Christopher Shepherd

Parenting in the Connected Home

New media technologies are a source of anxiety and concern for many parents. In this paper, we report on the parent-child relationships that surround children’s use of the Internet, television, video, DVD, and electronic games. We present three case-study vignettes drawn from an ongoing study of the contemporary Australian home as a node in dense local, regional, and global communication networks. Using these case studies, we identify and draw out some strategies and stances pursued by parents and children to manage their respective uses of new media technologies. We conclude with a discussion of the issues and concerns that surround parenting and new media technologies, noting that use of, and access to, new media technologies are both a site of contested and ongoing negotiation for parents and children, and an occasion for the negotiation of the parent-child relationship. This paper represents an extension and further exploration of issues addressed previously (Arnold, Shepherd, Gibbs, & Mecoles, 2006a, 2006b).

Mobilizing Local Knowledge and Asserting Culture; The Cultural Politics of In Situ Conservation of Agricultural Biodiversity

Knowing and deploying local, indigenous, or traditional knowledge has become an increasingly important instrument for the design and implementation of development and conservation initiatives in the Third World. This article explores the strategic mobilization of local knowledge through a case study of the politics of knowledge that emerges within projects aimed at the on-farm conservation of agricultural biodiversity in the Peruvian highlands. In framing traditional farmer practices and knowledge as integral to agrobiodiversity conservation, development and conservation groups take recourse to a particular construct of Andean culture. Yet tension arises between the customary delegitimization of Andean cultural traditions and the new appeals to value them, ambivalence emerges within interventionary discourse practice, and the recognition of local farmer expertise in a broader context of social hierarchy is rendered problematic. This case study of local knowledge, its mobilization and negotiation within a particular rendering of “culture,” ideological differences between institutions, agricultural heterogeneity, and the agency of recipient farmer groups have broader implications for how we study the utility and value of local knowledge and “cultural essentialism” in other development and conservation contexts, including those of East Timor.

From in vitro to in situ: On the precarious extension of agricultural science in the indigenous 'Third World'

Southern non-governmental organizations (NGOs) now act as important intermediaries in the transfer of agricultural science and technology for the development of Third World food production and markets. This paper presents an ethnographic exploration at the interface of Peruvian agricultural development NGOs and highland peasant communities, who are encouraged to leave subsistence farming and produce instead for wider markets. Following a methodology of symmetrical anthropology based in actor-network theory, I show how sociotechnical processes that underpin agricultural development rely on constructions of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ categories of practice in order to perpetuate efforts to change the peasant production methods. Yet as peasants appropriate and reinvent development’s technologies and resources, NGOs are pressured to further control the ‘discrepant’ responses and behaviours of peasants. Focusing on a number of NGOs and indigenous, Quechua-speaking communities in the southern Andes, I argue that the incorporation of peasants into markets is made problematic by both entrenched racial tensions and the creative capacity of peasants to circumvent the disciplining and social planning strategies of NGOs.

Imperial science: The Rockefeller Foundation and Agricultural Science in Peru, 1940–1960

When in the 1940s the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) set its sights on the agriculture of Latin American countries, it had a vision that this was both backward yet held real possibilities for improvement. The source of the problem, however, was thought to lie not with farmers but with the inadequacies of the existing scientific structures in Latin America, the scientists they housed, and the methods deployed. For the RF, these were failing to produce good scientific knowledge which would then ‘trickle down’ and out into society. Even the best scientists there were seen to be hampered by vocational surroundings in which agricultural research and education were believed to suffer from ignorance, indolence, politics, insecurity of tenure, lack of physical facilities, lack of adequate salaries, and an attitude that work in experimental plots was demeaning. From the perspective of the RF, little of merit could be said for science and agriculture in Peru or in the rest of Latin America. Yet there was the expectation that if agriculture there could be properly established as an experimental science, true knowledge would then flow from the laboratory out into the fields thereby redeeming what the RF perceived as inefficient and unscientific farming. With a characteristically individualistic approach to scientific development, the RF began a series of initiatives to foster a system of experimental science that was ‘still in the embryonic stage’ by promoting scientists who were seen to be exceptional. Over the coming decades, this approach was to become the dominant model that informed the emergent postwar discourse of agricultural development and its ever-expanding network of international research centres and development institutions (Escobar, 1995). The aim of this essay is to show how this individual ‘exceptionalism’ was inextricably linked to the RF’s construction of Latin Americans as ‘other’. It was an ‘otherness’ that depicted a social context that was imagined to be replete with contaminants—personal, moral, administrative, political and methodological—against the backdrop of the United States whose science and agriculture stood as a model for how things should be. Focusing Science as Culture Vol. 14, No. 2, 113–137, June 2005

Domestic Information and Communication Technologies and Subject-Object Relations: Gender, Identity, and Family Life

This paper examines the place of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the contemporary Western home and the role these technologies play in the affective shaping and constitution of gender, identity, and intersubjective family relations. In particular, we focus on the subject-object relations between people and technological artefacts to analyse how these associations contribute to the construction of domestic identities, facilitate ICT use, and transgress neatly drawn gendered difference. Involving Melbourne households as collaborators in our research through the use of a “Domestic Probes” methodology, we focus our case study on one suburban family - the Lukics - to support our claims that subject- object relations constitute both subjects and objects.1 Our contribution to family studies is to suggest that close attention to the network of associations between subjects and objects, people and technologies, can enhance an understanding of the entwining of domestic identities and technologies in the home.

Stretching the friendship: On the politics of replicating a dairy in East Timor

In this article, we address the problem of how technoscience knowledge and practices are translated when they are relocated during the highly organized, international encounters between cultures, often called “development.” We examine efforts to build a “model” Australian dairy and instantiate Australian dairy practices in East Timor following East Timor’s recent emergence as a nation-state. Through this ethnography of development’s construction of a heterogeneous sociotechnical assemblage, we show how knowledge and power inform the practices that enable Western models of production and exchange to be reassembled in postcolonial spaces. In aiming to conduct a symmetrical anthropology of development based in the actor-network approach, we follow development’s actors and actants as well as its epistemic divisions—nature and culture, human and nonhuman, us and them—into East Timor, arguing that the politics and agency of technology transfer is distributed among discourse, epistemology, and human and nonhuman actors.

The modern origins of traditional agriculture: Colonial policy, swidden development, and environmental degradation in eastern Timor

The origin of swidden systems is typically portrayed as a pre-colonial, pre-nationalist, and pre-developmentalist tradition, subsequently interrupted and eroded by colonial exploitation and post-colonial technoscience in favour of market agriculture. A recent counter-position to this ‘anteriority model’ presents swidden systems as reactionary ‘refuge agriculture’ in search of remote locations to circumvent state accountability (Scott 2009). A third model traces swidden agricultural processes as a ‘dual economy’ of both subsistence and commodity production. This article examines these approaches through a study of maize and rice in eastern (Portuguese) Timor, where a particular type of environmentally damaging swidden system and colonialism have been shown to be co-emergent. Accommodating new archival data and adding detail to the established position on Timor’s agricultural history, it is proposed that the early twentieth century was an important phase in the extension and dominance of maize in Portuguese Timor; and while far-reaching modification to rice cultivation is generally associated with the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, it is shown that the early twentieth century was also a major developmental period for this grain. It is further suggested that dynamics of agricultural change have differed across the colonial divide between Portuguese and Dutch Timor. The article calls for more comparative research on the divided island of Timor.

Ethnography, Agency, and Materiality: Anthropological Perspectives on Rice Development in East Timor

Rice in contemporary East Timor is multivalent, with a rich historical legacy. In the current postcolonial context, rice agriculture and the value of rice as both a consumption good and a development objective remain a priority. Government-sponsored rice production is framed variously as “food security” for the poor and as a key objective of “agricultural modernization” for a new class of dynamic farmers in a progressive market-oriented food production sector. In this article we present a comparative study of two rice development projects in East Timor that promote enhanced yields and production of irrigated rice through improved seed germplasm and other technologies of development. The Tapo-Memo scheme and the initiative known as “Seeds of Life” illustrate contrasting engagements with technoscientific development. We adopt three intersecting anthropological perspectives: sociocultural anthropology, the anthropology of development, and applied development anthropology. From the former we know rice as a set of cultural practices. The anthropology of development critiques and analyzes rice development in the light of existing farmer practices and technosocial relations. And applied anthropology seeks to act instrumentally to improve rice development interventions. The novelty of the article is to mix these perspectives while recognizing the methodological, interpretative, and subdisciplinary differences that separate them. We incorporate the analytical tool of the “boundary object” to examine how rice agency is experientially constituted and politically negotiated along the contours and at the boundaries of international development operations, national policy, extension agents, and the everyday lives, livelihoods, and aspirations of farmers.

“Seeing is Believing”: The Visual Politics of Development and Resource Management

In recent times science-based development and resource management have seen a shift from the use of vision and visual representation as an illustrative tool to one of a self-conscious strategy in the rearticulation and extension of objectively knowable worlds to the recipients of development. As images proclaiming objective meaning are projected across cultural and racial divides to transform the knowledge world of subjects from supposed states of situated ignorance to states of universal truth, purveyors of reason and modernity de-naturalize the cultures of Others while naturalising the meanings they uphold as objective, rational, efficient, and so on. Drawing on ethnographic research carried out in Peru, this essay explores the use of visual media in development and its relationship to labor processes and economic integration. The analysis links the traffic of visual media, discourse and metaphoricity to the lives of Andean subjects at a point where visual interpretations diverge in order to highlight the politics of perception that underlies the use of vision and visual representation in development. It is argued that given their frustration in securing the participation of subjects through traditional means, agents for development and resource management in the Andes are using visual media in an effort to sell the culturally-rooted doctrine of objectivity through which subjects are at once rendered distant and conscripted into the arduous labor that rural development and environmental initiatives involve. We conclude that the ontological divisions and simplifications that result from this practice may alienate the supposed beneficiaries of Andean development as much as enroll them into its perceptual politics.

The Sociology of Associations in Family Research and Practice

Readers of this edition of the Journal of Family Studies are referred to the companion piece entitled “Domestic Information and Communication Technologies and Subject-Object Relations: Gender, Identity, and Family Life” (Arnold, Shepherd, Gibbs, & Mecoles, 2006). In that paper, we attempted to trace the interplay of affect in sociotechnical relations in the home, particularly in the area of gender identity and the production of interpersonal social roles. In doing this, we drew an empirical and theoretical connection between gender and ICT use through what could be called a “sociology of association” (Latour, 2005). What does this approach to a particular study of ICTs and gender have to offer students of the family more generally? The present paper offers our reflections on this question, drawing initially on the analogy of intelligent design and proceeding to some tenets of a sociology of association with specific reference to family studies.