Community Networks, Actor-Networks: The Politics of Internet Interconnection Infrastructure in Indigenous Connectivity Projects

• In Event: Indigenous Knowledges and Technologies - II

Abstract

This paper aims to examine community-based experiences of internet connectivity in Tseltal and Zapoteco territories, within the Mexican borders, from the standpoint of internet interconnection. It analyzes the dynamics between bamboo towers, antennas, unregulated frequency band, and routers, along with humans’ efforts to establish access of local indigenous networks to the large internet. Using Actor Network Theory’s (ANT) principles and concepts that include actor-networks and the symmetry between humans and non-humans actors, the paper problematizes the role of internet interconnection infrastructure to support or constrain indigenous values associated to comunalidad, a concept related to indigenous societies’ organizations in the region of Oaxaca, Mexico, that, simply put, refers to thoughts and actions toward a community life (Martínez, 2013).

According to ANT, the entrepreneur actor of a network tends to seek ways to expand their power, while the other “enrolled” actors participate of the arrangement in detriment of their own control capability (Callon, 1984). As Jane Summerton synthesizes “In actor-networks, control by the dominant actor is accompanied by the loss of autonomy by all others” (Summerton, 1999, p. 96).

Autonomy is a key value in the comunalidad thought. It is guaranteed in state laws (Muñoz, 2005), and along with recognition, emerged as aspiration and life principle among some research interviewees. By juxtaposing comunalidad values with the materiality of internet interconnection, this paper—built on ethnographic fieldwork on the internet infrastructure that Tseltal and Zapoteco have enabled—proposes an alternative way to look at the indigenous communities interconnection to the global internet communication infrastructure, shedding light on conflicts of values yet overlooked in the internet community-network scholarship (Belli, 2016).

Works Cited

Callon, M. (1984). Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. The Sociological Review, 32(1_suppl), 196–233.

Belli, L. (Ed.). (2016). Community connectivity: building the Internet from scratch: Annual Report of the UN IGF Dynamic Coalition on Community Connectivity. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: FGV Direito Rio.

Martínez, J. L. (2013). Textos sobre el camino andado (Vol. I). Oaxaca: CSEIIO.

Muñoz, A. A. (2005). The Emergence and Development of the Politics of Recognition of Cultural Diversity and Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Mexico: Chiapas and Oaxaca in Comparative Perspective. Journal of Latin American Studies, 37(3), 585–610.

Summerton, J. (1999). Power plays: the politics of interlinking systems. In O. Coutard (Ed.), The Governance of Large Technical Systems (pp. 93–113). Florence, United States: Routledge.

Author

• Fernanda R. Rosa, American University