TY - JOUR
T1 - Mobile Persons
T2 - Cell phones, Gender and the Self in North India
AU - Doron, Assa
PY - 2012/11
Y1 - 2012/11
N2 - In this article I analyse the varied ways mobile phones are integrated into the daily lives of low-income people and the implications for courtship practices, marriage relations and kinship ties. Rather than offer a celebratory analysis of the mobile phone's empowering effects, my ethnographic research reveals a more complex story, one that shows how the presence of the mobile both reinforces and undermines gender roles and institutions of authority. Conceptually, I argue that mobile communication provides insights into north Indian personhood as 'nodal', while also stimulating new practices and ideologies that render this technology central to the struggle for (and over) power and domination.
AB - In this article I analyse the varied ways mobile phones are integrated into the daily lives of low-income people and the implications for courtship practices, marriage relations and kinship ties. Rather than offer a celebratory analysis of the mobile phone's empowering effects, my ethnographic research reveals a more complex story, one that shows how the presence of the mobile both reinforces and undermines gender roles and institutions of authority. Conceptually, I argue that mobile communication provides insights into north Indian personhood as 'nodal', while also stimulating new practices and ideologies that render this technology central to the struggle for (and over) power and domination.
KW - Gender
KW - Material Culture
KW - Mobile Phone
KW - Personhood
KW - Technologies of Self
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84868279630&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/14442213.2012.726253
DO - 10.1080/14442213.2012.726253
M3 - Article
SN - 1444-2213
VL - 13
SP - 414
EP - 433
JO - Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology
JF - Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology
IS - 5
ER -