technè and technology
“The dance of the tribals, the harvest sons of the peasants, the martial arts of rural folks, and innumerable other art forms, are plucked out of context, enacted in studios, and presented as exotic and primitive practices. Given the proliferation of the electronic media, artificial production of culture would replace organic production. To the indigenous society the consequence of this tendency is the possible loss of its creative potential, as its culture would be divorced from its social milieu” (KN Panikkar)
Thus, technologies are forming paths of creativity consisting of tools that shape the formation of material universes of culture. Largely used in multiple forms, tools and technologies, shows a consistent and respectful subordination to notions of innovation and creativity in environments that most lack basic access to resources. As noticed, technology is a definition that is pervading modes of practices and is not universalistic, and it shouldn’t exclude experimentation with materials such as purposeful aggregates of wires, tablecloth, ink and paper, libraries and documentation centres.
Hand painted banners, graphics or hand painted posters unfolds a vast specter of unsystematic media practices in India, intertwined with storytelling on the level of media ecologies, popular culture and technology. Auto rickshaw owners personalize their own little three wheelers with messages that do not exclusively contribute to advertising messages inside public spaces.
The autorickshaw mediated spaces of action do not normally fit into the notion of institutions, organizations and urban agents as strategies of social relations However it is precisely in the construction of a specific time and space that the production of culture needs to be questioned and assimilated in the vocabulary we are using to describe DIY media withing the space of the city: “the urban phenomenon contains a praxis (urban practice). Its forms, as such, cannot be reduced to other forms, but it absorbs and transforms them”. (cit. Lefevbre, The urban revolution)
ALF India comics
The alternative law forum (ALF) has been active since the year 2000 when a group of lawyers shared a strong opinion about the need to change substantially the legal representative system and decided to collaborate actively to reassess an ethical position in the domain of Indian law. They intervene in the domain of economical and social justice, in fact they started their activity offering legal advise to marginalized groups , which otherwise wouldn’t be in position to defend themselves in a legal process. One aspect of their work, as they successfully expanded their field of activity, is oriented in expanding knowledge production through collaborative and creative practices using low cost media forms . In fact “the phenomenon of new media allows reproduction and dissemination of information and material, and ALF’s media practices seek to engage with this and to exploit the democratic potential of new spaces opening up around media”.
Throughout the years, the alternative law forum has merged interest and combined in alternative dispute solution, critical research and pedagogical intervention. The latest will be the most relevant for my research, which will open a point for assessing the combination of case study I selected to show the expanding practice of comics as media education and intervention. In fact the alternative law forum has been active in producing comics in the arena of copyright and piracy, challenging the issue of Intellectual property rights. The comic they produce was a direct response to the educational comic made by the World Intellectual Property Organization.
Comics from Western Rajasthan
In order to better disclose and map the constitution of the new language through the media form of comics, I want to describe a documentary, which speaks about the work of World Comics India. In the state of Rajasthan several comic workshops have been carried out and a video documentation has been produced. The story that I will highlight in the next paragraphs is a short documentary called: “Swear by the river”.
The documentary begins the opening sequence through a voice-narration of a young woman, who lives in the Barmer district in Western Rajastan. In this particular region of Rajastan, tradition and community conduct is strongly engaged through relationship to tradition. Newborn girls are called: “Sorry” symbolizing a call to God, which means: “God, we are sorry that another girl is born”. Furthermore local traditions have still a strong practice in these villages, such as killing newborn girls withholding from punishment and keeping women uneducated. This documentary exploits the medium of comics for a campaign that encourages women to step out of their submissive condition and to argue against traditional practices and roles. The narrative focuses on the story of Kabbu, a young female, who is struggling to continue her education, as most of her peers. She says: “I learned how to express myself through comics and I did express myself”. The group of activists trained by the World Comics India team starts comic workshop in schools and villages. Young students produced a considerable amount of and during the period of three months, dealing with issues of dowry, unmatched marriage and women harassment. These stories are based on the experience of their lives inside villages, which discloses social and cultural issues. The story of Kabbu’s drawing had a strong impact and affected the beginning of the World comics campaign in this region. Her comic consisted in a story depicted two sisters being married at a very young age for economical reason. After, one of the sister’s condition worsens, because she is pregnant, their mother recognizes the mistake. The narrative, seen through Kabbus’ eyes, pinpoints to the condition of women, highlighting issues of early marriage and early pregnancy as expression of a more general women condition in rural India.
The documentary records young activists interventions, where they talk about the power of comics. Expressing his vision about comics, an activist called Kusum predicts the power of using comics as media tool: “through comics we are hoping to bring about a change in people’s attitude”. As a result of the workshops a campaign started in these villages. The campaign “Rights for our daughter” was exposed to larger audience through exhibitions held in tents, arranged with simple cloth and bamboo sticks in neighbouring villages, and collective activities such as street theatre, dancing and singing. Villagers responded to issues in public meetings and discussions for the first time. Madan, another activist, acknowledges that a change in attitude occurred among villagers: “They have realized that this is not about someone else, but it is about them; and that it is important to be aware of such issues. Through the practice of comics, a cultural phenomenon started where people begin to envision transformation between social relations and the politics of representation. When the exhibitions were taken to the streets, many people inquire about the comics. Also illiterate people were affected by the pictures, and with the aid of translators, they came to know about the campaign; they wanted to hear and listen about themselves. A young woman is speaking to the camera about her determination to join the campaign: “first I told my husband that I’m going to participate in the campaign, he replied: you wish. Then I asked my mother in law and she said no, but I had to come, I had to”. The documentary ended with a positive account of the story of Kabbu, who joined the campaign as a World Comic activist and obtained permission from her family to continue her education. This documented account shows the relevance of introducing media education among small communities, who participate collectively in the production of their own visual narratives.
The example of the documentary expressed the manifestation of the media language, used as a tool for social and cultural phenomena to occur. Thus, the acquisition of writing through comics, on one hand, expanded into practice of material appropriation, while the narrative that was created intertwined the social structure into a medium of culture itself. As visual images are used to tell stories, they create systems of representations of particular context. Thus the experience of drawing comics is participative in ways the medium is used, but also shares the experience of space and time of that culture. In the article “Tell me a story: the power of narrative in the practice of teaching art”, Amry Jane Zander is referring to contexts of visual imagery, which “ create visual narratives that imply certain cultural values and beliefs. Comparing contemporary visual media against the study of art from different historical times and places shows us that issues related to body image or other abstract concepts change considerably over time and context”.
motivating media education
I was fascinated by the intersection of culture and education in the discovery of the approach to education practices in India. However as I could read from different reports, educational progress seemed persistently technology driven. I found that the media intervention aspect of the work or World Comics India, for example, is significantly based on a self-education model and consists of local interventions where the only resources needed were basic drawing skills. The need to use tools at hand, in the comic example, illustrates the fact that an intensive web of interventions in the field of media education is taking place simultaneously among the rush to implement technological kiosks in rural areas without a proper approach to education. The research on media education conducted for Unesco significantly highlights the role of media education, which “necessarily entails a more ‘active’, ’student-centred’, ‘participatory’ pedagogy. Media education was, it was argued, a matter of ‘learning by doing’; and it was an area in which teachers needed to recognize the considerable knowledge and expertise of their students”.
The practice of teaching media that I will discuss at length in this chapter, specifically in the case study of comics, disembarks from relations with progress and development perceived by the standards of national politics. Nevertheless it opens crucial questions of the reproduction of cultural environments through media interventions. It is significant to affirm that the foundation of power relations in the political and economic milieu reside inside complicated networks of social determination. This aspect is going to be examined further when analysing ways through which self-education practices challenges significantly the role of cultural representation. Ashis Nandy exposed very critically the dominance implied in developmental paradigms, which could better illustrate my viewpoint and take on the subject:
“From colonialism, development has inherited the idea of a hierarchical ordering of living and non-living beings and the belief that those who are on the higher rungs of history have their right as well as responsibility to shape the ways of life and the life chances of those on the lower.”
Furthermore, I will rather describe and illustrate the educational aspect of specific media interventions through grassroot comic practice. Grassroot comic practice in India is a pioneering educational model where comic media forms challenges the deterministic aspect of the development paradigm. When activists teach villagers how to draw comics and how to create a story the people begin to express and discuss opinions that need to be taken in consideration, which most of the time incorporate health, illiteracy and gender discrimination.
Comics are an extremely powerful tool that disseminates ideas and raise voices among groups that share the same community furthermore reaching a level of language that can be understood even outside their immediate sphere. Most of the time matters happening in smaller villages outside the reach and attention of mainstream media often lack a representative voice. On the other hand this parallel landscape of different media interventions emerges simultaneously out of necessity. To make comics there aren’t requirements of electricity, high levels of education or sophisticated technological tools. You really only need a paper and pencil, which erases the issues of access, material ownership and sophisticated knowledge.
Nehru place: technological market
As I move through many hardware shops in Nehru place, I discover that appropriation and redistribution of technology creatively activate possibilities of multiple practices through “do it yourself” everyday life situations. In the market, located in the South of Delhi, you find hardware repair shops, second hand monitors, small stands with cartridge refill experts, pirated software vendors and every piece of technology at hand, from processors and motherboards to webcams. Nehru place has become the main IT hub for major towns and regions surrounding the city of Delhi, so in order to get computer pieces, customers have to travel as much as 12 hours by public transport. This implication becomes a very significant fact to understand further the dynamic of the market and the culture of the technology users.
Companies such as Microsoft and HP have their offices in the upper floors of the surrounding buildings and on every corner of the walking area small-improvised second hand shops operate in a parallel dimension. Competition becomes the real challenge where prices between hardware suppliers and “do it yourself” repairing shops shifts as more technological goods make it to the market. Technological resources available at hand feed the necessary elements for the redistribution of power. The small sellers would improve on their customer capability through an explosion of signs that would signal their shops. In this visually clustered space filled with advertisement slogans and loud shouting in order to attract customers, the elements of culturally significant relations slowly begin to emerge. There is a major difference between the authorized computer IT shops on one hand and services such as ad hoc build shops for cartridge refill on the other. One of the main differences is the practice of cartridge refilling. This is an illegal practice, but furthermore is accepted, as cartridges supplier’s shops can’t stop the flow of improvised card boxes arranged around the market square. The main reason why the refilling is so popular depends upon the economic situation: for the manual refill of the black ink cartridge the customer would have to pay only 40 rupees (0,40 E cent). In the official supplier shop, he would have to pay 1.040 rupees (18 Euro), which becomes a considerable economical difference.
There are different ways technologies intertwine with social groups and communities that pervade the everyday life systems. Economical values inherent in goods and commodities mould synchronic attributes of that culture. Thus seeking out characteristics of these cultural modulations in the everyday life becomes an important step in this research. The understanding of the digital divide raises issues such as the establishment of structures of power and ethnic biases. The diversity and creativity of appropriating, redistributing, remixing and intervening in the material culture that I witnessed in India, flourishes into a process of experimentation. There is a considerable shift in the culture of copying and distributing of technology entangled in local practices. Thus levels of technological transmission imply a constant activity of seeking out definition of media and technology in correspondence to their social and cultural milieu. The ways technologies intertwine with social groups and communities in India, doesn’t exclusively affect the conceptual framework of everyday practices of consuming material typologies as accustomed in the western framework of thought. Thus, this entanglement multiplies the need for new ways of understanding social communication and opens fields of research in the cultural dynamics of the Indian technological walla. The argument that Raymond Williams brought forward is that “the manner in which a technology is used, its “local” appropriation, is argued to be more closely linked to the social organization of the society in which the technology is deployed than any essential qualities the technology itself is understood to possess”
