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Relationships between Indigenous Peoples and Information Societies

Research period:2020.10-2023.3

KONDO Shiaki

Keywords

Urban indigenous peoples,digital anthropology,identity

Objectives

The objective of this research project is to shed light on how indigenous peoples construct lifeworlds in urbanized and informationized contemporary society through comparative research. It is well known that migration to urban areas and the urbanization of traditional living areas have increased among indigenous societies around the world (Aoyagi and Matsuyama, Indigenous Peoples and Cities, Aoki Shoten, Tokyo 1999). However, in addition to this theme of indigenous peoples and cities that has been discussed up to now, with the recent advent of informationized societies it is also necessary to think about the relationship between information technology and indigenous peoples. How has the emergence of communication technologies such as smartphones and social media changed the lifestyles of indigenous peoples? Communications between traditional territories and urban areas have become easier due to new technologies. What kind of impact can we observe in such profound change? While indigenous peoples can now communicate in digital space, hate speech toward minorities, including indigenous peoples, has become rampant. How can we think about “digital sovereignty” for indigenous peoples? This project aims to contribute to answering such questions.

Research Results

This joint research project examined how digitalization is advancing in indigenous societies across the world, and found that progress on digitalization and the local phenomena it generates are diverse. In the context of indigenous people’s movements in areas such as North America, South America, Australia, and New Zealand, social media are used by indigenous people in both urban and traditional communities to challenge mainstream society. Digitalization is also progressing in the management of cultural heritage such as indigenous languages and tools, with indigenous people themselves recording and sharing information. Digital technologies are also used frequently in contexts such as everyday interaction with family members.
Online hate speech against indigenous people is also on the rise in societies such as Australia and Japan. Indigenous people themselves, and their non-indigenous allies, are beginning to resist and tackle this problem with activism using Twitter hashtags.
In societies such as these, people’s use of digital devices and applications is often embedded in indigenous culture, but it can also rise to forms of conflict and bargaining that had previously not arisen within indigenous communities, such as infringement or circumvention of cultural norms. Therefore, in addition to media anthropologist Faye Ginsburg’s notion of “embedded aesthetics” in indigenous media, it is important to adopt an “embedded but not closed” perspective.
The abovementioned conditions, which have been identified in prior research and in presentations by members of the research project team, are predicated on the popularization of smartphones among indigenous people and the development of an environment in which the internet can be browsed with relative ease (although the digital divide persists even today).
However, in socialist countries and other societies where the internet is censored, it is difficult to use social media freely for purposes such as criticizing the regime. In such societies, people are devising ways to bypass censorship and continue using methods of negotiation with mainstream society based on distinctive local practices. This research project found a need for further research on this matter in the future, given that prior literature in digital indigenous studies is largely founded on the situation found in liberal societies such as North America and Oceania, with a paucity of studies on regions where the internet is censored or monitored.