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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Digitizing Family: An Ethnography of Melanesian Smartphones

The Digitizing Family: An Ethnography of Melanesian Smartphones

Hobbis, Geoffrey

Hardcover

AnthropologyGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 3030349284
ISBN13: 9783030349288
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: Feb 8 2020
Pages: 225
Weight: 1.19
Height: 0.81 Width: 5.83 Depth: 8.27
Language: English

At once a digital ethnography of smartphones and a classically conceived village-based ethnography, this book relocates the study of digital technologies to rural Melanesia, with a focus on the Lau of Malaita, Soloman Islands. In this 'technography', Geoffrey Hobbis studies the materiality and functional attributes of smartphones and their object biographies--modes of acquisition, maintenance, uses, limitations and the problems specific to this region in adopting and adapting smartphones in everyday life. As he examines the various uses of smartphones, as both telephone and multimedia device, Hobbis also explores the social and cultural transformations, the hopes and uncertainties, with which they are associated. Ultimately, in bringing together a study of digital technologies with classical anthropological theory, The Digitizing Family develops a theory of smartphones as kinship technologies and supercompositional objects.

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