From out of orbit: meanings of indigenous modernity

Abstract

Globalization and its primary feature, ICT, face a renegotiation of traditional dichotomous pairs of western rational logic. If technologies are associated with modernity, and indigenous with tradition, a reflection on mobile appropriations, the leading version of ICTs, by indigenous communities in remote environments such as the Amazon, seems particularly interesting to discuss on tradition vs. modernity. In this discussion there are a few topics very presents: first and second generation's digital divides, asymmetries in the media literacy and the influence of the variables of gender, ethnicity and class. We will reflect much attached to the empirical results of a case study in Ecuador, under the "Mobile Ontology and nomadic techno-citizenship" project, whose results point to a hybridization of the categories of tradition and modernity, embodied in technological appropriations by the Shuar and Kichwa-Saraguro indigenous.