Sirpa Tehnunen Discusses Culture, Conflict, and Translocal Communication in Rural West Bengal

As media reports of political movements from various locations have shown, mobile technology can be a powerful political instrument. As part of the South Asian Studies Council Colloquium Series, Sirpa Tehnunen, a social anthropologist at the University of Helsinki, will speak about how political activists in West Bengal, India use mobile phones for their daily political work.

September 19, 4:30pm • Room 203, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue

Dr. Tehnunen seeks ways to recognize the disruptive and political potential of mobile technology without ignoring its social and cultural rootedness.  The paper on which her talk is based illustrates how riots and protests relate to the increase in translocal communication enabled by phones. She also demonstrates how the political use of mobile technology for extra ordinary events is grounded in the social and political processes of ordinary everyday life and draws from the local understanding of politics by emphasizing certain aspects of it. She relates the increased multiplicity of political connectedness enabled by phones to broader relationship diversification process in the village, paying special attention to gender relationships. Her paper confirms the cultural continuity amidst the increase in translocal relationships but it also pinpoints how cultures harbor conflicts and alternative discourses which translocal communication helps to amplify. 

Dr. Tehnunen is a social anthropologist who is currently carrying out research on the appropriation of mobile technology in India. As in her previous research projects on women’s wage labor in urban India or gift giving in rural India, this project seeks to understand unexpected cultural manifestations of the market economy. Her latest monograph Means of Awakening: Gender, Politics and Practice in Rural India (Kolkata:  Stree 2009) is an ethnographically rich study of local politics and gender in rural West Bengal, India. She has published articles in such journals as Ethnos, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Modern Asian Studies and Contributions to Indian Sociology and Social Anthropology. She co-edited Culture, Power and Agency: Gender in Indian ethnography (Kolkata:  2006) with Lina Fruzzetti.