Cybernauts of the South Pacific
Some anthropologists tell students that the most famous ethnography to have unraveled a whole society, Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), starts at the beach. It doesn’t actually, but that’s too good a story not to be part of professional socialization. The book describes a vast scheme of relationships and meanings that are gathered up in a system of interisland trading at the pinnacle of which are mystical ritual objects, each laden with a history of previous holders that become part of the identities of new recipients. “I kula, therefore I am” could be their Cartesian rule that gives meaning to all other exchanges there – kind of like email for today’s cybernauts? Is the Internet cafe the new beach? This one’s in Fare, on Huahine,
one of the islands of Tahiti. I go to Internet cafes in other countries, sometimes for the Internet but always to check them out. I’m an anthropologist, and this is part of my research subject. I wasn’t doing research here, just vacationing, and the Ao Api New World Internet shop is not quite on the beach. It’s above a dry goods store on the shopping street in Fare.
Such streets have long since replaced the beach – or become the beach in the modern period – where interisland and inland trade meet in the South Pacific. Fare’s is a classic one, a single line of shops that are strung along
a road facing the quay where interisland ships unload, and usually owned by Chinese families. Why Chinese? In French Polynesia, as across the Pacific islands, Chinese immigrants were brought during the colonial period for planatation labor, although fewer here than in Hawaii, and many ended up in trade. This division of labor reflects not natural inclinations but ‘family values’: obligations of Polynesian kinship to share, it was explained to me, would empty stores into kinship exchanges before the goods were exchanged for cash. So these streets are where one circuit of exchange meets another.
This is an ‘Old South Seas’ port scene of two-story buildings with balconies that serve as outside rooms above the street and help ventilate offices housing services over the shops – travel booker, insurance, some government offices, doctors, a bank, maybe an attorney – all facing the wharf. The form emerged in the colonial period that began Tahiti’s and other South Pacific islands’ incorporation into modern commerce; and the guidebooks say that Fare’s commercial street is as near Old South Seas as anyplace in Tahiti. You can detect the form beneath later accretions in bigger ‘modern’ places (with international airports) like the Tahitian capital, Papeete,
or in repurposed places like Kailua on the Big Island of Hawaii, where a
pre-colonial king who unified islands gathered nobles around his seasonal residence that is now a park at the end of this street and native trust property.
But Internet cafes? The metaphor is a ’strong attractor’ for more. ‘Window on the world’ is one that occurs to a lot of us. It’s one that occured to me when looking around Internet cafes in the Middle East. I’ve done that in Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt. Cliche would have them look like one in Egypt’s Siwa oasis.
Most actually look like Haroon’s in Yarmook, across from the University on a street once claimed to have featured in the Guiness Book of World
Records for the most Internet cafes. The story was “over a hundred.” I didn’t check the book, and quit counting at thirty on the surrounding streets. Closer inspection reveals this one to be a shwarma shop (closed on Friday). Haroon’s story was that he aimed to attract students from the University across the street to an Internet place “where they could have something to eat, too.” A bit of product differentiation?
Getting closer to local metaphors, here’s the “Internet Oasis” (Wahat al-Internet in the Arabic sign) across from another university in Jordan.
“Oasis” evokes both a place made fertile by water and a waystation along roads to someplace else, which might be a little nearer the local sense of things, or what anthropologists call “local knowledge.” Wahat al-Internet has a shwarma shop next door. The large brown thing by the door is its sign. When I took this picture, the Oasis just offered computers connected to the Internet.
What they connected to the Internet was mostly local youngsters, from students around universities to pre-teens in neighborhood shops. And they connected to familiar moral panics – anxieties, actually, about what they would connect to – from pornography to the politically incorrect to each other. I suppose. Proprietors of these cafes often told me the kids were ‘chatting’ across the room and surfing porn across the world. Well, why not? That’s what adolescents do: they extend their social networks and expand their social experience. The Internet’s been widely touted for that ever since it went public with the World Wide Web. But a few reality checks:
- An early study in the Pew Internet and American Life surveys (Lenhart, Amanda, et al., The Ever-shifting Internet Population, 16 April 2003) reported that the relative proportion Internet traffic devoted to porn declined overall as Internet demographics expanded from male youth to include moms, who, coming on-line for email with their kids as they went off to college, brought moms’ information networking habits – i.e., relationship maintenance – to cyberspace.
- In my more unsystematic observation, kids in Internet cafes in Jordan, who may also have surfed a bit of porn, were mostly looking at sites for car and muscle magazine (the boys) or fashion magazines (the girls) or at the webpages of US and other foreign universities (both boys and girls). Since an adult can’t observe these things too closely without becoming a little creepy, I surely missed a lot; but the point is …
- Internet use, all research shows, extends social networks on their margins for all known uses and users, starting with the engineers, who built it for communication with distant machines and added email for communicating with their operators, down to suburbanites in Toronto (Wellman, B., Quan-Haase, A., Witte, J., & Hampton, K.N. Does the Internet increase, decrease, or supplement social capital? Social networks, participation, and community commitment. American Behavioral Scientist, 45 (3): 437-456, 2001) and, so far as I can tell, also in the Middle East.
In other words, the idea of reaching/looking way out is true only in a mythic sense. It’s a mystical image of protean hopes and fears for the Internet comparable to kula myths of the Argonauts of the Western Pacific about the vast plenipotentiary power in kula objects to connect across time and distance.
So, what about the Internet cafe as the new beach for cybernauts in the South Pacific? Much as the Canadian geographer, Harold Innes, showed (The Bias of Communiction, 1951), new lines of communication are laid down over old ones and differ largely experientially. This is the source for the humanist, also Canadian and guru of the Toronto school of communications, Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message.” Back in Fare on Huahine, there’s the beach where Polynesian canoes used to come ashore. It’s now largely covered by a concrete quay for modern ships. Paralleling it is the street of Old South Seas shops that emerged in the colonial period of modernization: traders, government offices, a few stores, restaurants for travelers, shops and services that are the interface with the world of sea-borne communications. Paralleling that, literally on top of it, is the Internet cafe upstairs, where the post-modern world touches down, the beach in these post-colonial times.
I’ve not seen an Internet cafe in Polynesia named “Internet Beach” with the localizing panache that “Internet Oasis” has for the Middle East. In Jordan, the initial wave brought “cybertunnel@safeway” in a shopping mall, “Internet Cave,” “Mr. Internet,” “Internet Pioneers,” which convey something of a local register of the notion that the Internet ‘routes around’ obstacles to communication, but also Dar al-’Aql (“Abode of Wisdom”) and some international brands from teleco providers. They’re just “Internet” or “Internet Cafe” in Tahiti, where French is after all an official language. I did see one in Kailua, on Hawaii, called “Dog’s Internet Cafe,” apparently an evocation of the surfer circuit of the tourist trade. Huahine’s Ao Api Internet shop is glossed (in English!) as “New World,” which could mean anything, including postmodern irony – there is a French-language university on Tahiti – as well as something from/in a new world of global communication and information flows. What I saw in Fare was a shop that, in addition to computers connected to the Internet, also displays DVDs for sale and rent, advertises web-design services, sells computer accessories, has a few curios for tourists, plus local kids looking at things like on-line magazines, university webpages, and a lot of websites about dancing as well as lots of emailing to relatives overseas.
Like many former colonies, Tahiti has a many people gone overseas for work and education which, some guidebooks warn potential tourists, can be serious competitors for flights at holiday times; so the email is understandable, It’s a boon to maintaining family ties worldwide, as Daniel Miller & Don Slater showed for Trinidad (The Internet: An Ethnographic Account, 2000). But dancing? This was in the month prior to the national celebration in Papeete, which is a stop on an international circuit of dance competitions in which nations all around the southern and western Pacific participate avidly. Moreover, every night everywhere while we were there, local dance groups were practicing in churches and town halls; there were fund-raisers at schools where kids put on dances they’d been practicing that included hip-hop and reggae as well as ‘traditional’ Polynesian ones. In the daytime, pupils at elementary schools could be seen lined up for instruction and practice during recess. The local papers were full of preparations and play-offs for what amounted to a national fete of dance competitions with which Tahitians greet Bastille Day and make it their own national celebration, plus stories about last year’s winners and travel agency adverts for packages to international dance exhibitions and contests, all addressed to the local market. These competitions are immensely popular. Go on YouTube, search for “dance” and the name of any Polynesia island nation (Tahiti, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, New Zealand, Hawaii, etc.) to see amateur and some professional video from them. Post-modern (and completely non-ironic) kula in the age of globalization.
Is this, as Marcel Mauss summed up Bronislaw Malinowski’s sprawling tome on the kula, “the most solemn part of a vast system of prestations and counter-prestations which seem to embrace the whole of life… the gathering point of many other institutions… set amidst a series of different kinds of exchange… giving them meaning… takes the whole tribe out of the narrow circle of its own frontiers” (The Gift, 1966, pp. 25-26; orig. Essai sur le don, 1925)? Since this is, effectively, Mauss’s empirical respecification of Durkheim’s notion of “total social phenomena,” the question might be: is the Internet a total social phenomenon of the networked information society/age? Is video on the Internet the gift that keeps on giving and so the Internet, the connector that keeps on connecting, the platform – the beach – for post-modern kula?
It could well be. In their ethnography of Internet use in Trinidad, Daniel Miller and Don Slater described its becoming a social networking and cultural phenomenon. “Trinis,” as the polyglot descendants of colonial-period immigrants who make up the population now call themselves, enthusiastically embraced email for keeping in touch with relatives who migrate overseas for work or education. They also embraced the Internet as a way to publicise Trinidad overseas, particularly to project a contemporary Trini identity that they sought to show in the best executed, most up-to-date formats by, among other things, putting the Miss Universe pageant on-line when it was held in Trinidad. Not only that, some local churches engaged in intense speculation about metaphysical significances of the Internet itself as communication way out, with the mystical Other for some (Hindu websites for Indian Trinidadians) and for others with the mystical self (Trinidad’s pentacostal churches), reflexively registering a spiritual dimension that in more secular precincts is celebrated as infinity in temporal, spatial and social terms such as ‘always on’, ‘death of distance’, ‘where do you want to go today’ (Bill Gates’ vision of the Internet), ‘being digital’, ‘network cultures’. How about ‘new world’, the Huahine gloss on the Internet?
The Internet has attracted interpretations like these from its beginning and everywhere it spreads. “Cyberia” was an early anthropological one, when the Internet was newly public and speculation translated the sense of discovery into a notion that it was new space, a cyberspace. Experience and spoil-sport social science that has shown how well cyberspace mirrors ‘real life’ have moved well beyond edge-of-the-earth frontier metaphors. Comparisons also suggest a more universal and grounded analytical model that does not privilege any instance as archetypal or its type-site.
Each instance – Trinidad, Tahiti, Jordan, the US – features metaphors, cultural performances, and networking that could be said to domesticate, or in Innes’ terms, to settle the Internet . Comparatively, it makes sense to think of the Internet that can be seen here, or in Trinidad or in the Middle East, or on Facebook as a layering of networking, performativity and reflexivity. Networking is what Internet use extends and what extends Internet use into existing social relations, bringing them closer and pushing out their margins. Communicating with relatives in London or Los Angeles is still communicating with relatives, more densely and ubiquitously perhaps than through letters and via the telephone, but still motivated by family values. Likewise on Facebook with ‘friends’. Performativity, putting one’s culture (or, at the blog level, opinions) on the Internet, into global circulation with others and according to standards that the medium elevates, formalises or entextualises subjectivities. And, finally, in reflexive re-presentation emphasising cosmological versions of experience, ’way out’ beyond ordinary or everyday boundaries are imageries of cyberia or networked cultures in the anthropological imagination, New World on Huahine, the Realm of Wisdom in Jordan, hyper-mobility and its correlate self-fashioning in America.
Tags: dance, harold innes, hawaii, huahine, internet cafe, kula, marcel mauss, Middle East, polynesia, tahiti
You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.