S2E5: “Connectivity and Culture: Digital Anthropology in Rural Argentina”
2025-10-23 40 min
Description & Show Notes
In the fifth episode of the series Luisa Conti and Fergal Lenehan, from the Centre for Digital Interculturality Studies, talk to Martina Di Tullio, an archaeologist and anthropologist based in Argentina who has undertaken extensive scholarly work together with rural Indigenous communities in Northwestern Argentina in relation to Internet usage. The conversation touches on Internet provision in rural Argentina, its impact on the researched communities as well as challenges towards digital sovereignty .
So, what – according to Martina – is the future of the Internet in Indigenous communities?
Listen to find out!
For more information on ReDICo and the ReDICo Centre for Digital Interculturality Studies, see: www.redico.eu
To join the ReDICo Hub, go to: https://hub.redico.eu
Visit the ReDICo YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DigInterculture
For more information on Martina Di Tullio’s work, see: https://deerlab.academia.edu/MartinaDiTullio
Transcript
Chapter 1: Introduction Hello and welcome to ReDICo, the podcast for digital interculturality. The science podcast is brought to you by the Centre for Digital Interculturality Studies, which is presently based at the University of Jena. Our interest is in the intersection between intercultural communications and Internet studies. This episode is part of the second series of our podcast dedicated to the topic of Internet futures. The first series looked at freedom and the Internet and is still available from most podcast platforms.
So, I'm joined today by my colleague from the Centre for Digital Interculturality Studies, Fergal Lenehan. Hello everybody. And our guest today is Martina Di Tullio. Hello, thank you for having me. Oh, you're very welcome. So let's start. Martina is an archaeologist and anthropologist based in Argentina. She's a member of the research collective Palka Project, a name that means meeting point or crossroads in Quechua. For over 15 years, this group has worked closely with rural indigenous communities in northwestern Argentina.
Two of these communities are at the centre of Martina's PhD research: Cusi Cusi and Lagunillas del Farallón. She will pronounce it better than I do. Her work examines how the arrival of the Internet has been reshaping these communities, places that despite being long standing sites of lithium extraction, only gained connectivity a few years ago. I have to say that there are many aspects of your work that can help us better understand the present and engage with it critically in order to imagine possible futures. So let's begin. Martina, could you tell us more about these two towns and about, not just the name, and about how the Internet, so to speak, first arrived there and how essentially you study these towns as a cultural anthropologist? Thank you, Luisa, for the introduction. Um, so I just...
tell you all the story. As you mentioned, I first studied archaeology at the University of Buenos Aires and there I joined the research team, Pallqa, and I had been working in this region called Puna in the province of Jujuy, which is in the extreme northwest of Argentina. So it's a region very high up in the Andes Mountains at over 3 ,800 meters above sea level and it's very hard to reach. It takes over four hours driving from any major city to get there. So when I first traveled there with the team in 2017, we went to the village called Cusi Cusi, which means Joy Joy in Quechua. It's a little village of around 300 people very close to the border with Bolivia.
And when I first arrived there I remember, I have it written in my diary also, that everything seemed red to me, like the unpaved roads, the houses made of sun-dried bricks, or also the surrounding mountains, everything is very red. And the people who live there are legally recognized as an Indigenous community, specifically of Quechua identity, and their traditional lifestyle is based mostly on Lama herding and also small-scale agriculture. So there is no kind of mobile phone or data coverage in any part of the Puna even nowadays.
Chapter 2: Two Towns, Two Stories of (Internet) Connection And in 2017, in Cusi Cusi, there was only a small place with some computers without access to the Internet, but this had to be paid for and not many people were familiar with the use of computers in general, so this was not a very used space. And mostly people communicated with a single telephone booth that was available in one of the buildings of the government. So going there for me and for the team at first, coming from the big metropolis of Buenos Aires, it felt like a place of disconnection and we could totally focus on our work, we were doing mostly archaeological excavations and that sort of work.
And it was like that until 2019, when the government of this province of Jujuy applied a policy to address the issue of the digital divide. And they extended the fiber optic network all along the national routes, including the Puna, and they started giving free connectivity to the different villages of the Puna. One of them was Cusi Cusi, where they created a free WiFi hotspot in the main square of the village. So in 2019, they had permanent and free access to the Internet in the square, but not in the houses.
I was not there, but in 2019, the governor of the province traveled to Cusi Cusi to present this new infrastructure. It was like a whole event,
And in one of my first trips, I was joined by another colleague of the research team who is also an anthropologist, and he was starting to do research in this other little village called Lagunillas del Farajón. Here we pronounce Lagunillas del Farajón in Argentinian Spanish, but that would be the correct way. And this is a small town only 20 kilometres away from Cusi Cusi. And it's a bit smaller, it has around 200 inhabitants. And so I joined my colleague in one of my first field trips to go there, to visit there, and I was also very amused by how different it was from Cusi Cusi.
First, it's the highest village, I mean it's the highest inhabited village of the country because it's at 4200 meters above sea level. It's very hard to breathe there. It's very hard to reach also. Second, it's not all red, like Cusi Cusi, it's all white because the sediments are different. So it's like the same style of Cusi Cusi, but everything is like white, gray, it's much drier. And the third thing that amused me was that because of its complicated geography, the government could not extend the fiber optic there when they were doing the infrastructure work. So instead they gave the people 40 parabolic antennas for free Internet, satellite Internet.
And they distributed these antennas among all the houses. And also something that was very interesting is that the Wi-Fi that they got, all the Wi-Fis had the same password so anyone could access from any point of the village. So when I went there in 2022 the situation was completely different than the one in Cusi Cusi because they already had a connection in their houses, they had almost permanent connection because no matter which part of the town they were, they could already access that.
Chapter 3: Research and Engagement Going back to your question, I think you also, more methodologically, what I do, I do ethnography. I've been doing ethnography, which means going there, staying there, making friends, making acquaintances, building trust relationships with the local communities. Of course, I ask for permission, official permission, to the authorities of the communities to conduct my research and also to each individual participating. I do participant observation in different activities.
I recorded a lot of formal interviews with the participants. I think I have over a hundred interviews so far. But of course, usually the most interesting conversations are not recorded. So most of my information also comes from casual conversations. I also did some anonymized surveys, especially to students at the schools, the teenagers mostly. Because the school principals also wanted to gather information about the uses, the kind of contents that students were in contact with. So I shared the results of the surveys with them.
And then I also organized and conducted several workshops regarding digital media because the people asked for them. They felt, when I was first talking to them, they were complaining about how little they knew about how to handle digital technologies. Suddenly, they were facing so many new things and challenges, so they asked if I could give them a hand. And of course, I was not an expert in digital education, but I did know people in the field. So I gathered, yeah, we made like a little team with other colleagues and especially...
a colleague who works in an NGO specialized in digital education and we prepared special workshops for them, for these communities, which were great experiences: We had workshops about digital citizenship or digital security and the different things that also they had asked for. So, yeah, and we tried to also use it as a way of giving back for their participation in the research. Yeah, so digital access is not just the Internet. There is so much behind, as digital literacy, which is absolutely important. And also what kind of digital access they have, if you have the smartphone computer, but also if they have the Internet at home or not, or at the main square. Chapter 4: Transformation of Connections and Cultures
It will be very interesting to hear from you how this introduction of the Internet has changed the community in terms of cultures, as a normality, but also in terms of social cohesion, how much they were doing things together and how was a change in sociality through the Internet. On the other side also, the cultural aspect: so before they were sharing so much knowledge, and then obviously they were still sharing it, but much more knowledge from outside was coming in. So I think it diversified more the people living there.So it would be nice if you could tell a bit of what you observed in relation to changes and also if you
could say something in relation to how the difference is in having the Internet in the square or having the Internet for example in every house? So when I first started my research they only had Internet in the main square but they wanted to have in their households and they were fighting with the government while demanding the government to extend it and since the government was not answering to this demand they had this project,
which was very interesting, to create a community-owned network. They wanted to be able to own, to manage, to be in charge of the service of their own Internet. And they had organized it with an activist of this kind of networks. But they applied for funding to do so, because of course they did not have the resources and they needed technical help. And that funding they had to ask to the national state. And they were about to be approved, that was a project that was about to be approved, but the provincial government intervened and called it off,
because they said that they already were taking charge of that area. So that and with many other things that happened in 2023 with the provincial government, generated like a general distrust in the government. And in the end, at the end of 2023, there was a private company that was allowed to work there and offer household service and people chose to do that. And the community project was not possible, unfortunately, it was a very interesting idea. But now, since the end of 2023, they do have it in their households.
And so I've been documenting that change, because that's how, yeah, in the last years they have had permanent connections in their houses. And they notice, they themselves notice how much the village has changed, not only in comparison to before the Internet in the main square, but also comparing what the main square meant with all the problems that they had with that, because they would, the bandwidth was not strong enough for all of them. And some people acquired routers to repeat the signal inside of their houses. And there were a lot of inter-communitarian conflicts.
But also people are like, well, “but at least we went out, at least we saw each other, at least it was a space of community”. And it was also a space that was very important for my research because it was very easy for me to just go there and see people and start talking to them. And since the end of 2023, it's again, everyone is in their houses and they don't have so many reasons to go out. So going back to your question, that was like the context. You were asking about the cultural transformation and the place of the strength of social ties.
Let me give more context, I think it's important to understand, to put all of this in a more historical frame and political frame to understand because indigenous communities of the Andes have always been in contact with each other and other groups, the herding lifestyle has always been mobile and of course no culture is static, it's not that yet the cultural transformation happens now. So when talking about cultural transformation, social ties, what truly interests me is their intersection with wider power structures. So over and over again in history there have been more powerful groups.
that disintegrated communities spread ideas and aspirations that aligned with their interests in order to access lands or resources. This was the case with the Incan Empire when they conquered the area, and then again in a more violent and dehumanizing way with the Spanish conquistadores. Today, as you mentioned at the beginning, the Puna is part of the Lithium Triangle, a region with over 60 % of the world's lithium reserves. For those who don't know, lithium is one of the most important minerals used in the production of electrical batteries, used in digital technologies and also electrical cars and so on.
So, there are many foreign companies interested in advancing their mining activities in the area. And this goes against locals' interest because this activity, this extraction uses and pollutes a lot of water, which is very scarce in this area. So the Internet and digital technologies, I think they are not neutral in this context. Of course, there are many factors that affect local lives, not only the Internet, the global and national economies, the spread of evangelism, climate change and so on. But these technologies are usually framed in a positive and life-saving way, like:
Now that people are connected, the hegemonic discourses might say that they can find more information on how to get out of their marginal condition, as if it was a matter of information, like Payal Arora says in her work. But even though, of course, it's great that they could access Internet just as everyone else also because it's something that they wanted, it has come with a cost. And it's important to say that the Internet they are having their first access to is not the same Internet that maybe we from cities have first access to. It's not.
Yeah, it's today's Internet. It's an Internet ruled by social media, algorithmic recommendations and infinite strategies to retain our attention to keep us there. So it is not just a place of communicating to others or obtaining information, as you were saying, but it also shapes certain ways of living, certain ways of thinking, feeling, of relating to the world and to the others. So in both communities, these technologies have been incorporated into multiple practices, in multiple ways, with the good and the bad, as they say. But I intend to go beyond our relativistic approach and see the articulations to the political implications.
So, for example, in both communities, people express a lot that they feel they are becoming more like people in the cities. So I asked, what do you mean by this? And actually the answer is, yeah, we don't go out anymore. And this means it refers to, well, not going out to work in the fields, which is a structural part of their identity and lifestyle and tradition. Not going to find their neighbors in person and text them. I mean, they text them instead. And they just, yeah, they realize they are staying at home or they're having like a more sedentary lifestyle in general. And they are also very aware of their phone 24 -7, for example, some express that they feel they have less time than before because they feel they're always busy. So the days go by faster because they're all the time permanently connected.
And a very big worry is also about people not going to the community meetings anymore, because they can find out via WhatsApp group what happens, what is going on, what people say, which is also seen as kind of affecting the sacredness of those assemblies, those meetings. In fact, I was never allowed to go to one of those meetings, because it's only for people of the community. Chapter 5: Reflections on Academic Coloniality One criticism that is often made of this type of cultural anthropological research is that it's a type of parachute research where you have white researchers parachuting in from urban areas, who other than the communities in which they live for a short period and come out. How did you consciously attempt to overcome this type of outsiderness and this type of othering, which is basically...
it traditionally has been a distinct problem in cultural anthropological research, as I'm sure you know. Because, I mean, from one perspective, you're talking here about the power relations in which the communities that you are talking about are embedded in. But I mean, you are also part of these power relations from outside, very obviously, in terms of epistemology, in terms of methodology, in terms of your status as a settler, a white settler from Buenos Aires. How did you consciously engage with these questions, if you can answer sort of succinctly? Yeah, I mean, it's a very good question and, of course, it's very important.
Of course academic extractivism and academic coloniality is a problem and in our research group we're very aware of that, very conscious of that, very worried about that. Also in our universities, studying anthropology in Latin America necessarily means addressing that question and always trying to see what we can do to not reproduce the colonial legacy of anthropology inside our own societies.
So, of course, I cannot deny that I myself am in a different situation than the communities that I work with. So, basically, there are many instances by which we try not to reproduce these logics, and the most important is the engagement, the engagement with the communities. So, for example, it's not casual that my team works there for 15 years, because what people ask from us is to not just:
go, get some data and then never come back again, which is maybe a common practice in other kinds of academia. But they ask for us to come back. And coming back means having the time of building relationships, real relationships with people and also of offering help in whatever they might need and basically creating reciprocal relationships with people. So, OK, so you're talking about we go there. You're talking about creating a long term sustainable relationship with the people. Yeah. OK. And also, I think it's important, for example, it's not casual either that I have this political interest in what's going on in the area because
it means that from academia we are supporting the demands, the resistance, the political claims that the people we work with are worried about. And then of course in many small instances such as the workshops or many other ways in which we can help and try to neutralize those differences. Chapter 6: Local Strategies Towards Digital Sovereignty So you have mentioned before in another context that WhatsApp
only allows one account per phone. Something that becomes a real issue for families sharing a single device. So to me, that perfectly illustrates how digital infrastructure built within a capitalist framework is often designed by and for the privileged and rarely for those with fewer resources. At the same time, these infrastructures can also enable alternative voices and grassroots in relation to their organizing. From your perspective, therefore, that's my question: Is there any real balance here? Or is the inequality simply reproduced in new ways?
So, as Mark Fisher said, capitalism has found a way to allow for anti-capitalist discourses to have a place in media without really affecting the power structure. So I think the ways we relate to digital technologies fit into this pattern. Of course, they allow for alternative voices to be spread and help people in organizing. For example, in JuJuy Puna, there are many ways in which digital media have been used to resist oppression. For example, two years ago, there was a massive uprising in the province against extractivist measures that were established by the government. There were riots and demonstrations
and people were live-streaming them with videos on social media, people who were participating in the demonstrations, who were staying in touch during moments of maybe police repression, through WhatsApp. So it was fundamental for them to have this connectivity and it helped them organize their resistance. But at the same time, the government was also using this media to spread fake news, for example, via WhatsApp, in order to scare people away from the places of protest, or even to find and arrest dissidents. And they were also controlling the official media to spread their own version of the story. In the end, after over two months of protest, the resistance was neutralized.
Well, and I think cases like this happen often in many parts of the world. So I don't think there can be a balance if we just leave it to how things work today. Digital technologies and the Internet, the way they are now, are designed from hegemonic powers in order to feed the reproduction of the logics that benefit them. This can be seen both in exceptional political struggles, like the one I mentioned, but most importantly, I think it can be seen in the shaping of everyday lives and subjectivities in a way that is useful for the model. I think this is important to recognize in order to think of alternatives, which I believe play more on the ground of either changing the way we relate to these technologies in the everyday life or changing also the way the technologies themselves work.
Yeah, so Martina, you've shown in sort of how different models of Internet provisions shape social life very interestingly and how connectivity in turn affects the cohesion autonomy and future trajectories of communities. Imagine sort of an indigenous community with no Internet which comes to you drawing on the experience you've studied in these communities for advice and how to implement it. So what would you suggest? Or to turn it around I suppose: What would the Internet itself need to change to truly serve such a community rather than forcing it to adapt sort of an outside model. So the question here is, I suppose, how can we do a better Internet based on your working experience?
I think the key lies in what you mentioned, not trying to adapt to an outside model in general that will always be the advice from anthropology, I think, always to plan from and for the territories and this means...
reflecting on what the Internet means for a specific community, what they expect from it, what they would like it to bring into their lives and what they would not like. As it is an infrastructure for so many aspects of everyday life, I think it is necessary to have instances to spread consciousness on how it might affect what they value and the logic on which their culture operates. So once that is decided in an ideal scenario, of course, it will follow to design a local network that fits those aspirations. Now, I'm not a technician, but I'm also not coming up with anything new either, because in Latin America, as you were saying, there are many experiences of community-owned networks in rural Indigenous contexts that have followed these ideas,
for example in Oaxaca in Mexico, and there are many communities that have built their own networks and given employment in maintenance for the local youth and charging local families for the support and sustainability of the service. So this has helped in avoiding migrations, in avoiding frustrations because of dependence on external actors. And also there were some cases, very interesting cases in which as the bandwidth was not so strong, the communities decided to establish limits to the daily use for each member or each family. And there is a work by Fernanda Rosa who explains that using only what is necessary is also an important part when it comes to sharing.
And this made local people more cautious of what they used their time in the Internet for. It sounds like the Cosmovisión, I got to know it while with the Mapuche in Chile: the idea of using the resources as far as you need them, so not more, not less. So it sounds like taking this Cosmovisión into the digital. Yeah, yeah. Well, of course, there are so many Indigenous cosmovisions in general, they ...
have another relationship to nature, to resources, to being aware of what is available and focusing more on this is very common in the Andes, focusing more on the continuity of life and of the resources, their sustainability in time, over other ideas such as progress or accumulation or growth, right? So another interesting thing about these community networks from Mexico was that they also created intranetworks, intranets that could be accessed without any limits by the locals and in there they gather digital resources regarding their traditions, their histories, their languages.
So, these are very interesting experiences in digital sovereignty, which of course, as you were saying before, they require a lot of work and a lot of effort because they require strong community organizations, they require resources. The alternatives will always be more complicated, right? They are unknown paths. And still there is the question of what would happen if they had infinite access to the network, right? Because we have this idea of the Internet as an infinite service.
And I think, as Éric Sadin says, that the question of the limit is an issue common to both the economic libertarian ideas and the way the digital technologies work. Because recently I also heard an Argentinian psychologist talk about how some decades ago smoking was so common and accepted in society. And it took years of policies and spreading awareness to limit the practice to specific places and moments and even people. And, of course, the Internet has many more benefits than smoking. But I think it's an interesting parallelism to think about because what I'm trying to say...
is that it's not only about changing the Internet itself, which we should, but also about changing the role we give it in our lives. Or as one of the participants of my research put it in the Jujuy Puna: We should not allow the Internet to catch us, to catch our lives, to take power over our lives. So yeah, I think it's a question of both changing how the Internet works and also changing what role it has in our lives, in our society, in how it structures our time, our space and all of that. Chapter 7: The Latin American Digital Anthropology Network The Internet has reached the highest town in Argentina and the digitality is transforming us and I'm wondering actually...
Can we think anthropology without the digital? That is the question we asked ourselves in relation to intercultural communication, which is a connected science. Can we think of cultures, of interculturality, of society, of anything... without considering digitalization? So we have created ReDICo: “Researching Digital Interculturality Co-operatively”. We want to create a network of people who want to rethink reality or ways of analyzing reality through this consciousness of the digital permeating it. And so for this reason also you have been involved in our network, but you are also part of another network which has been created in Latin America: the network of digital anthropology.
Maybe you want to say something on this, on your network and also on how this field is developing in Latin America and what distinctive perspectives or approaches are emerging there, maybe also different than what you observe in other areas. Well, yes. Digital anthropology has been developed in Latin America for many years, but I think it did not have much institutional space until recently, as in many places maybe with the pandemic. Universities of the region started introducing certain debates on the digital in more formal contexts, such as seminars and courses.
And this led many of us to realize that it could be a field of its own identity or with its own debates. And in this context is that some students from Chile and Argentina decided to start the network, the Latin American Network of Digital Anthropology, at first with just a Discord channel and a YouTube channel recording certain conversations. And this caught a lot of attention real fast because there were so many anthropologists in the region trying to look for ways of continuing their work through maybe digital ethnography and the methods, or also trying to understand the realities we were living during the pandemic, during the quarantine with all the digitalization of everyday lives.
So, in 2021, the network organized the first Latin American conference of digital anthropology. It was online. And since then, the conference has been taking place each year. Yeah, every year, it was only once in person in Chile. But then it was so far it has been online most of the time and this year is going to be in December. It's free. It's a very nice experience. I was there both participating and also organizing this conference. And I think what is going on there is not only just reflecting with and about digital technologies, but also about our region and our place in the production of knowledge. So I think what is distinctive about
our conversations is the consciousness of our geopolitical situation and the shared concern on how coloniality and colonialism are being reproduced, intensified or resisted through the digital means. I think we all share a common education in decolonial literature. And yeah, I think that's what we bring to the debates, living and researching in territories with people that have been subject to multiple ways of exploitation over the centuries and also leading to such unequal societies today is something that structures our questions, concerns and also theories. So basically I would say
that what we bring is a strong political engagement.Whenever I listened to presentations regarding a new technology, a new development in digital technology or something, or the new revolution on AI or things like that, I could not help but always wonder and perhaps also ask:
Where are these technologies coming from? Who are they benefiting and who are they oppressing? What are we doing all of this for? And what kind of lives are we planning for our futures with them? So these questions are the questions we'll take with us, So, thank you Martina very much. Now to everyone:
You can also join the ReDICo Hub at https://hub.redico.eu. This is the platform for all of those people who are interested in the topics of our podcasts and related ones. And on the Hub, you will find also Martina's, Martina has a profile and also information maybe about the conference in December, I'm quite curious. This platform is for scholars, but also for students and for those involved more practically, such as trainers, for example, but also policy makers and teachers. You can also follow us on Bluesky, LinkedIn and Mastodon. Thank you very much to everybody. Thank you very much from me as well, Martina. And have a nice day.
Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.