![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article contributes to recent attempts to provide ethnographically and historically nuanced accounts of Africa's mobile phone ‘revolution’. It does so by examining the coming of mobile phones in one particular place and time: Bugamba Sub-County, in rural Mbarara District, South-western Uganda, between the years 2000 and 2012. In so doing, it extends recent anthropological scepticism regarding the transformative potential of mobile communication per se, by showing how in this case, the most notable effects generated by mobile telephony were in fact those produced by a series of exchanges of phone-related objects, which took place in a sense ‘prior’ to communication. These circulations effected a kind of ‘time–space expansion’, which allowed for new imaginaries of physical and social mobility. The article illustrates these arguments through a detailed examination of the mobile spaces of taxis, and through a discussion of changing burial practices.
Notes
1 Earlier versions of this article have been presented at the Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association (Baltimore, USA, November 2013), at the Institute of Postcolonial Studies (Melbourne, Australia, March 2014) and at Flinders University (Adelaide, Australia, August 2015). I would like to thank the audiences at all of these venues for their helpful comments. I would also like to thank Terry Austrin, Georgina Drew, Katrien Pype, and two anonymous reviewers for Ethnos for their suggestions. Of course, any mistakes or omissions remain mine alone.
This article is dedicated to the memory of Terry Austrin's son, Alan, who was tragically killed during the final stages of its drafting.
2 For a good introduction to the history of mobile phones and ICT4D in Africa, see Donner (Citation2008).
3 A pseudonym is used here, and throughout.
4 Throughout this paper, I use the term ‘ecology’ in a different sense from the way in which it is typically employed in media studies. In most media studies, the phrase ‘media ecologies’ refers to the ways in which different forms of media – print media, radio, television, etc. – coexist, and inter-relate, within given social contexts. Against this, I follow Ingold's (Citation2012) use of the term ‘ecology’ to refer to the meshwork of dynamic interactions through which persons and things are brought into meaningful relations with each other.
5 It also included, to a lesser extent, some of the locality's various boda-boda (moped-taxi) drivers as well.
6 As part of its wider reduction of import tariffs, the SAP greatly reduced the cost of importing motor vehicles into Uganda. As a result, and following a general pattern across Africa, huge numbers of reconditioned Japanese vehicles (most of them made by Mitsubishi, Nissan and Toyota) were brought in via markets in the Middle East.
7 Usually by simply throwing them out of the window, and honking the horn, as he passed their destination.
8 Previously, extended stops were made only on the way back to Bugamba on the weekly market day (Friday), and only then, for the time that it took to load up passengers' purchases into the taxis.
9 All of these services were always much cheaper in Nyeihanga than in Mbarara.
10 The failure by any resident to come promptly to the dead person's home once the fire had been lit, or to stay and help out with the preparations for the funeral, resulted in either a heavy fine, or a beating.
11 I am not suggesting that mobile phones were the only things to have altered burial practices during this period. However, in altering the ways in which burial announcements are communicated to distant others, their effects certainly have been transformative.
12 All burial ledgers are always very carefully kept within a household. In many instances, they are the only written documents that a household possesses, aside from church documents such as baptism and marriage certificates. It is beyond my scope here to provide an exhaustive analysis of these burial ledgers. However, it is worth noting that because of how they are produced, any collection of these ledgers will provide important insights into the relative socio-economic position of the household in which it is stored, and into how that household's position may have changed over time.
13 In addition, I noted that some of the payments had been made by people who didn't attend in person, via mobile money.