THE RELEVANCE OF WESTERN STUDIES OF CYBERSPACE IDENTITY FOR NON-WESTERN SOCIAL FORMATIONS David Hakken

(STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, USA)

1. Introduction: Sheffield Cyber-Identities In 1980s Sheffield, England, Barbara Andrews, and I were first alerted to the importance of identity practices in cyberspace. A group of women were talking about what brought them to the municipally-funded Women's Technology Training Workshop: "What brought me on this course is, like what this other woman said, you could get into "modern." You'd been at home, your kids were growing up, and you start feeling you'd been left behind. It felt like an opportunity to get into the Twentieth Century." "That's how it is with technology. I think that any change for the better is going to improve life. Computers are a relatively new thing, and there's an opportunity there for women. We're getting in at the beginning of something..." (Hakken with Andrews 1993:18). 2. Identity, Anthropology, and Social Science in the 1980s and 90s In their "identity work, automated information technologies (AITs) had assumed an important place. These working class women were "presenting themselves (Goffman 1972), but they were also exploring alternativescreating their own third way, as another put it, neither working class hero nor Sloan Ranger. This creation was collective, carried out in talk with other people.

2.1 Western Identity Anthropology

Identity became central to Western anthropology in the 1980s and 90s. This was in response to young, insurgent, activist scholars demands for disciplinary relevance to then emerging new social movements. Their perspective is captured in the phrase, The personal is (also) political. Especially American scholars focused on a problem at once both practical and theoreticalhow to build lasting coalitions. Various additive forms of systems theorydual, tri, quadra, etc. (e.g., race and class, gender, race, and class, sexual orientation, gender, race, and class ) developed, but these merely reflected, did not solve, the political problem. Instead, North Atlantic-oriented anthropologists worked out an alternative, a cultural theory of identity. Drawing heavily on Bourdieuvian notions (e.g., habitus and distinction; 1978), they theorized a common process underlying distinct identities like gender, race, class, and sexual orientation (Sussser and Patterson 2001). Movement organizations could be based on specific distinctions, but coalitions would stress the commonalities of the underlying processes (Young 2000).

2.2 The Non-Western Identity Issue

Anthropologists from/interested in the non-Western world developed a parallel identity interest in the relative failure of Nationalist social movements. These movements were critiqued in similar ways to the old Western movements, for having subordinated the needs of women, ethnic minorities, and lower social strata to the tactical priorities of narrow nationalist elites. Adopting entities different from nations as the relevant unit of analysis fostered new focuses, such as global diasporasthe ethnoscapes of Arjun Appaduraior the well as globalizing media and of culture at large as appropriate arenas of struggle and movement building (1996).

2.3 General Identity Anthropology

For such reasons, two parallel questions came to frame anthropologys intellectual agenda. One looks WesternWho am I?while the other perhaps more EasternWho are we?, but they are hard to separate. Martin Stokes nicely states this identity focus in his theorizing of music, which is socially meaningfullargely because it provides means by which people recognize identities and places, and the boundaries which separate them. [M]usical performance, as well as the acts of listening, dancing, arguing, discussing, thinking and writing about music, provide the means by which identities are constructed and mobilized (1994:5). In short, an agenda was set: To study social practices to assess their role in identity formation. 2.4 Cyberspace Identity Change Our symposium on Internet, Identity, and Anthropology takes place on this intellectual terrain. It also addresses another current identity crisis, that of the Computer Revolution of my Sheffielders period. This period showed enthusiasm over/concern for how AITsmost recently the Internetimpact identity making. A CR implied fundamental changes in the ways individuals and groups co-construct notions of what is characteristic of them, and what separates them from others. Like the related notion that new communities are inherent in cyberspace, transformation of identity is a central part of the cyberspace idea, that a broad, new social formation is compelled to emerge when AITs are widely deployed (Hakken 1999). To evaluate these claims, I found myself, like several other ethnographers, studying cyberspace. Since thats where most of the computers were, it initially made sense that these studies were mostly carried out in the West,1 and often from an applied perspective. These two factors gave early cyberspace ethnography a particular tone. For example, ethnographers were employed by corporations to address the productivity paradox. That is, the accelerating AIT investment in Western workplaces was statistically associated with an output decrease, rather than the expected increase, well into the late 1990s. AIT ethnography argued that productivity would only rise when organizations learned to take advantage of AITs new identity capabilities, supporting alternative communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1994; Wenger, et. al. 2002), not allowing pre-existing hierarchies to undermine them. Arguing for focusing on organizational culture rather than structure, we promoted an alternative, cyberspatial future. Perhaps

to free themselves from corporate masters, ethnographers like Landsgaard (1992) and Wynn (1988) allied themselves with the powerful professionalizing project of Computer Science, busily recreating all previous knowledge in its own image. In such ways, many analyses bought in to the Computer Revolution idea, especially its more personal, identity aspects.

3. The Ethnography of Western Cyber-Identity

Identity themes are so central to Computer Revolution discourses that the case for computings transformative impact can be said to be substantially based on them (e.g., Batteau 1998; Castells 1989; Cherny 1999; Gatewood 1991; Harvey 1995; Sapir 1991; Turkle 1984 & 1995). My 1999 book, Cyborgs@cyberspace?: An ethnographer looks to the future, examines the entities who/which will carry culture in cyberspace, if and when it comes to pass.2 The book was intended to help ethnographers come to in cyberspace, to examine AITs critically as well as celebrate the potentials of the worlds they represent, so that all can participate in their construction. What follows is a list of the most common identity themes.

3.1Cyberspace as Generative of New, and More, Identity

When encountering computers, Sheffielders experienced new collective identities; they even called themselves "computer people." Sherry Turkle reported parallel but more individualistic developments among Boston- area middle class American youths. An imaginative early piece (1980) described the "computer as Rorschach," how "computered" youths project onto the computer their dreams, desires, and visions. Computing stimulates so much identity exploration that it becomes The Second Self (1984). Turkle subtitled her 1990s book, Life on the Screen, Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995). Her term "age" implies an epochal difference between life before and life on the screen, new personal identities being the key to change. Because they enable "constructing identity in the culture of simulation" (p.10), computers as intimate machines are the new central location for identity processes (1984:26).

3.2 More Complex Consciousness in Identity Formation

Moreover, Sheffield workers and Boston youths were addressing identity with more social- and self-consciousness. Reflecting on her own experience, as well as the complex identity practices of multi-user domains (MUDs), Sandy Stone argues (1995) that the declining "rootedness" in any particular identity also indexes a fundamental shift in social formation type. Her stress on change in identity processes complements Turkles focuses on content. Turkle offers Microsoft's WINDOWS multi-tasking as a metaphor for the multiplex self, where "your identityis the sum of your virtual presences" (1995:13).

3.3 Altered Agency

To have agency means both to act in the world and have one's actions treated as legitimate. It is also central to systems like democracy, in which it is supposed to be

broadly distributed. In social formations that fetishize the individual and in which power is distributed, determining legitimacy is a central activity. Cyberspace supposedly holds new implications for agency. Sandy Stone focuses on a central change in how identity practices are, in Habermas (1990) terminology, redeemed. Older forms of agency required physical presence, but in cyberspace, a represented presenceeven a cyborg who redeems through talkis sufficient. Living on the net means legitimacy is less often gained in real life; instead, the relationship between agency and authorizing body [becomes] a discursive one. Eventually this produces a subjectivity that could fairly unproblematically inhabit the virtual spaces of the nets (pp.96-7). The result is allegedly widespread crossing of identity boundaries. In Engineering Culture, a book centered on identity among privileged workers (1992), Gideon Kunda critiques this shift in agency. His computer engineers have increasing difficulty locating a boundary between themselves and their organization: they work long hours and have less and less of a "life" away from work. Concluding that they are losing any capacity to think independently, Kunda sees their form of work as a profound threat to democratic agency. Like Mark Slouka (1996), he doubts whether ethical agency is even possible in cyberspace.

3.4 Identity Marginalization: On the Internet, Nobody Knows Youre a Dog

Social discourse gives greater voice to those with valued identities (male, white, higher class/caste, and heterosexual). The narrowing of communication channels characteristic of life on-line, including the elimination of non-verbal communication, supposedly mutes this identity effect, famously encapsulated in the New Yorker cartoon with this caption. On-line options for identity manipulatione.g., gender bending reinforce the need to evaluate messages in terms of their content, rather than the identity of the speaker. Cyberspace levels the playing field. 4. The Ethnology of Cyber-Identity

4.1 The Non-Transformative Character of Western Cyber-Identity

Paradoxically, this last point amounts to a claim that identity is less relevant in cyberspace. Indeed, the argument that cyber-identity is transformative is marked by lapses and contradictions like thesee.g., identity is claimed to be both more and less relevant. Consider also Stephen Helmreichs (1998) study of artificial life, selfreplicating computer programs alleged to possess internal developmental dynamics sufficient to justify their being treated with the dignity usually reserved for life forms e.g., they have a right to life. Helmreich demonstrates how the artificial behaviors of these cyborgs replicate pre-existing social relations, mimicing familiar white male hierarchies demonstrably, but often unconsciously, programmed in. Unaware that they actively transport the old social relations, artificial lifers create a false sense that hierarchies of class, race, and gender are "natural." The identity playing field is not leveled; indeed, by naturalizing identity hierarchy, old inequalities are made more salient, undermining both identity change and marginalization claims. In the 1990s, I concluded that the evidence for identity change in cyberspace was not yet sufficient. This conclusion also followed from my own trans-national,

comparative studies of computing, which made me acutely aware of how easily diversity correlated with social class and/or geography could be misframed as new patterns. The extent of technological enchantment and determinism also made me skeptical, reinforced by arguments that changes like those described above began long before widespread computing (e.g. Giddens 1991). Turkle implies that childrens projections onto computers "informate" (to use Zuboff's (1988) term) new social agencies. I see this rather differently: that, so far, computers mostly reflect visions from outside the technology itself, creating at most a secondary self. Analysts like Pfaffenberger (1988) focus on why the personal computer "revolution" wasn't one, how on-line information systems failed to create substantial new forms of democratic agency. Indeed, once it is accepted that the relationship between culture and identity is complex, evidence of complexity of individual level identity processes is no longer necessarily evidence of change in social formation type. To make the case that cyberspace is really different on identity grounds, one must demonstrate that a substantial difference actually exists, not just its potential. Computing is a medium by and large not yet the message. 4.2 Non-western identity change in cyberspace? My 1999 conclusion was primarily based on Western cyberspace ethnography. Most of those who participate in the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing of the American Anthropological Association do their work in American institutions, perhaps because of the applied orientation discussed above. Similarly, few of those doing community computing in minority communities have chosen to focus on cultural difference as a matter of interest rather than as a source of problems to be overcome. While some take study of techno-science in non-Western nations as a serious topic, their research focuses typically on traditional rather than cyberspace topics.3 Initially, thinking about computing in non-Westerns contexts centered on two questions. One was framed in traditional economic development terms: as computing became even more widespread, would it broaden the north-South divide, as a consequence, for example, of less developed telecommunications infrastructures and fewer skilled engineers (e.g., Allwood 1992)? The second question followed: Would AITs have so much of the West built into them that the non-West would be permanently handicapped in their ability to use them (Hill et. al., 1998)? 5. Non-Western Cyber-Identity Ethnography This second question broadened comparative study of the cultural dynamics of computing and began the ethnography of cyber-identity in non-Western geographic contexts. This ethnography suggests dynamics different from Western ones. Does understanding these differences suggest how to enter cyberspace without replicating, or even increasing, inequalities?

5.1 Developed Non-Western Internetting

Daniel Miller and Don Slater analyze Trinidad, a relatively developed nonWestern nation. According to The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (1999) Internetting was hot there during the late 1990s. However, its use is stitched into

everyday life, as when Trinis use the Internet to contest the dissolving of relations in dispersed families or to intensify offline relationships (p. 82). Miller and Slater find no reason to suppose that these encountersconstruct new identities in relation to cyberspace rather than projecting older spatial identities through new media and interactions (p.85). [W]e cannot exclude spatial and even national identities from Internet Studies, either on the basis of theoretical assumptions about disembedding or on the basis of extrapolations from exclusively US and European experiences Trini-ness as a project defined and pursued over a particular history,[T]he Internet is being understood and used to an unexpected extent in relation precisely to those projects that might be understood as representing Trinidad. [and are] important to those we studied.(pp. 86-7). This notion, that pre-existing cultural tendencies are what non-Western surfers manifest most while on the net, also comes across in Nuria Soehartos, Internet and Indonesia in its Chaotic Period: The Net Makes it Work, the Net Makes it Worse (2001). The Internet had a crucial, identity role in the nations recent political transformation, in that helped dissatisfied Indonesians pursue a common goal: the dethroning of President Soeharto and the destruction of the New Order. At first, this seemed to constitute a unique identity project: Because this common goal was held so widely in Indonesia, and because the Internet was aperhaps themedium through which this goal was promoted and organized, information posted on the Internet in Indonesia before the resignation of Soeharto was widely regarded as credible and accurate. Further, credibility was inversely linked to normal identity markers: [T]he anonymity of the Internet and the fear of the authorities ensured that no one knew the source of the information posted or the identity of its author. The sharing of a common goal generated a degree of trust between Indonesians, and it was this trust that was the foundation of the reputation for veracity that the Internet enjoyed. After Soehartos resignation, however, the identity project fell apart, and the Internet lost its reputation; The net made it worse. In sum, while the trust and belief generated between parties via the Internet can carry over into everyday life and motivate individuals to action, such mobilizability is not permanent. In Cyber-Maroc: Uncritical Globalization and Cosmopolitan Desire among Moroccan e-Migrants (2001), Stephen William Foster identifies another Internetconnected change in identity: ...[A] new generation of Moroccan e-migrantspursuing transnational narratives and practices of self that suggest an important shift in their historical consciousness They spend a great deal of time in cybercafes, refiguring themselves and their social milieu beyond significant economic hardship. Cyber-Maroc is being constructed by educated but unemployed diplomes chromiers. Like Trinis, [t]heir avid crossing of national and linguistic boundaries does not sacrifice their identity as MoroccanTheir rhetoric of self participates in a globalization that makes its own expanding inequalities yet allows the Moroccans to represent their mission as rooted cosmopolitanism.

Miller and Slater worry about idealization of Trinidad on the Internet, and Foster has strong misgivings about Cyber-Maroc, where . sociability is being displaced and deflected[T]his redefinition is being embraced by Moroccans uncritically, not only because it seems to afford more connection and a greater density of interaction, but also because it seems to promise more specific, pragmatic consequences[They are choosing] a transnational, transactional cosmopolitanism that is less the obliteration of national boundaries or geographical isolation and more a matter of arranging an escape and affording at least the illusion of social repositioning and economic advantage. Foster sees them often losing themselves uncritically in cyber-space, in an infinite realm of otherness, of possibility. Their e-migration is problematic, producing an arrest as much as a transformation

5.2 Marginals on the Net

Among the generalizations suggested by these ethnographies are: 1) that some Western Internet identity phenomena are if anything more pronounced; 2) that these however are very context dependent; 3) that they show more continuity than discontinuity with prior collective identity projects; and 4) that Internet identity change may be problematic for collectives and illusory for individuals. Is Internetting similar among more marginal groups, those in the past sometimes described as Fourth World? In an article on Maya Hackers, Diane Nelson builds on her prior interest in the impact of civil war on indigenous identity to examine the role of new technology in the Mayan cultural rights movement (1996). She identifies a new pan-Mayan identity being forged through IT-connected acts of collective construction. A culturally-oriented Mayan movement insists that racism is not reducible to capitalist exploitation, which Nelson feels separates it from the preceding guerilla uprising. The new movements leaders, Mayan Hacker/culture brokers. are a positive counter-identity model, offering vital information and networking to [its]political strategies (p.291), Like Nelson, Kyra Landzelius waxes eloquent on potentials for Fourth Worlders identified in Western Internetting. She begins by drawing attention to the capacity of global interactive telecommunication technologies totransform the nature of identity, sociality, and morality (n.d.:4). She believes these technologies are being rapidly assimilated into the lives of indigenous peoples, especially through subaltern cyberactivism. This is the use of the flexible and relatively egalitarian, discursive space of Internet as a political tool engaged by disenfranchised peoples who have historically lacked access to more conventional forms of political powerto broadcast the political agendas of native peoples seeking empowerment and presence on a worldwide public stage (p.9).

To Landzelius, cyberactivism is transformative of subaltern identity because, by enabling real-time dialogue links across ethnic and national lines. This sustains community, a position she share with both Howard Reingold and George Soros. John Sherry focuses on the cyberactivism of a community/technology development project called Dine CARE in another relatively marginal group, the Navajo in Americas Southwest (1996?). Sherry is less sanguine than Nelson and Landzelius about either the utility of AITs to support new cultural identity projects or their inherently transformative impact. He is particularly insightful about the ways in which AITs marginalize the Dine/Navajo in ostensibly open competitions for public resources. One example is reinforcing a Western modernist predilection for discursive redemption through precise, written logic, in contrast to a Navaho preference for face-to-face talk: In Navajo, computersserved to inhibit local discourses by appealing to disembodied objectivity[which] resulted in a systematic erosion of the anecdotal evidence of elders, medicine people, or concerned Navajo citizens (1996?: 4). Yet Sherry also sees important opportunity: In spite of all the troubles describe above, Dine CARE members displayed far more creativity and ingenuity in assimilating and reframing technical discourse, documentary practices, and technology than most discussion of hegemony seem to acknowledge is possible (p.26). In particular, the absence of space for culturally-preferred types of discourse prompted indigenous creation of alternative spaces for appropriate Dine utterances. Indeed, the very heterogeneity of an AIT-mediated audience, containing non-Dine as well as Dine, broadened Dine identity. Like Miller and Slater, Sherry finds in this material important food for identity anthropology. While acknowledging that anthropology has perhaps outgrown its concern with authenticity, many ethnographers still regard the local need to accommodate to a Western audience as a distinct threat to local practice.[Y]et the use of foreign media, even for constructions which may appeal to a foreign audience, do not necessarily imply a complete abandonment of local systems of discourse (p. 27-8). Sherry concludes, [T]he politics of the cultural process lies as much in the ability to make ones voice heard as it does [sic] in ones access to information (p. 32). This assessment of marginals Internetting is more consistent with my own work on identity in Western cyberspaces than is the computopianism of Nelson and Landzelius. It brings into focus the distinctive topology of cyberspace, its ability to support one identity without necessarily undermining others. My student John Backman experienced this while helping to get African-American community people from Upstate New York painlessly into surfing the Net. After several hours, these previous non-users were highly satisfied with both the number and value of the sites they located, concluding our people are well represented on the net. While statistically suspect, this conclusion highlights the potential of the net to collective identity projects for marginal peoples, if they have means and know where to look.

5.3 Diasporas
Diasporas, those geographically separated from a native land but still connected to it, have been a third focus of non-Western Internet Identity study. In The Second Self in the Third World (n.d.), Bryan Pfaffenberger documents how different senses of history and discourses over identity structure very different assessments of similar

technical practices. Technology offers a rich terrain for cultural reproduction to Tamils in London. Miller and Slater make a similar argument about the dynamics of cultural identity when discussing the use of the Internet by UK-based Trinidadians. It has changed their relationship not only to individuals...but also to their sense of being a Diaspora Trinidadian. A stage on which to perform Trini-ness, Internet chat eliminates the class distinctions so characteristic of other performances and thereby feels especially inclusive (p. 93). Miller and Slater are at pains to historicize this phenomenon. Before, in the mid90s, Trinis were likely to behave like others in user groups, including flaming. They did this under a necessarily more general Caribbean identity. However, with new utilities like ICQ, which allow more differentiated ecologies of discourse, and with greater numbers on line, this behavior has been replaced by the highly nationalistic Trinidadian behaviors discussed above. Jon Andersons analyzes somewhat different Internet uses among Diaspora Arabs (1997) that migrate existing discussions on-line, highlight the concerns of Diaspora communities in their home cultures and in political and religious issues of their home societies, offer cultural profiles, political news and commentary and religious witness, and [are] usually in advance of more official voices. For Anderson, The most striking feature of the Internet in this regard is spontaneous, unofficial representation. What this activity marks is an increasingly public, unmoderated (and not infrequently immoderate) representation that additional participants can join on their own authority and interest plus ability to use the technology. So, while an increase in communication afforded by the Internet is, in the first instance, a migration of existing messages, it especially enables messages heretofore expressed in much more limited settings -- say of coffee houses, university dormitories, political cells -- to find more public outlets and thus to change the balance of who and what is published. Like Nelson and Landzelius, Anderson sees the opening of these new channels as broadening political discourse. New groups emerge around discoursed opened up and made more public: [S]uch groups proliferate on the Internet whence political dialogue, too, can be carried on from a distance but without the distractions of distance. He concludes from this more generally that The Internet is preeminently a realm of publication, less a new consciousness than a forum greatly extended by an additional medium with its own properties, felicities and barriers to entry that have the effect of greatly expanding the range and number of persons who can participate at the same time that participation is nearly world-wide and nearly instantaneousBy comparison to the asymmetrical arrangements of broadcasting, on the Internet barriers to access are very little higher for senders than for receivers, and those are coming down all over.

5.4 Summary of Non-Western Internet Identity Dynamics

The cyber-identity dynamics of mainstream, marginal, and Disaporic nonWestern net surfing are similar. These ethnographers draw heavily on the Western Identity discourses described in previous sections of this paper. Some, like Nelson and Landzelius, emphasize the transformative, even computopian quality of the dynamic

unleashed, but this is more a matter of rhetorical figure (Nelson) or of hopeful potential (Landzelius) than of ethnographically demonstrated pattern. Others, like Miller and Slater and Foster, are more negative, even compputropian (Hakken with Andrews 1993). Miller and Slater, Pfaffenberger, and Anderson emphasize continuity. For them, the Internet constitutes a new terrain onto which essentially prior identity and other social processes are projected. There is some change, but it is more contextual than transformational. Soehartos and Millers and Slaters analyses deeply situate Internetting in time, tracing how the dynamics of one period transform quickly into something else, even their opposite. All Cyberians claims to be different should be respected, but also understood in context. There is no support here for the notion of a technology-induced globalization of identity dynamics. While cosmopolitanism may sometimes be extended, it may, as in Trinidad, have already been substantial. Conversely, it may be morphed, as in what Miller and Slater call glocalization, the globalizing of local space. Less evident in the non-Western materials are the individually-oriented concerns of the Western ethnographers, such as identity expansion, dispersion or change in agency. Agency is at issue, but it is the agency of groupssubalterns, marginals, and Diasporas rather than of individuals. Perhaps most conspicuous by its absence in the non-West is concern with greater self-consciousness about identity. This may well be a consequence of the more marked identity that is already an all but necessary consequence of colonial status. I believe the ethnography reviewed here reinforces an anthropological inclination to expect Western identity discourses to have a strong individualistic inclination, while Eastern ones are more collective. However, the identity concerns of Sheffield workers had a substantial collective element, suggesting that higher individualism is associated with higher social status as much as geography. As with the Western materials, I reach two overall conclusions: 1) AITs/Internet use has not as yet led to massive change in identity dynamics in the non-Western World, but 2) Internet use on occasion involved new dynamics in social formation reproduction, and its potential in this regard remains substantial 6. Conclusions Changes in identity were widely trumpeted revolutionary social consequences of automated information technologies. On the whole, the emerging studies of nonWestern Internet identity dynamics are no more supportive of the transformationist position than were the earlier Western ones. Non-Western studies demonstrate both similar potentials and somewhat different dynamics. Even at the height of the hysteria over the new economy, the case for the transformative impacts of computing were to me less than compelling. My skeptical position prepared me for the dot.com, dot.tele, and dot.edu collapses, still the main event in new millennium economics. What can we conclude about the relevance of these comparisons to nonWesterners trying to develop coherent postures toward the Western AIT juggernaut? In his cyberspace anthropology manifesto, Arturo Escobar hopes for an alternative to mindless Western cheerleading for technology-led development: Are there different possibilities for Third World societiesother ways of participating in the technocultural conversations and process that are reshaping

the world? How can social movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin American articulate policies that allow them to participate in cyberculture without fully submitting to the rules of the game? Will most social groups in the Third World be in a position even to know about the possibilities afforded by the new technologies? An especially important question is whether Third World governments will be interested in constructing the technological imaginaries that will be required for access to the new technologies from the perspective of more autonomous design. Asserting that : There will not be a genuine social transformation without transforming the relation between society and the technologies it incorporates (p.138), Escobar identifies the deeper concern of cyberspace anthropology: Identifying ways to compute that foster truly different cultural dynamics, AITs that actually reinforce, rather than undermine, cyberspaces vast potentials. This papers original goal was to consider the implications of Western studies of Internet identity for non-Western anthropology. I could not do this without also addressing what ethnographers had to say about non-Western contexts, following Escobars ensuing charge, To start paying attention to Third World technological innovation is a first step towards gaining technological self-esteem. He then moves on to more pointed issues, whether the new technologies can be conceptualized in ways that do not reduce them to their role in economic development, [that instead address] what cyberculture means from different third World perspectives (p. 139). These two questions seem to me still a good starting point for indigenous anthropologies of identity in non-Western cyberspaces. As imagined worlds, protocyberspaces are especially cultural. Both Western and non-western anthropological cybernauts see studies of computing as rich arenas in which cultures already studied at great length are themselves reproduced on new terrain. I hope to have demonstrated here how, though such studies, we have something important to learn. In particular, we are better positioned to evaluate the Cyberspace identity claims skewed toward Western experience. Similarly, the degree of similarity or difference of computing in different cultural contexts is an obvious terrain for testing the extent of cultural mediation of technology, a core problem in the anthropology of techno-science. References cited Allwood, Carl Martin 1992 Constraints on the usability of computers. Unpublished ms., Department of Psychology, University Goeteborg, Sweden. Anderson, Jon 1997 Globalizing politics and religion in the Muslim world. The Journal of Electronic Publishing 3(1). Available at: http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/archive/Anderson.html. Appadurai, Arjun 1996 Modernity at Large: The Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Batteau Allen 1998 The limitations of thematic approaches in the study of organizational cultures. Available at http://anthro.wayne.edu/ablimit.html.

Bourdieu, Pierre 1978 Outline of a theory of practice Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Castells, Manuel 1989 The informational city: Information technology, economic restructuring, and the urban-regional process. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Cherney, Lynn 1999 Conversation and Community: Chat in a Virtual World. ?:C S L I Publications. Escobar, Arturo 1994 Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the anthropology of cyberculture. Current Anthropology 35(3):211-31. Foster, Stephen William 2001 Cyber-Maroc: Uncritical Globalization and Cosmopolitan Desire among Moroccan e-Migrants. Paper presented to the Annual Meeting, American Ethnological Society, Montreal. Gatewood, John 1991 My PC and me: Personal computers and academic routines. Paper presented to the annual meeting, American Anthropological Association, Chicago. Giddins, Anthony. 1991 Modernity and self-identity. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Goffman, Erving 1972 Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday & Company. Habermas, Juergen 1990 Legitimation Crisis. Boston: Beacon. Hakken, David 1999. Cyborgs@Cyberspace?: An Ethnographer Looks to the Future. New York: Routledge. -----, with Barbara Andrews 1993 Computing myths, class realities: An ethnography of technology and working people in Sheffield, England. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Harvey, David 1995 "Cartographies of knowledge: Space, time, and public discourses in contemporary capitalism." Paper presented to the annual meeting, American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C. Helmreich, Stefan 1998 Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hess, David. 1992 Introduction: The new ethnography and the anthropology of science and technology In Knowledge and society: The anthropology of science and technology Hess, David, and Linda Layne, eds. (pp. 1-26). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press Hill, Carole, Karen Loch, Detmar Straub, & Kamal El-Sheshai 1998: A Qualitative Assessment of Arab Culture and Information Technology Transfer, Journal of Global Information Management 6(3):29-38.

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After completing the Sheffield research alluded to above, I began to formulate a comparative project on computing in Bulgaria, where production of an indigenous PC was indicative of a tradition in computing almost as long as American or British ones. This project was obviated by the events of the late 1980s, which greatly disrupted computing, along with many other things.
2

I arrived at my notion of the properties of such entities via a dialectic between data from empirical investigation, ethnographic and laboratory, and a kind of logical deduction regarding what properties any such entities must have in order to be compatible with culture as we know it. I argued for focusing on the cyborgic rather than simply biological characteristics of all carriers of culture, including those who will carry cyberculture. It also critiqued the cyberspace ethnography of ethnologists like Dawkins and philosophers like Dennett precisely in terms of their impoverished general ethnography, the consequences of presuming that cultures are consistent, imposed cognitive orders rather than mazeways for handling diverse practices.
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For those wanting a broad ethnography of computing, it is a substantial problem that so few cultural anthropologists have advocated effectively for studying computing among "third" let alone "second" world peoples, David Hess (Hess 1992) and Benetta Jules-Rosette (1990) being partial exceptions. The anomalous disinterest of computing anthropologists in computing cross-culturally is doubtless tied to the general anthropological ambivalence to technology (one prescription for which is the re-centering on cyborgs as the carriers of culture). The STS disinterest is perhaps most closely connected to the "expertise" problem: the reluctance of natural scientists to take seriously those without advanced credentials in their field. In relation to "Third World" computing, this reluctance has racist implications.