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Mobile phone company Vodafone gets inspired by traditional Kula exchange system

Published on December 18, 2004 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, corporate & business anthropology, culture traditions, gift economy gift giving, Pacific Oceania

New Scientist

Every year, the people of the Trobriand Islands in the Solomon Sea off Papua New Guinea exchange ornamental seashell armbands and necklaces. It is a social ritual that according to Malinowski cements social bonds between fishing communities. Strange as it may seem, this tradition has inspired a recent new service from communications company Vodafone.

Anthropologist Richard Harper has been working for Vodafone in the UK since 2003, where he has adapted kula-style gift-giving rules to encourage social bonding among groups of people in phone-texting networks. Under his guidance, Vodafone has launched its Postcard service. You send an MMS picture-and-text message to Vodafone, who will print it as a postcard and mail it to whomever you want. Like the islanders’ gifts, Vodafone’s postcards are permanent – unlike text messages.

The idea is that the recipient will then want to send a postcard of their own, perhaps to a third party, and so draw more subscribers into the network. Exchanging more valuable artefacts, such as music or video files, may be next. >> continue

(link via Purse Lip Square)

LINKS UPDATED 21.9.2022

New Scientist

Book Review: Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

Published on November 7, 2004 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, books, gift economy gift giving, politics

Steven Shaviro, professor in English at Wayne State University

David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is filled with interesting and provocative ideas. Graeber wants to ally the discipline of anthropology with the anarchist currents that have shown up, most recently, in the anti-globalization movement. Each, he says, has a lot to offer the other.

What anarchism can offer anthropology, according to Graeber, is a way out of academicist impasses, a way that anthropology might change the world, rather than merely interpret it. This is the most upfront side of the book, but also its least convincing one. For I fear that here Graeber overly idealizes academia, and the discipline of anthropology in particular.

Graeber is far more interesting when he writes about what anthropology can offer anarchism. Graeber discusses Marcel Mauss’ theory of the gift as an alternative to orthodox economic assumptions about the centrality of markets and “exchange”, and Pierre Clastres’ arguments about societies that explicitly sought to avoid the formation of a State.
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NOTE:

Many anthropologists would agree that there is an affinity between anthropology and anarchism and there are many convinced anarchists among anthropologists, but fewer of them might support “resistance against civilization” as the webpage Radical Anthropology calls for. Nevertheless, this website has some interesting articles, like Anthropology and Anarchism by anthropologist Brian Morris at Goldsmiths College, London. (UPDATE: The website was closed down, I’ve linked to copies in the Web Archive)

See also another review on Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology in Green Pepper Magazine that among other states that “in the last three decades of the twentieth century, it was the work of Sahlins and other critical anthropologists such as Richard Lee and Pierre Clastres that produced some of the most outstanding changes within anarchist theory.”

>> download “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology” (Link updated)

Steven Shaviro, professor in English at Wayne State University

David Graeber's Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is filled with interesting and provocative ideas. Graeber wants to ally the discipline of anthropology with the anarchist currents that have shown up, most recently,…

Why you always get a present you don’t want – Social Sciences and Gift-Giving

Published on November 4, 2004 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, gift economy gift giving, persons and theories, Us and Them

The Daily Telegraph

Millions of pounds are wasted each year because few understand the secret language of giving Christmas gifts. Why do we go through with it? Because the Christmas present is about kinship and power; taste and insight; symbolism and values. Over the years, it has become a rich source of PhDs, projects and papers for anthropologists, ethologists and sociologists, not to mention a legion of psychologists.

Gift-giving in primitive human societies was seen by the French ethnographer Marcel Mauss as a way of forging bonds with strangers. Decades ago, the distinguished University of Chicago anthropologist Prof Marshall Sahlins noted that the closer the kinship between the donor and the recipient, the less emphasis was placed on reciprocity and the more on sentiment. >> continue

The Daily Telegraph

“The science of ethnography is an ideal tool to designing mobile phones”

Published on October 20, 2004 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, corporate & business anthropology, design anthropology, gift economy gift giving, technology

The Feature

People often confuse what they want with what they need when it comes to consumer products. Manufacturers try to collect this information through interviews, but observing users’ behavior in their natural environment can provide better insights. The science of ethnography can be an ideal tool to learn how teenagers use mobile phones and to help shape designs to cater to them.

Last year, a team of researchers went to a sixth-form college in England and for five months observed the way a group of students used their mobile phones. The researchers used these observations, along with periodic interviews, to come up with a concept for a 3G mobile phone that addressed their findings.

The researchers came to the conclusion that mobile phones were not only used as tools for transmitting and receiving information, but were also used as tools to establish and maintain the status of social networks. Mobiles facilitated the “obligations of exchange.” In particular, students have a social contract with each other to give and accept “gifts” in the form of text messages. The gift’s value is derived in part from the message’s content, but it also comes from the fact that the gift was given at all, regardless of its content.
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The Feature