Subversion, Conversion, Development. Cross-Cultural Knowledge and the Politics of Design ed. by James Leach and Lee Wilson (review)

What is information? The global development community recently has discovered the value of information for the alleviation of poverty. According to international agents’ promises, the worldwide diffusion of mobile phones, internet access, and related technologies will empower people in remote places. The core of this dubious promise holds that access to information is a device or a tool that can be obtained and used.

This is, however, a quite limited perspective, and the objective of this book is to show the shortcomings of such a model. The claim here is that “information” must not be considered as a thing that one can acquire or possess. Information is, rather, a status that changes those who have it. It leads to a different point of view and a change in priorities. This book deals with knowledge and information as an agent which defines social relations and refigures the design and usages of technology. Therefore, information and knowledge should not be analyzed as things, but rather as a transforming part of social networks. In consequence, this volume presents several case studies of communities that deal in different ways with information. In other words, social groupings can be understood by analyzing their notion of knowledge and their practices of sharing and transmitting information.

Based on this expanded understanding of information, it becomes untenable to speak about “owning knowledge” or “receiving knowledge.” Instead, it is more appropriate to consider the transformative capacities of knowledge. One consequence of this perspective is the observation of subversive tendencies. As everybody knows, this is true on a political level in the context of the Arab Spring. Astonishingly, there is yet no more general analysis of the transformative impact of the new internet devices and social media. The case studies provided here emphasize the creative potential of improvisation, covering a wide range of contexts and social configurations. The reader is informed about computer nerds in Germany who club their Wi-Fi devices together in order to build a nationwide network of free-of-charge access to the internet; about a “postcolonial database,” where the entries are authored and categorized by aboriginal communities in Australia; and about a digital collection of “sacred books” in South America and Southeast Asia. In particular, the last two examples show how local knowledge, information sharing, and inherited ritual practices are transformed by the technologies of the digital age. In these cases, transformation does not mean simply producing an (virtual or real) “object,” but rather opening a platform for new forms of exchange. Buddhist monks as well as religious experts from northeast Amazonia engage differently in reenacting their tradition and improvise in integrating the information available through these new platforms into their existing practices.

Even in situations where the internet and the related technologies are brought to particular areas in order to represent “modernity” and to enforce the global orders of development, labor, and consumption, people find ways to undermine this logic and to define a quite different use of the new media. In one case study, dealing with the highland population of Borneo, the modeling of genealogies and longhouse communities appears more relevant than any other internet application. Following Michel de Certeau, Poline Bala rightfully claims that this appropriation is simultaneously a mode of subversion: the internet is not used for development but rather for strengthening the local identity. Although the limits of space do not allow mention of all the case studies, it should be highlighted that all of the contributions forcefully underline the book’s argument.

One shared aspect of the contributions, convincingly stated by Marilyn Strathern, is the fact that each deals with innovations that are novelties of interest. People engage in appropriating such novelties because they have an interest, and they figure out something specific from the countless options made possible by these technologies. Whether technological or social, innovation requires such interest; otherwise it is no...