 2011) influential understanding of mediatization builds

crucially on the idea of media logic, a term originally coined by Altheide
and Snow (1979), who defined media logic as the influence of major
media’s form and logic on people’s lives. Criticizing mass communication
research for its overwhelming focus on media contents and their effects
on audiences, Altheid and Snow (9) argue that forms of communication
change the way people interpret social life. In a similar vein, Hjarvard
(2008) views the mediatization of society as a long-​term social and cul-
tural process through which the society becomes increasingly dependent
on the media and their logic. Hjarvard (2011, 123) denies viewing media
logic as singular or uniform; instead, he argues that media logic comprises

T h e or i z i n g P h o n e U s e C o n t e x t s a n d M e di at i o n [ 27 ]
82

the various modalities through which the media enable, limit, and struc-
ture human communication and action. He further describes media logic
as “the institutional, aesthetic and technological modus operandi of the
media, including the ways in which media distribute material and symbolic
resources and operate with the help of formal and informal rules” (123).
Hjarvard’s (2011) concept of mediatization is well illustrated by his work
on the mediatization of religion in Nordic countries. Drawing on secondary
data and survey research, he argues that the media have become an impor-
tant source of information about religious issues. Consequently, religious
information and experiences are molded according to the demands of pop-
ular media genres, while the media use religious symbols, practices, and
beliefs when narrating stories about secular and sacred issues. Moreover,
Hjarvard notes that the media have taken over many of the cultural
and social functions of institutionalized religions by providing spiritual
guidance, moral orientation, ritual passages, and a sense of community
and belonging. For Hjarvard, the mediatized religion in Nordic countries
exemplifies mediatization as a unilateral process of the diffusion of media
logic to traditionally nonmediated social spheres. Media become inte-
grated into the operations of other social institutions, while they also ac-
quire the status of social institutions in their own right. Hjarvard views
media as an institution on par with other major societal institutions, and
his analytical focus is on the relationships between institutions. He also
presents mediatization as equal to high modernity’s other significant social
and cultural transformative processes, such as individualization, urbani-
zation, globalization, and secularization. He maintains that mediatization
is highly interdependent with these processes, because, for instance, the
rise and spread of communication media have enabled the globalization of
culture and commerce. At the same time, globalization has influenced the
ways through which media are produced, distributed, and used.
The concept of media logic has been mostly applied to examine mass
media’s role in social change in Western countries. The worldwide prolif-
eration of new media has, in turn, made evident the problems with the
media logic idea. As Couldry (2008, 2012) argues, the influence of media is
too heterogeneous to be reduced to a single media logic. Even if each me-
dium does have its own media logic, which Hjarvard (2011) proposes, this
still raises the question whether the same media could exert the same logic
regardless of their social and cultural contexts. Morgan (2011) argues that,
in its most extreme form, mediatization offers a blunt account of historical
change during which media production unilaterally transforms ancient so-
cial institutions, such as religion, education, politics, and entertainment,
into itself by replacing their mode of social relations with mediated forms

[ 28 ] A Village Goes Mobile

of connectivity. Morgan’s analysis of eighteenth-​century British evangel-
ical print culture reveals a range of factors and agents that contributed to
change in religion during an era when print media exploded and emerged
around the globe. Morgan argues that print media were not an autono-
mous social force that changed a passive religion; instead, many factors
and agents influenced changes as parts of a network. Similarly, Deacon
and Stanyer (2014, 1033) maintain that mediatization scholars overem-
phasize the role of the media as agents of change. Madianou and Miller’s
(2012) concept of polymedia, in turn, has demonstrated that instead of
succumbing to media logic, people make active choices to produce desired
meanings in different contexts.

CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON MEDIATIZATION

Critical debate (e.g., Couldry 2008, 2012; Lundby 2009; Hepp 2013) on the
notion of media logic and the institutional theory of mediatization has
led to the emergence of a cultural perspective on mediatization (Couldry
2008; Hepp, Hjarvard, and Lundby 2010; Hjarvard and Petersen 2013;
Martín-​Barbero 1993; Krotz 2007), which emphasizes flexibility. Krotz
(2007) defines mediatization not as a specific process, but as a metaprocess
grounded in the modification of communication as the basic practice of
how people construct their social and cultural world. Nevertheless, Krotz
identifies mediatization with a structural shift comparable to globalization
and individualization—​the increasing involvement of media in all spheres
of life and the social construction of everyday life, society, and culture as
a whole. Hjarvard (2008, 2011), who initially developed the institutional
perspective on mediatization, has also drawn closer to the cultural perspec-
tive: Hjarvard and Petersen (2013) argue that mediatization is not a linear
process through which the media impose their logic on the cultural realm;
instead, it is contextual and depends on the general social pressures toward
mediatization, as well as on the possibilities to use media for various cul-
tural purposes. Although the integration of media into cultural practices
evokes cultural change, the outcome is dependent on the contexts in
question (Hjarvard and Petersen 2013). In a similar vein, Hepp, Hjarvard,
and Lundby (2010) argue that it is important to capture the diversity of
mediatization, instead of assuming a single line of development. These
authors, nevertheless, identify mediatization with the media dominance
in late modern societies and argue that the globalization and individuali-
zation entail overall processes at work, although the outcomes depend on
particular social and cultural contexts.

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03

In underlining the need to take cultural contexts into account, the cul-
tural perspective on mediatization shares an interest in exploring media
use holistically as part of social and cultural contexts with media an-
thropology and ethnography. However, as Hepp, Hjarvard, and Lundby
(2015) note, empirical work rooted in the mediatization concept remains
scarce. When empirical examples are used to demonstrate mediatization,
the choice of concepts often reflects that it has mainly been discussed in
terms of cases from Western countries (Hepp and Krotz 2014; Hepp 2013;
Hjarvard 2013; Hjarvard, Lundby, and Hepp 2010; Lundby 2014). Despite
development toward greater flexibility to account for the multiplicity of
cultural and social contexts, mediatization scholars discuss social changes
through Western-​based concepts, such as individualization, secularization,
and modernization.
These concepts tend to exclude local understandings of cultural domains
and concepts of person in most parts of the Global South where the pro-
liferation of new media has contributed to social dynamism during recent
decades. Similar to a large body of ethnographic research, cultural studies,
and postcolonial scholarship2 that has explored how processes emanating
from the West influence the Global South but, yet, take local forms, this
book sustains a critical voice regarding the common assumptions about the
spread of new media.

MEDIATION AND INTERDEPENDENCY BETWEEN INFORMATION

AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY–​B ASED AND
FACE-​T O-​F ACE COMMUNICATION

Like much of the mediatization scholarship I have discussed, I explore how

mobile phone use relates to social spheres, but instead of preconceived in-
stitutional notions, I use ethnographic data to examine the local meanings
of social spheres and their ongoing changes. In contrast to mediatization
scholarship, which focuses on long-​term changes, I explore a shorter time
frame based on ethnographic fieldwork. As a family of methods that entails
direct and sustained interaction with people, ethnography has great poten-
tial for developing an understanding of media use, particularly as part of so-
cial and cultural contexts. Unlike mere textual analysis of media contents,
ethnography helps unveil both tacit and explicit meanings of action and
mediated communication in their contexts.
My approach is similar to that of Baldassar et al. (2016), who argue that
instead of treating face-​to-​face/​physical and ICT-​based forms of commu-
nication and co-​presence as mutually exclusive, or even as competition,

[ 30 ] A Village Goes Mobile

it is more fruitful to examine the way the two forms of communication
interrelate with each other. Andersen (2013) similarly uses the media-
tion concept to explain why mobile phones have become objects of broad
moral concern in Papua New Guinea. She argues that morally charged
stories about phone friends make the central problem that mobile phone
use generates in Papua New Guinea explicit: how to maintain morally ap-
propriate forms of exchange in a context where spatiotemporal relations
have been radically distorted and in which the participants’ identity can
easily be hidden. Archambault (2017) demonstrates how mobile commu-
nication has opened virtual and discursive spaces within which illicit ac-
tivities can be pursued with some degree of discretion among the youth
in Mozambique. In a similar vein, Jorgensen (2014) explains the popu-
larity of phones in Papua New Guinea by noting that phones have enabled
discursive intimacy outside everyday surveillance and without the me-
diation of relatives or third parties. Baldassar et al. (2016) build on the
concept of co-​presence (Licoppe 2004; Ling 2008) to examine mediated
strategies of co-​presence. Mobile phones and digital media have extended
social fields to include those who are physically out of reach and have pro-
vided the means to maintain a symbolic proximity that promotes a sense
of presence while absent.
I build on the view endorsed by anthropologists (Mazzarella 2004;
Boellstorff 2008; Horst and Miller 2012): mediation need not only be
assigned to media technologies, because it can be regarded as a general
condition of social life. I view all interactions as mediated in the sense
that their contexts always influence interaction and speech. As Horst and
Miller (2012) argue, there is no pure human immediacy, but all interaction
is as culturally inflected as digitally mediated communication. People com-
monly respond effortlessly to changes in contexts: they have fairly clear
ideas of what can be expressed, how, and in whose presence. The capacity
for monitoring speech contexts is an essential part of social competence
(Hymes 1974). Contexts, in turn, comprise not only physical surroundings,
but also what people do, when, and where (Cole, Engestrom, and Vasquez
1997, 22). As conversations, mobile phone calls represent speech contexts
but they are also more than just dyadic exchanges between two individuals.
To speak is to take up a position in a social field in which positions are de-
fined relative to one another in constant flux (Hanks 1996, 201, 211). In
other words, even if the ability to communicate translocally over the phone
creates conditions for specific open-​endedness and ambiguity in com-
parison to face-​to-​face communication, two persons conversing over the
phone are not oblivious about the more far-​reaching reception of their dis-
course by multiple publics. Hence, mobile phone–​enabled speech contexts

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23

emerge as part of relational and affective dimensions of social life. Indeed,

it is the way phone-​enabled discussions relate with preexisting social and
cultural contexts that determines their impacts.
I furthermore follow Hanks (1996) by analyzing speech contexts as a
part of routine social perceptions and actions. The question is therefore
not how unmediated culture becomes mediated through new media, but
how different forms of mediations interact when a powerful new medium
is appropriated. The interconnections between ICT-​based communication
and face-​to-​face contexts are more conspicuous in places like Janta, where
face-​to-​face communication plays a more prominent role in comparison
to media-​saturated environments. I analyze how phones help link speech
contexts and give callers new possibilities to choose and create the context
for their speech and to engage in critical and unconventional discourses
and action. I relate mobile communication to diverse social contexts,
analyzing the relationship of mobile phone–​mediated conversations with
other speech contexts and media—​in this sense, this book is not a study of
a single medium.

THE MATERIALITY OF MEDIA IN OPEN-​E NDED

CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Although the cultural perspective on mediatization has challenged the idea

of media logic, media technologies still have material attributes that influ-
ence their use. Unlike Grint and Woolgar’s (1997) suggestion, technologies
are not open texts that can be written and read in any way. For instance,
mobile phones and especially smartphones enable many activities besides
communication, but there are several actions that they simply do not
afford, such as traveling. I concur with Hutchby (2001), who proposed a
reconciliation between constructivism and realism using Gibson’s (1979)
theory of affordances. Gibson, a scholar of the psychology of perception,
developed the affordance concept to refer to how technologies offer cer-
tain possibilities for action. Hutchby (2001) argues that for the affordances
to materialize, users must perceive them. For Hutchby, affordances are
functional and relational aspects that frame, but do not determine, the
possibilities for action in relation to an object. He points out that materi-
ality need be contemplated not only in physical terms, but also as having a
materiality affecting the distribution of interactional space or navigation.
Hutchby’s notion makes it possible to make sense of how technologies
can be understood as artifacts that may be both shaped by and shape the
practices humans use in interaction.

[ 32 ] A Village Goes Mobile

 I account for the materiality of mobile telephony, which I view as crucially
influenced by the social construction of mobile telephony. The history of
the mobile phone is complex—​mobile phones contain other technologies,
the antecedents of which stretch back nearly a century (N. Green and
Haddon 2009, 18–​19). Nevertheless, motivation to improve logistics and
the ability to navigate with the help of phones formed a strong undercur-
rent in the development of wireless communication technology. Marconi
developed his pioneering radio technology innovations for maritime com-
munication in the 1900s, and the Detroit Police Department led the way in
land mobile use in 1921 (Goggin 2006, 24–​25). The first portable radiotel-
ephone was launched in 1943 for American forces (25). Landline phones
were initially developed and marketed for business purposes in America
(Fischer 1992). Although the industries were unable to envision the role
phones could play for social purposes, phones were gradually adopted for
social uses in homes in the 1920s. The purposes for which wireless com-
munication was developed by no means cover their actual uses; neverthe-
less, mobile telephony has been put to logistical uses worldwide. Chapter 4
develops an understanding of how the cultural specificity of mobile phone
appropriation relates to technologies’ affordances, which enable logistical
efficiency. I take into account both the affordances and the social practices,
and thereby my approach closely relates with recent theories of practice.
Recent theories of practice (Schatzki, Knorr-​Cetina, and von Savigny
2001; Reckwitz 2002; Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012; Pickering
1995) have much in common with the affordances paradigm in that they
take the materiality of technology into consideration, as well as their role in
social change. Building on Schatzki, Knorr-​Cetina, and von Savigny (2001)
and Reckwitz (2002), Shove, Pantzar, and Watson (2012) use the notion
of practice to examine how the perception of materiality relates with eve-
ryday life. They view practices as comprising materials, competences, and
meanings, arguing that practices emerge, persist, shift, and disappear
when connections between these types of elements are made, sustained, or
broken. Shove, Pantzar, and Watson differentiate their approach in terms
of theory and method from those who undertake detailed ethnographies
of situated practice. Such ethnographies as Suchman’s (1987) study on
the use of photocopiers and Orr’s (1996) work on the training of service
technicians have radically reformed the understanding of technology use.
Shove, Pantzar, and Watson (2012), however, state that they are interested
in the trajectories of practices-​as-​entities instead of the context-​specific
processes; consequently, they do not use detailed ethnographic research
at specific locations. However, ethnographies that focus on one context by
no means exhaust the scope of ethnographic research—​in anthropology

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43

the interest in looking at larger trajectories of everyday life is usually la-

beled holism, which has been the hallmark of ethnographic fieldwork
since its beginning. Like Shove, Pantzar, and Watson, I am interested in
larger trajectories of everyday life, but unlike them, I use the ethnographic
method to analyze interrelated symbolic contexts as well as how people are
able to reconstruct and change them.
Moreover, contrary to these authors’ discussion on the social life of leisure
practices, such as Nordic walking and snowboarding, my focus on practices
in rural India underlines the issues of inequality and local understandings
of hierarchies. In a social field, actors are not situated symmetrically vis-​à-​
vis an innovation. As De Sardan (2005) argues, the introduction of an in-
novation is likely to serve the interests of some people, while damaging the
interests of others. A number of hierarchies plague South Asian societies to
the extent that hierarchy was long considered a defining feature of South
Asian sociability (Dumont 1970). Although this stress on hierarchy and
its ubiquitousness have prevented academics from perceiving alternative
South Asian realities (see, e.g., Mencher 1975; Appadurai 1986; Srinivas
1989; Chatterjee 1993; D. Gupta 2000), local hierarchies continue to be a
defining feature of life in the village of Janta. Chapter 3 introduces the
concept of caste as well as the caste structure of Janta, and throughout this
book, I explore how the appropriation of mobile telephony relates to local
hierarchies by applying the concept of intersectionality.
As Wallis (2013), who pioneered in applying an intersectional frame-
work to studying mobile telephony, demonstrates, the concept of
intersectionality brings attention to how multiple axes of identity and
modes of power relate to mobile phone use. Based on her study of young mi-
grant women, Wallis used the concept of intersectionality to theorize how
social constructions of gender-​, class-​, age-​, and place-​based identities pro-
duce particular engagements with mobile technologies that, in turn, repro-
duce and restructure these identities. What makes my study distinct from
Wallis’s approach is that whereas Wallis explored urban female laborers
whose lives were largely structured by the demands of their workplaces,
my focus is on a rural community with its distinct social structure—​my
study is not limited to one group such as young women; instead, I examine
the dynamics of intersectionalities within a community.
My focus on local hierarchies helps analyze both power issues and de-
velopment: Who benefits from mobile telephony and how does the ap-
propriation of phones relate to power issues? Consequently, my approach
departs from mediatization studies in that I explore how mediation relates
to development and power issues. Slater (2013) points out that scholar-
ship has tended to view new media use in Western countries as an identity

[ 34 ] A Village Goes Mobile

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Title: Rose, Blanche, and Violet, Volume 2 (of 3)

Author: George Henry Lewes

Release date: January 11, 2024 [eBook #72681]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Smith, Elder and Co, 1848

Credits: Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROSE,

BLANCHE, AND VIOLET, VOLUME 2 (OF 3) ***
 ROSE, BLANCHE,

AND

VIOLET.

BY

G. H. LEWES, ESQ.
AUTHOR OF "RANTHORPE,"
"BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY," ETC. ETC.

Il n'y a point de vertu proprement dite, sans victoire sur

nous-mêmes, et tout ce qui ne nous coûte rien, ne vaut rien.

DE MAISTRE.
 IN THREE VOLUMES.

VOL. II.

LONDON:
SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, CORNHILL.
——
1848.

London:
Printed by STEWART and MURRAY,
Old Bailey.

CONTENTS.

——

BOOK II.—(Continued.)

CHAPTER

XXI.—The Elopement Delayed

XXII.—How they went to London
XXIII.—Cecil's Jealousy
XXIV.—The Denouement

BOOK III.
CHAPTER

I.—Rose Vyner to Fanny Worsley

II.—The Woman with a Mission
III.—What was said of the Walton Sappho
IV.—Prophecies Fulfilled
V.—The Astute Mrs. Vyner
VI.—Faint Hearts and Fair Ladies
VII.—Bold Stroke for a Lover
VIII.—Woman's Caprice
IX.—Consequences

BOOK IV.

CHAPTER

I.—The Boarding-House
II.—Inmates of a Suburban Boarding-House
III.—Happy Labour, Happy Life
IV.—How Mrs. Vyner was Beneficent
V.—The Curse of Idleness
VI.—A Sketch of Frank Forrester
VII.—Cecil's First False Step
VIII.—The Poetess in London
IX.—Husband and Wife

BOOK V.

CHAPTER

I.—Love Feigned and Love Concealed

II.—Doubts Changed into Certainties
III.—Declaration
IV.—The Tempest Lours
V.—Vacillation
VI.—The Trial
VII.—Father And Child
VIII.—The Crisis

ROSE, BLANCHE, AND VIOLET.

 BOOK II.
(Continued.)

CHAPTER XXI.

THE ELOPEMENT DELAYED.

Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds
Towards Phœbus' mansion; such a waggoner
As phaeton would whip you to the west.
Come, gentle night; come, loving black browed night
Give me my Romeo.
Romeo and Juliet.

Captain Heath and the postilion were not the only persons impatient at
the unexpected delay. Cecil leaning against a tree, watching with anxious
eyes the window of Blanche's bed-room for the signal, and counting the
weary minutes, as they dragged with immeasurable tediousness through their
course of sixty seconds, began at length to suppose that she would never
come.

Nor was the unhappy Blanche herself the least impatient of the four. The
whole mystery of the delay was the presence of Violet in her room. She had
repeatedly announced her intention of going to bed, but Violet gave no signs
of retiring, and their conversation continued.

It more than once occurred to her to place Violet in her confidence, but
certain misgivings restrained her. The fact is, Blanche had been uneasy at
Cecil's attentions to Violet, during the first period of their acquaintance with
him; an uneasiness which she now understood to have been jealousy; and
naturally felt reluctant to speak of her engagement to one who had almost
been her sister's lover.

It happened that Cecil's name came up during their conversation, and

Violet turning her large eyes upon her sister's face, said,—

"Shall I tell you my suspicion, Blanche? Cecil Chamberlayne is fast

falling in love with you: you colour; you know it then? perhaps return it?
Oh, for God's sake tell me that you do not return it!"

"Why should I not?" replied Blanche, greatly hurt.

"My poor Blanche!" said Violet, tenderly kissing her, "I have hurt you,
but it is with a surgeon's knife, which inflicts pain to save pain. If it is not
too late—if you are only at the brink of the abyss, not in it—let me implore
you to draw back, and to examine your situation calmly. Oh! do not waste
your heart on such a man."

There was an earnestness in her manner which only made her language
more galling, and Blanche somewhat pettishly replied,—

"You did not always think so. At one time you were near wasting your
heart, as you call it, upon him."

"I was," gravely replied Violet, "and a fortunate accident opened my eyes
in time. You, who seemed to have watched me so closely, may have noticed
that for some time I have ceased to encourage his attentions."

"Since he has ceased to pay them," retorted Blanche.

Violet smiled a scornful smile.

Neither spoke for a few minutes.

"I have a great mind to ascend the ladder," said the impatient Cecil to
himself, and see if it is only womanly weakness which detains her."
 "Can they have been detected?" Captain Heath asked himself for the
twentieth time.

"Blanche," said Violet at last, "you greatly misunderstand me; but what
is worse, you greatly misunderstand him. Listen!"

She then narrated the whole of her episode with Cecil: her first yearnings
towards him—her interest, and almost love; then the scene at the Grange; his
conduct in the affair with the bull; she recalled to Blanche the mutual
coldness which must have been observed until after Cecil's confession
respecting his cowardice, which so far cleared him in her eyes, that she was
amiable to him for the rest of the evening; she then told her of reflections
made that night when alone, and the result to which she had arrived, and
concluded by saying:—

"I am most willing to admit his fascinating manners, his varied

accomplishments, and some good qualities; but he is weak, selfish, and
capricious. He is not a proper husband for you, the more so as he is poor, and
has not the character which will enable him to battle with the world. Rich, he
would not make you a good husband; poor, he will be a curse to you, and
throw the blame of his misery upon you."

Blanche remained perfectly quiet during this dissection of her lover's

character, and not a change in her countenance betrayed that it had in the
least affected her. Nor had it. Perfectly incredulous, she listened to her sister,
seeing only the distortion of prejudice in her language.

"Have you finished, Violet?" she quietly asked.

"I have."

"Then give me a night to consider."

"Yes, consider it calmly; think of the man on whom you are about to
bestow your affections, and ask yourself seriously, Is he the man I ought to
choose?—— Good-night, Blanche!"

"Good-night. God bless you!" said Blanche, hugging her fervently,

which Violet attributed to the emotion excited by their conversation, but
which really was the embrace of parting.

A few minutes afterwards, Blanche was descending the ladder, a small

packet in her hand, and was received in the arms of her impatient lover.

CHAPTER XXII.

HOW THEY WENT TO LONDON.

How the old post-chaise rattled merrily along the hard road, as if
conscious of the precious burden which it bore! There was no moon: the sky
was overcast. Lights glimmered from the windows of distant houses at rare
intervals; and the watch-dog's lonely bark was occasionally heard—a sort of
mournful sound, which told how deep the night had gone.

With what wild passion—with what inextinguishable delight the lovers

pressed close to each other, in that rumbling chaise! The sense of peril and of
escape was mixed with the indescribable rapture of two beings conscious
that all barriers are borne down, and that they at length belong to each other.

Away! away! from home, with its restraints, its perils, and its doubts—
far into the wide world of love and hope!—from father, sisters, friends—
from luxuries and comforts, cheaply held by those who know not the reverse
—to the protecting bosom of a husband, dearer than all the world beside; and
with him to begin the battle of life, which love will make an everlasting
triumph!

Away goes the rumbling chaise! too slowly for its inmates, whose
impatience needs wings; too swiftly for the wretched man, who sits behind,
communing with his own bitter thoughts.

What a slight partition divided the delirious lovers from the unhappy
wretch who rode behind them—a partition which divided the joys of
paradise from the pangs of purgatory. The captain had not only to endure the
misery of unhappy love, but also the, to him, horrible torture of believing the
girl he loved had given herself up to a villain, who did not intend to marry
her.

"If I do force him to marry her," he said, "what happiness can she expect
from such a scoundrel? Her character will be saved; but her heart will be
broken ... If he refuses ... if I shoot him ... she will hate me ... will not less
revere his memory ... and will have lost her name!"

And merrily the chaise rattled on.

It reached London at last. There the captain got down, and, hailing a cab,
bade the driver follow the post-chaise, at a slight distance. It stopped at an
hotel. They alighted, and went in.

The captain followed them to the hotel. His first act was to write this
letter to Meredith Vyner.

(Don't read this aloud.)

"My DEAR VYNER,

"Before this reaches you, the flight of your daughter with Chamberlayne
will have been known to you. Make yourself as easy as possible under the
deplorable calamity; for I am in the same hotel with them, and will see them
duly married.

"You will be astonished to hear me talk of their marriage, and of my

forwarding it, instead of taking every step to prevent it. But, when I tell you
that marriage is now imperative—that it is, alas! what we must all now
eagerly desire—my conduct will be intelligible. Put your perfect trust in me.
You know my affection for your children, and my regard for the honour of
the family."

Great, indeed, was the consternation at the Hall, on the morning when
the flight was discovered. At first it was imagined Blanche had gone off with
Captain Heath; but when Cecil's absence was also discovered, the real state
of the case was acknowledged. But the captain's absence still remained a
mystery. That he should be implicated in the elopement, seemed impossible.
His known dislike to Cecil, and his great regard for the whole family,
contradicted such a suspicion. Yet wherefore was he not forthcoming?

This threw such a mystery over the whole affair, they knew not what
conclusion to form; some doubts began to arise as to whether it really was an
elopement. Such matters were not usually managed by three persons. And
yet the moonlight ramble by the three on the preceding evening did not that
look as if there were some understanding between them?

To this Rose objected, that as they had been willing to accept of her
company, it was evident there could have been nothing in it beyond a mere
ramble.

It was observable that the one who suggested and most warmly
maintained the probability of there being no elopement in the case, but only
perhaps some bit of fun, was Mrs. Meredith Vyner, who absolutely
dissuaded her husband from taking any steps towards pursuing the fugitives
by this reasoning:—

"Either they have eloped, or they are executing some joke. I incline to
the latter; but even admitting the former, you know dear,—it is perfectly
useless your following them, until you know what route they have taken, and
as yet we have got no clue whatever. While you are hurrying to Gretna, they
may be quietly housed in London, and so you have all the bother and
agitation for nothing."

Like all indolent men, Vyner was glad to have an excuse for sitting still
and doing nothing. But what was Mrs. Vyner's motive for dissuading him?
Simply this: she believed in the elopement, and was delighted at it. Not only
was there one daughter "off her hands"—one rival the less—but by the act of
setting her father's consent at defiance, gave him the power of refusing to
give any dowry, or even a trousseau, with something like an excuse for so
doing. Mrs. Vyner had already run her husband too deeply into debt, not to
keep a sharp eye on any means of economy that did not affect her comforts
or caprices; and money spent upon "her dear girls," was always considered
worse than lost.

On the arrival of Captain Heath's letter, all the mystery was revealed; and
great was the talk it occasioned!

CHAPTER XXIII.

CECIL'S JEALOUSY.
A husband's jealousy, which cunning men would pass upon their wives for a
compliment, is the worst can be made them; for indeed it is a compliment to their beauty,
but an affront to their honour.

WYCHERLEY: The Gentleman Dancing Master.

The captain had just sealed his letter when he saw Cecil leave the hotel
alone. He determined to profit by the opportunity, and seek Blanche. He
found her writing.

As she recognised him, she gave a low scream, and then springing up,
exclaimed:—

"Is my father with you? Oh! intercede for us. Gain his consent."

"I am alone, Blanche."

"Alone?"

"I came with you from Wytton. The same carriage brought us both; you
rode inside, and I behind."
 "What! .... is .... what! are you going to....?"

"To watch over you, dear Blanche, as a brother would. To force him to
marry you."

"Force! why, what do you mean? Cecil is but this instant gone for the
license."

"Are you sure of that?"

"Sure? He said so; and shall I doubt his word?"

"Why then did he bring you here? Why did he not take you to Gretna?"

"Because he feared we might be pursued, and they would be sure to

follow that route."

"Hm! Yes, it is possible. And till you are married?"

"I am to stay with an old lady—a relation of his. He will prepare her to
receive me this morning."

He sighed. So strange is human nature, that the idea of Cecil behaving

delicately and honourably in the transaction, was at first a disappointment
and an additional grief to him! He could not bear to think his rival less
contemptible than he had held him to be, nor could he with pleasure find that
his own services were not needed. Blanche wanted no protector.
Nevertheless, partly out of a lingering suspicion that all would not go on so
smoothly as it promised, and partly from the very want he felt to consider
himself of some use to his beloved Blanche, he refused entirely to credit her
statement of Cecil's intentions, and declared that he would remain to watch.

"At any rate, allow me to give you away," he said, "I shall then be sure
that all is right. Can you refuse me?"

She held out her hand to him by way of answer. He raised it respectfully
to his lips, gazed sorrowfully at her, and withdrew.
 When Cecil returned, and learned from her that the captain was in the
same hotel, that he had seen Blanche, and that she had consented to his
giving her away, he stormed with rage.

"Heath again! Is the viper always to be in my path, and imagine I shall

not crush him at last? What is the meaning of his thrusting himself between
us?" he asked her, with great fierceness. "What the devil is at the bottom of
it? What makes him so anxious to have you married? I am a beggar, and he
knows it; yet first one thing, then the other, he has nothing but schemes to
make me marry you. Wanted me to be a quill-driver, that I might be rich
enough to marry. Marry, marry, marry! By God! there is something in it
which I will discover."

"Cecil, dearest Cecil, you terrify me!"

He paced angrily up and down the room, without attending to her. A

horrible suspicion had taken possession of his mind: he thought that Captain
Heath had not only been her lover, but that his passion had been returned,
and that it was to conceal the consequences of their guilty love that a
marriage with any one seemed so desirable.

"I see it all," he said to himself, as he strode about the room; "they have
selected me as their gull. It is a collusion. From whom, but from her, should
he have known we had taken that moonlight stroll in the shrubbery? Why
should he take upon himself the office of sentinel? Why offer me a situation?
Why follow us up to town? How should he know we were to elope? Why
should he, in God's name, be anxious to have her married, when it is quite
clear he loves her, or has loved her, himself? He owned it last night—owned
that he loved her! I do believe, when he carried off the ladder, he knew I was
in the room, and adopted that mode of making me irretrievably commit
myself.—But it is not too late.—We are not married yet!"

How curiously passion colours facts! No one will say that Cecil had not
what is called abundant "evidence" for his suspicion, and the evidence was
coherent enough to justify to his own mind all that he thought. It is
constantly so in life. We set out with a presumption, and all the "facts" fit in
so well with the presumption, that we forget it is after all not the facts, but
the interpretation which is the important thing we seek and instead of
seeking this we have begun by assuming it; whereas had we assumed some
other interpretation, we should perhaps have found the facts quite as
significant, although the second interpretation would be diametrically
opposed to the former.

Had Cecil, instead of seeking for corroborative facts to pamper his own
irritable jealousy, just asked himself whether the characters of Blanche and
the captain were not quite sufficient of themselves to throw discredit on any
suspicion of the kind—whether, indeed, he ought to entertain such an idea of
such persons, unless overwhelmed by the most clear, precise, unequivocal
evidence—he would have saved himself all the tortures of jealousy, and
would not have desecrated the worship of his love by thoughts so debasing
and so odious.

Blanche, perfectly bewildered, sat silent and trembling, keeping her eyes
fixed upon the strangely altered bearing of her lover.

Stopping from his agitated walk, he suddenly stood still, folded his arms,
gazed at her with quiet fierceness, and said,—

"As Captain Heath takes so much interest in, you, perhaps he will have
no objection to escort you back to your father."

"Cecil! ... Cecil! ... In Heaven's name, what do you mean?" she said, half
rising from her chair; but afraid to trust her trembling limbs, she sank back
again, and looked at him in helpless astonishment.

"My meaning is very plain, very," he said, with intense coldness. "You
are free to return to your family, or not to return, if you prefer remaining
with Captain Heath. Perhaps," he added sarcastically, "as he is so partial to
marriage, he will marry you himself."

She strove to speak, but a choking sensation at the throat prevented her.
She saw him leave the room without having strength to recall him, without
ever making a motion to prevent him.

In mute despair, she heard his heavy tread upon the stairs, and like a
person stunned, felt no command of her faculties, scarcely felt anything
beyond a stupid bewildering prostration of the soul.
 With flushed face and heated brain, Cecil rushed into the street, and
wandered distractedly away. The fresh air somewhat cooled his burning
brow, and the exercise gradually enabled him to recover his self-possession.
He began to doubt whether he had not been rash in his suspicions.

"It is quite true that Heath has taken a most extraordinary part in the
whole affair; but I remember now, that, during our interview in my room, he
seemed by no means anxious I should marry her; indeed I taunted him with
wishing to get me out of the way. He offered me the secretaryship to enable
me to marry, and when I refused that he set his face against ... I have been an
ass! ...

"And yet his conduct is inexplicable. He loves her, and she knows it....
What a web entangles me! ... I will return and question her; she cannot
deceive me ... she is not altogether lost ... I will try her."

With this purpose he returned.

Meanwhile, Captain Heath had found Blanche weeping bitterly, under

the degrading accusation of Cecil's jealousy; and having extorted from her
some incoherent sentences, which made him aware of what had passed, he
said, "My dear Blanche, I am going to bid you have courage for an act of
fortitude. You must struggle with yourself—you must reason calmly for a
moment."

"Oh, tell me, tell me what to do. How shall I eradicate his suspicions?"

"You cannot do it. In one so weak and capricious—one who could think
so unworthily of you, and upon such ridiculous appearances—jealousy is
incurable. It will bring endless misery upon you. It will destroy all love, all
confidence. If he suspects you already, what is to secure you from his
suspicions hereafter? Blanche, you must quit this. Return with me to your
father's; he will receive you kindly."

"No, no, no," sobbed the unhappy girl.

"Yes, Blanche. It is a hard alternative, but it is the best. You ought to

rejoice in his injustice, because it displays him in his true colours. He tells
you what you have to expect."
 "I love him."

"Alas! I know it; but you see how he repays your love."

She only sobbed in answer.

"He will make you miserable for ever. Now, before the irrevocable step
is taken, release yourself from such a fate: return with me."

She wept, but could not speak.

Heath's arguments at last prevailed; and, in a tone of terrible despair, she

exclaimed, "Take me home, then."

A flash of joy passed over his sad face as he heard this heart-broken
phrase, which assured him that, however his beloved Blanche might suffer at
first, she was at least saved from the certain misery of becoming the wife of
Cecil Chamberlayne.

On reaching the hotel, Cecil ran rapidly up stairs, and on the first landing
stood aghast, at seeing Blanche coming down, leaning on the captain's arm.
She was weeping, and her face was hidden by the handkerchief with which
she wiped her eyes.

"Where are you taking her?" Cecil fiercely asked.

"Home," was the stern reply.

"Home! Whose home? yours?"

"To her father."

"And by whose authority?" he said, in a low, hoarse, almost suffocated

voice.

"Her own," was the crushing answer.

They passed on.