Technology

When I started this research I looked at technologies as gadgets that were just ‘there’. During my fieldwork, I increasingly came to question my perception and began to study technology with regards to social and cultural perspectives, because the study of

‘technology alone’ is ‘physically sterile’ (Malinowski, 1935:69). ‘Technology’ is

deconstructed here not with the aim of understanding technology as such, but in order to understand processes of human interaction that are mediated through it. I define technology as a device, set of techniques, systems, skills, practices or methods of organisation that serve to control and to adapt to the socio-cultural, political, economic and ecological environment. A technique is a way of doing something, while a technology is a complete tool. A technology, combined with other technologies in order to construct or produce

something larger, combine to form techniques in that specific setting. The word technology stems from the ancient Greek tekhnologiā, the science or systematic treatment of skills.

Ingold (2001) highlights how common understandings of technology obscure its ancient meaning, abandoning the connotation of skill. Instead, skill is regarded as a practical ecological adaptation. This view places the development and curation of skill as something of an inferior quality to technology; I concur with Ingold here. When discussing what technology is, with friends, family, colleagues and especially with people who have advanced training in engineering, I often find myself discussing a very different idea of technology than the person with whom I am exchanging thoughts. This could possibly have to do with their placing a hierarchy or levels of advancement concerning what a technology is or is not. ‘I am really not following you. Herding is not a technology. Technology is the application of science. What the Maasai are doing is not technology; it’s a pre-stage of technology, you have to write that! Make a distinction!’ Christer (my father, a civil engineer).

My definition of technology is one that acknowledges its ancient meaning but also, since this ethnography is about Maasai people, incorporates the Maa

understanding of technology, which I will examine later. Varela and Maturana (1997) have built a case that technology is autopoieitic (self-creating). Similarly, Schiffer (2001) defines technology as a living and adaptive system. The argument is that technology builds upon previous technology in an unstoppable process. The stance is also picked up by Arthur (2009), who argues that technologies have a recursive nature. What he means is that it takes pre-existing technologies, a history of

technology and its use, to create technology. He also argues that, while we often know every single detail of specific technologies (how they work, how they are constructed,

which techniques have been implemented) no science has made a deep enough effort to define and to understand what technology, in itself, actually is.

The Maasai case shows how technology is adopted into socio-cultural, political and economic networks in which it becomes an extension of well-established and historically influenced practices. This shows how it is not just a history of technology that creates new technology, but how newer technologies become merged with historic technologies. There is nothing ‘novel’ about communication technology as such. Technologies take shape organically as novel components become combined with old ones. Therefore, this makes online platforms such as Facebook, as it is used by the Maasai, a slightly different technology to Facebook used somewhere else, given that its historical build-up is different. This is all in the service of answering the question of ‘what is technology?’

Saitoti, a junior elder in Narok and a Maasai rights activist, explains

technology like this (in Facebook chat): ‘You can say tekinoloji because the Maasai had no word for technology, because traditionally the elders are custodians of knowledge. Before, young people should not innovate.’ Ben, a warrior from

Nainokanoka (via Facebook messenger): ‘Engariyano is technology. I am sorry for delay, network connection is very slow!’ Ibrah, a human-wildlife conflict specialist, refers to the Ilkonuno as the technologists of the Maa people; now largely outcasts (as explained in 1.3.1.), they used to craft weapons and advance the skills necessary to defending Maasailand.

There exists, within Maa culture, an understanding of technology as knowledge production or as an intelligent system, engariyano, traditionally reserved for elders, but challenged by warriors; teknoloji, in terms of novel devices such as the smart phones, are disrupting the ways in which knowledge is produced, shared and received

by younger people, as elders often complain (see Chapter 7). In line with this

understanding, brought forward by many research participants, I too treat the process of acquiring and sharing knowledge as an understanding or definition of technology. Saitoti comments (via Facebook messenger): ‘It [engariyano] comes from the word

aariya, meaning a higher level of intelligent person or knowledgeable person.. eg [sic]

God.. So in essence, it means intelligence.’ Engariyano is the knowledge of how things are done and this knowledge is passed down by elders. Women are the key to the passing down of knowledge; mothers in teaching their sons and daughters, senior elders, are considered to be closer to God and act as ‘walking encyclopaedias’. Women hold a more important role than men in preserving and passing down

knowledge and perhaps it is not coincidental in this context that the higher level, God,

Engai, has a feminine pre-fix.

Technocratic language has led many to believe that only what is ‘high tech’ (airplanes, the CERN accelerator, power plants) is technology (Lull, 2002). This understanding of technology is spurned even by those scholars seeking to

conceptualize technology within historical cultural processes, including Lull’s use of the buzzword ‘communication age’ or Castells (1996) coining the ‘information age’ as characterizing the advent of the 21st century. These notions create the idea that there is a disruption between what was (an allegedly pre-technological era) and what is (a so-called communication/information age) when, instead, the relation between cultural systems and practices has been constructed and reproduced continuously throughout time with the aid of systems of knowledge production. This dissertation suggests the breaking down of the evolutionary hierarchy between ‘high tech’ and customary technology (such as language for instance).

Technologies of mobility are tools, instruments, skills, techniques, systems, practices or methods that enable mobility. Mobile technologies would include technologies that are portable, such as shoes, whereas technologies of mobility also encompass moorings that enable human mobility. Herding, for instance, is a

technology of mobility that relies on moorings (the homestead, the cattle pen, women as household caretakers) to function. Technologies of mobility are systems that enable, replace, support and give meaning to a broad variety of movements. Scholarly analyses of the intersection between mobility and technology have focused mainly upon ‘spatial, infrastructural and institutional moorings’ (Hannam, Sheller and Urry, 2006:3) or upon the ties and nodes through which information is mediated (Freeman, 2006). Instead, I examine the cultural processes mediated at this intersection. Key thinkers within mobility studies (Cresswell 2006, 2010; Hannam, Sheller and Urry, 2006) have examined technology amidst other aspects of mobility. De Bruijn, Nyamnjoh and Brinkman (2009) place African mobilities and technologies at the forefront of mobility studies in analysing the (re-)shaping of social spaces through mobile technology in Africa. Technologies of mobility play a crucial role in how strategies of economic and ecologic mobility are negotiated around environmental and political constraints.