One
of the most exciting things about the web is that the level of infrastructure
needed is pretty minimal. Many parts of rural Nepal, which have neither
roads nor a stable electricity supply, now have email. They have solar
panels, batteries or small generators which are charged and then run
for a few hours a day to communicate with the rest of the world.
Telephone lines are of course essential, but telephone lines don't have
to be laid down along the ground all the way to the server: retransmittors,
VSAT and other clever techniques are being devised to connect remote
parts of the country with the centre, and then the world. In the village
of Nangi, near the Annapurna mountains, a whole school has been kitted
out with computers and the students are learning to type, send messages
and surf the web before they are learning more traditional reading and
writing skills.
How
does this affect anthropology? In many ways. First of all, it changes
the way people do fieldwork because few anthropologists are now ever
really out of touch with their professors, friends and loved ones. Second,
many small scale societies and ethnic groups now have a web presence
and can find out as much about the anthropologist by sniffing around
as he or she can about them. As a result of this, anthropology is becoming
noticeably more collaborative as an enterprise, with the objects
of study being active producers of information alongside the ethnographer.
