Horst, Heather A. and Daniel Miller (2005) From Kinship to Link-up: Cell Phones and Social...

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C u r r e n t A n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 46, Number 5, December 2005� 2005 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2005/4605-0003$10.00

From Kinship toLink-up

Cell Phones and SocialNetworking in Jamaica1

by Heather Horst and DanielMiller

On the basis of lists of numbers saved on individuals’ cellphones and other evidence, it is argued here that low-income Ja-maicans use the cell phone to establish extensive networks, apractice identified as “link-up.” Link-up has many of the samecharacteristics as those found by R. T. Smith in a classic study ofJamaican kinship and genealogy. However, the new evidence sug-gests that kinship merely exemplifies a pattern that may befound in a wider range of Jamaican networking strategies includ-ing the creation of spiritual and church communities, the searchfor sexual partners, and the coping strategies adopted by low-in-come households. Link-up also accounts for the rapid adoption ofcell phones and the patterns of their use by low-income Jamai-cans and highlights the importance of understanding the local in-corporation of cell phones and local forms of networking enactedthrough new communication technologies.

h e a t h e r a . h o r s t is a postdoctoral research associate at theAnnenberg Center for Communication at the University ofSouthern California (3502 Watt Way, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0281 [[email protected]]). Born in 1973, she was educated at theUniversity of Minnesota, Twin Cities (B.A., 1996), the Universityof California, Santa Barbara (M.A., 1998), and the University ofLondon (Ph.D., 2004). Her research interests include new com-munications technologies and the matrial culture of the house inJamaica. Her publications include “A Pilgrimage Home: Tombs,Burial, and Belonging in Jamaica” (Journal of Material Culture9[1]:11–26) and “Building Home: Being and Becoming a ReturnedResident,” in Returning to the Source: The Final Stage of theCaribbean Migration Circuit, edited by Dwaine Plaza and Fran-ces Henry (Mona: University of the West Indies Press, in press).

d a n i e l m i l l e r is Professor of Material Culture in the Depart-ment of Anthropology of University College London. Born in1954, he received his B.A. (1976) and his Ph.D. (1983) from Cam-bridge University. His current research is on loss and separation,the experience of au pairs, and a theory of value. Among his re-cent publications are the edited volumes Materiality (Durham:Duke University Press, 2005) and (with Susanne Kuchler) Cloth-ing as Material Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2005) and The Dialecticsof Shopping (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

The present paper was submitted 31 i 05 and accepted 7 iv 05.

1. We thank Phil Burnham, Fiona Parrott, Anastasia Panagakos,Anat Hecht, Eric Olive, and the journal reviewers for advice andcorrections on the text. We are grateful to Digicel for sharing com-mercial information with us and an anonymous reviewer for draw-ing our attention to the work of Lars Hinrichs.

Far from the homogenization that might be expectedfrom the global appropriation of new technologies, eth-nography reveals considerable variation in what tech-nologies have become in different regions. For example,no one in the cellular phone industry denies that therapid and widespread adoption of texting in Europe waslargely unpredicted. Yet the texting capital of the worldsoon established itself in an even less likely place, thePhilippines, where according to Nokia 100 million textswere being sent daily from 10 million cell phones by2002 (Pertierra et al. 2002:88). With respect to the In-ternet, Miller and Slater (2000) argue that a study of thelocalization or appropriation of the Internet does not ap-propriately conceptualize our relationship to technologybecause it presupposes a fixed entity called “the Inter-net.” Rather, the Internet is something created by Trin-idadians, for example, in that the particular relationshipbetween e-mail, web surfing, and chat that makes up theTrinidadian Internet has as much claim to being called“the Internet” as the usage of any other region. Theseresearchers found that, despite predictions that its glob-alizing effects would erase conventional boundaries andnotions of territory, the Internet in Trinidad was themost nationalistic medium they had encountered.

The global development of the Internet was accom-panied by an almost uncontested set of inaccurate pre-dictions that finally led to what Cassidy (2002) has calledthe “dot.con” fiasco. Similarly, in the development ofcell phones, one of the biggest gambles in business his-tory—the worldwide sale of licences for third-generationphones for US$125 billion—has led to a situation inwhich it is their inexpensive voice facility rather thanany of their new features, such as video phoning, thathas generated the most sales (Economist 2004). The re-cent history of telecommunications is, then, a story ofthe failure of prediction by industry, investors, and ex-perts. It therefore seems reasonable to propose that thesocial imperatives of consumers and not just the de-mands and influences of commerce may be a major factorin accounting for patterns of usage.

Initial research on the impact of the cell phone on aregional basis has indeed already suggested a wide rangeof local patterns of usage (Katz and Aakhus 2002). Thatthis is the case even within the Caribbean is evident fromthe contrast between Trinidad and Jamaica. Trinidad hasapproximately half of Jamaica’s population of 2.6 million(cf. Henry 2004) but nearly three times its per capitaincome in 2003, US$7,260 as compared with Jamaica’sUS$2,760 (World Bank 2004). The ethnography of Inter-net usage in Trinidad in 1999 demonstrated great enthu-siasm and considerable sharing of access, while our studyof Jamaica in 2004 revealed much less interest and shar-ing. Although government statistics suggest 7% pene-tration of the Internet in Trinidad and 3% in Jamaica,2

our evidence is that actual usage is considerably greater

2. The Jamaican figure comes from a survey by Don Anderson’sMarket Research Ltd. carried out in 2003 for JAMPRO, the Jamaicanpromotion corporation. This suggested that there were 95,000 In-ternet users, 60% of them residential (Kirton 2003).

756 F current anthropology Volume 46, Number 5, December 2005

in Trinidad (Henry 2004). With respect to the use of cellphones, there were also clear differences but in the op-posite direction. By the end of 2004 Trinidad had ap-proximately 600,000 cell phone subscribers (TrinidadGuardian 2004), whereas there were 2 million subscrib-ers in Jamaica (Digicel, personal communication). Thelatter figure reflected an average of three phones perhousehold. Given the much higher income levels of Trin-idadians and their sense of themselves as a First Worldnation (Miller and Slater 2000:118), these numbers werequite surprising.

One reason for these differences was the different re-sponses of the two governments to the liberalization ofthe telecommunications sector prompted by the WorldBank and others.3 The Trinidadian government encour-aged the development of the Internet and computerswith interest-free loans to public-sector workers that,combined with much higher income levels, made com-puters more affordable. By contrast, it was slow to grantlicences to the cell phone sector. The Jamaican govern-ment showed less appreciation of the potential of theInternet but was quick to grant licences for the cellphone industry.

The role of companies has been as important as thatof the state. As it has for much of the Caribbean (Maurer2001), the Cable and Wireless Corporation has domi-nated the telecommunications industry in Jamaica for acentury and has attempted to retain the various privi-leges associated with its monopoly. Not surprisingly, ithas come to be regarded as impeding the developmentof the telecommunications industry (Miller and Slater2000:117–43; Stirton and Lodge 2002). This perceptionproved decisive when it came face to face with the mod-ernizing commercial strategy adopted by Digicel, a cellphone company capitalizing on its success in developingmedia in Ireland in entering the Caribbean market (Boy-ett and Currie 2004). Since commencing operations in2001, Digicel has achieved extraordinary success in Ja-maica. By the end of 2004 it had sold nearly 1.5 millioncell phones in a country of only 2.6 million people. Cap-italizing on many Jamaicans’ visceral dislike of Cableand Wireless, Digicel created an impressive marketingcampaign led by the highly experienced Jamaican HarrySmith. Smith successfully used many populist images,such as Rasta or “roots” colours and prominent spon-sorship of sports and entertainment such as the TV seriesRising Stars, the local equivalent of Britain’s Pop Idol orAmerican Idol in the U.S.A.

To suggest that the comparative success of the Internetin Trinidad and the cell phone in Jamaica is entirely dueto the actions of the state and the companies involved,however, would miss the story that emerges from theethnography of usage.

The research described here is based on a year’s eth-nography divided between an urban and a rural site in

3. Jamaica is party to the World Trade Organization’s GeneralAgreement on Trade in Services of 1995, including the annex onbasic telecommunication services, and also subscribes to the Con-nectivity Agenda for the Latin American and Caribbean Region.

Jamaica. Funded by the British Department for Inter-national Development, the study was carried out si-multaneously with research in Ghana, India, and SouthAfrica.4 The goal of the project was to assess the impactof new communication technologies on low-incomehouseholds and thereby to help agencies determinewhether they should be a priority in future aid policy.Since our research in Jamaica was limited to low-incomehouseholds in which we observed very little Internetuse,5 our ethnography essentially developed into a studyof how low-income Jamaicans constructed the cellphone. The ethnography was based upon traditional an-thropological methods of participant observation whileliving with families in the two sites over the course ofa year.6 We also carried out a general household surveyof 100 households and an intensive budgetary survey of20 households and investigated the commercial and gov-ernmental bodies concerned with the provision and us-age of new communication technologies (see Horst andMiller n.d.). Given the project’s focus upon policy andpoverty, our study concentrated on low-income house-holds, with low income being defined as less thanJA$3,000 (US$50)7 per week in the rural area andJA$5,000 (US$80) in the urban one.

The rural site is located in the hills of central Jamaica,where Horst has been visiting and working for over tenyears. The “town” we call Orange Valley has only around500 core residents but serves a hinterland of some 14,000persons living in small districts and individual home-steads in the surrounding hills. Depending upon the sea-son, as little as 10% of the population is formally em-ployed, but most residents grow some of their own food.Men typically work intermittently as labourers in con-struction or as seasonal labourers for crops such as or-anges and cocoa, while women market foods or raisechickens. Were it not for the income provided by remit-tances from relatives and friends living abroad, it is likelythat the area would be rather less populous. Since untilrecently Cable and Wireless Jamaica supplied no land-lines to much of this area, our rural research is, in manyrespects, a study of the introduction of the telephone.

The urban site, here called Marshfield, is a low-income(relative to other urban areas) settlement in Portmore, adormitory community of 200,000 developed by the gov-ernment with the aim of providing the opportunity for

4. The other ethnographies were led by Don Slater in Ghana, JoTacchi in India, and Andrew Skuse in South Africa.5. Indeed, most of the Internet access we observed for low-incomeJamaicans was through the cell phone, not the computer.6. Horst spent the year in Jamaica, while Miller made three visitsof a month each. Both Horst and Miller divided their time betweenthe two sites.7. Throughout 2004, the exchange rate was approximately $JA60to $US1. Mean per capita consumption in Jamaica was estimatedat $JA2,277 weekly in 2004 from figures provided by the PlanningInstitute of Jamaica (2003) and the Bank of Jamaica (2005).Our def-initions of low income reflect the national profile of higher urbanincomes. Our analysis of 20 low-income households revealed av-erage weekly consumption of JA$3,983 for a household of 2.7 per-sons in Orange Valley (or JA$1,475 per capita) and JA$6,584 for ahousehold of 3 persons in Marshfield (or JA$2,194 per capita).

horst and miller From Kinship to Link-up F 757

home ownership to people living in the violent garrisoncommunities of downtown Kingston. While architectsand other planners remain sceptical about the scheme’sprospects, the elderly in Marshfield consider this movea blessing and are convinced that they would have diedyoung had they remained in central and western King-ston, which continues to have one of the world’s highestmurder rates.

In contrast to the yards and tenements of Kingston(Brodber 1975), Portmore consists of tiny starter homesthat look like small shipping containers. Each unitcomes with indoor plumbing, electricity, water, and toi-let facilities and a small plot of land allowing for limitedexpansion. Most working adults in Marshfield cross acauseway to the centre of Kingston for work as shopassistants, nurses, or government utility employees. Asin other areas of Jamaica, youth unemployment is high:27.2% compared with 9.1% for those over 25 years ofage in 2003 (Planning Institute of Jamaica 2004: table21.8). A property common to the two sites is a staunchPentecostalism.8 While Orange Valley was one of theareas from which Pentecostalism initially developed inJamaica in the nineteenth century (Austin-Broos 1997),Portmore has come to symbolize home ownership, do-mesticity, and respectability, all of which are associatedin the Caribbean with increased religiosity.

Cell Phone Lists

The substance of our research consisted of participantobservation, and our evidence relates to the use and pres-ence of the phone in activities ranging from religion andcommerce to child rearing. Our initial survey of 100households revealed several unexpected features ofphone usage, and we developed further investigationsbased on these preliminary findings. We found, for ex-ample, that many Jamaicans could instantly tell us howmany numbers there were in their cell phone’s internaladdress book, both on the phone itself and on the SIM(Subscriber Identity Module) card stored in it. Intrigued,we asked 25 individuals to work through all their storednumbers and tell us how they knew the individuals con-cerned, when they had last phoned them, and what theyhad talked about. Participants seemed comfortable withdivulging this information as long as anonymity was pre-served, although one or two preferred to gloss over a fewnames or delete others as they appeared on the list. Mostof the participants featured prominently in the more gen-eral ethnography, and this allowed us to contextualizeand interpret the material presented here.

8. According to formal statistics, Jamaica is primarily Protestant(61.3%), with the categories of Church of God and Pentecostalscomprising only 28.8% of the population (Country Reports 2005).Our fieldwork suggests that, whatever their nominal affiliation, themajority of low-income Jamaicans possess a worldview that incor-porates a version of Pentecostal belief and practice (see also Austin-Broos 1997). Similarly, we found that although they were not formalpractitioners, many men’s perspectives have been influenced byRastafarianism, particularly in Marshfield.

Although individuals were often aware of the preciseextent of their phone lists, there was no evidence thatthey were using it as a quantitative manifestation of so-cial popularity in the manner observed for Norwegianyouths (Ling and Yuri 2002). Clearly this list could notbe equated with the entirety of an individual’s socialnetwork. One reason lies in the technology itself. Mostphones allowed the owner to save only 200 names, with200 more on the SIM card (though many participantswere aware of only one or the other). Cell phones areoften lost or stolen, in which case SIM cards, which canbe transferred between phones, are no safer a repositorythan the phones themselves. We heard many a personcursing the failure to have provided written back-up forpatiently accumulated contacts lost when a phone felldown the toilet or was stolen on a bus. In fact, the ownerof one of the smallest phone lists kept only 13 names inhis phone because he had recently lost another phone,which he estimated had contained over 60 names. How-ever, names and numbers can be accumulated (or reac-cumulated) quite rapidly. It took 16-year-old Tameka lessthan a week to gather 30 numbers to enter into her phonebook, the process aided by her excitement over the nov-elty of her first cell phone.

A basic description of the 25 phone lists is providedin table 1. On average, individuals saved 95 names andnumbers, the smallest list containing only 11 and thelargest 209. Three of the individuals we interviewed hadmore than one phone. Typically the largest lists camefrom Digicel phones, followed by Cable and Wireless andMiPhone. Since a few numbers were not disclosed andsome phones were recent purchases, our sample mayunderestimate the typical phone list. It was never in-tended, however, that this group be taken as a sample ofthe population. It represents our concentration on low-income individuals and the relative scarcity of phonesamongst the elderly. Some of the smaller lists representrecently purchased phones rather than the actual size ofindividuals’ networks. Kin are clearly a minority withinthese networks.

The basic figures disguise a number of quite differentconcerns, each of which may lead to the accumulationof an extensive network. For example, there are manyindividuals whose lives are consumed by their serviceto their religious beliefs. Damian, 17 years old, had saved126 names in his phone book, the majority of them num-bers for his church sisters and brothers and church-ori-ented groups. For example, he kept a list of individualsin his phone whom he might call upon to play music inthe church or help him organize church meetings or tosummon large numbers to a youth camp he is organizing.Hoping for a good turnout, he would simply scroll thoughhis list, texting or phoning everyone on it who might bepersuaded to attend. Similarly, a young Baptist man whowas also a religious dub poet used his phone both as achurch youth leader and to recruit an audience for per-formances. A Pentecostal man in Orange Valley used thephone to arrange transportation to concerts and conven-tions for his church band. Church-based networks canbe even more extensive in urban areas. For example, in


table 1Phone Lists

NameNumber of

Names Kin Non-kin Gender Age Range LocationEconomic

Status

Allison 16 6 10 F 30s Urban Supported by baby-fatherBijei 209 17 192 F 10s Urban Employed full-time retailBridgette 34 11 21 F 10s Urban Former student, sells phone

cardsCamille 95 18 77 F 20s Rural Helps out in family businessCharmaine 12 6 6 F 40s Urban Supported by baby-fatherDamian 126 13 113 M 10s Rural Student, street vendingDonnovan 39 16 23 M 10s Urban Student, supported by

motherDorothy 42 19 23 F 40s Rural Runs small shopGrace 154 26 128 F 20s Urban Student/teacherJoydene 11 5 6 F 20s Urban Supported by father and

baby-fatherJunior 176 16 160 M 20s Urban Employed full-time retailKeisha 102 21 81 F 30s Rural/Urban Supported by baby-father,

sells phone cardsLisa 90 15 75 F 30s Rural Unemployed, supported by

boyfriend(s)Marlon 183 8 175 M 20s Urban Student, supported by

mother and fatherMichael 13 0 13 M 30s Rural Drives taxiMichelle 45 10 35 F 10s Urban Former student, supported

by mother and boyfriendMonique 166 11 155 F 30s Urban Supervisor at shopPeter 171 22 149 M 30s Rural Supervisor at shop, farmingRobert 195 7 188 M 20s Urban Unemployed, supported by

uncleRomeo 193 31 162 M 10s Rural Student, supported by

mother and girlfriendsSonia 85 5 80 F 30s Urban Works part-time, domestic

helpTameka 30 8 22 F 10s Rural Helps out at family shop,

supported by fatherTyrone 98 11 87 M 30s Urban Employed full-time, shift

workWinston 51 16 35 M 40s Rural Works part-time,

constructionYvette 33 9 24 F 30s Urban Supported by baby-father/

boyfriendAverage 95 13 82

Portmore there are churches that require a relay of ser-vices on a Sunday morning to accommodate the 9,000congregants who regularly attend. Many of the youngercongregants used the phone to check on the times ofservices, arrange to pick up church members, or organizeactivities.

However, the most extensive form of phone-based net-working revolves around the potential of sexual liaisons.For example, Robert’s phone book contained 195 namesand numbers, most of them belonging to women hehoped to have, was having, or had had some kind ofrelationship with. Among these he identified a desig-nated principal relationship, second and third principalrelationships that were ongoing, and other, far more ex-tensive links with women he described as “less good-looking” who constantly called him, though he rarelycalled them back, and women he designated as partic-ularly attractive, whom he called quite often but whoonly rarely called him back.

For females this kind of networking often has a quiteexplicit additional objective—finding a man sufficientlysolvent and reliable to support them (Chevannes 1993).This aspiration is something readily attested to even byyoung girls of 15 or less, who begin this quest as school-girls. While they may have relationships with school-boys, they prefer to associate with older men whose“pockets run deeper.” Lisa, a 32-year-old mother whohad engaged in such activities while still a schoolgirl,remained reliant upon the economic viability of the olderman and operated with a highly developed version of thismale-female engagement. Over the past decade, she hadbeen cultivating relationships with men of various agesand marital statuses, constantly on the lookout for some-one with whom she might be able to settle down tosupport herself and her son. Over the years she had hadnumerous boyfriends, many of whose numbers were stillsaved in her phone. She called them on a regular basisto “check them” and keep the relationships viable. Boy-


friends whom she may have loved but who “could donothing for her” were often dispensed with for more tran-sient relationships, such as local big men who could pro-vide her with a few thousand dollars every few monthsbut for whom she would never settle entirely. Whilesome of these relationships involved sexual encounters,other relationships were merely friendships. Yet, it wasdifficult to differentiate between these, given the flir-tatious tone of the conversations (“Still sexy girl?”) andtext messages sent back and forth between Lisa and hermale friends.

In addition, Lisa was keen to cultivate relationshipswith men who traveled or lived permanently abroad.When she stopped working, she survived on the basis ofher relationships with two men—her Jamaican boy-friend, who sent her JA$5,000 monthly, and her boyfriendin “foreign,” who sent JA$5,000 monthly for her ex-penses and an extra JA$3,000 for her son (over US$250per month). Both incomes were almost always collectedat the local Western Union office. In fact, she met withher Jamaican boyfriend only every month or two and hadnot seen her foreign boyfriend since his visit to the islandover a year ago. When the foreign boyfriend stopped send-ing money and the Jamaican boyfriend proved to be keep-ing another girlfriend, she began scrolling through the90 names in her phone book, calling men whom sheknows “have it” (i.e., have regular paychecks, such ascivil servants), old boyfriends, and other potential“friends” to revitalize the links that might help her meether expenses. One-third of the way through her list sheasked a friend to send her a phone card (which he did)so that she could continue to reinvigorate her links. Inthese calls she did not ask for money but called to ask“wa gwaan” (what’s going on) and see if they were “allright.” While there were a few names that she skippedover, she noted the potential of certain others, such asOwen (“He is always encouraging me”).

The list of names saved in Lisa’s phone was comple-mented by a much larger handwritten list of names thatshe kept in a file attached to her bedroom wall for safe-keeping. There were seven or eight persons whom sheclaimed to speak to by phone every day, including hercurrent boyfriends and two of the nine men she consid-ered “ex-boyfriends.” Such men tended to have regularemployment as, for example, firemen or policemen orthe potential to help her obtain employment (includingtwo local politicians). There were ten relatives, but thesewere mostly cousins and easily blended into the generalcategories of friends or people who might help her insome way. Several of the men were described as flirta-tious, always pursuing her by phone. Other names in-cluded girlfriends she liked to go out with in the eveningand people living in the countryside who sometimes pro-vided her with vegetables or sugarcane.

The maintenance of cross-sex relationships is probablythe most visible use of cell phone technology in Jamaica.In practice the phone’s use is symmetrical by gender,differing mainly in that men tend to see sexual relationsas ends in themselves while women tend to associatethem with other needs, most often economic survival.

From Kinship to Link-up

One of the classic works of Caribbean anthropology,R. T. Smith’s (1988) Kinship and Class in the West In-dies, reported the results of a study aimed at gaining abetter sense of people’s perception of kinship by col-lecting comprehensive listings of all those considered tobe relatives from 51 principal participants, mainly fromJamaica but including a component from Guyana. Whatwas most striking about these lists was the sheer numberof kin, with an overall mean of 284, more than twice thenumber reported by Schneider (1968:49) for white Amer-icans. It was also found that a baby-father’s kin9 becameincorporated into a mother and child’s network even ifthe baby-father himself took no further responsibility forthe child’s emotional, financial, educational, or socialupbringing. In short, Smith’s book suggested that in Ja-maica there might be little concern with the precise def-inition of kin and little interest in the normative andjural rules of kinship and descent that had dominatedmuch of the early history of anthropology. Instead, kin-ship was more important as an extensive network ofpotential connections expressed through the recognitionof individuals as relatives. The volume therefore formsa major bridge between the foundational work of Clarke(1966 [1957]) and the current work of Besson (1995, 2002)focusing upon unrestricted cognatic descent and ego-cen-tered bilateral kinship. Together these works demon-strate that kinship relations in Jamaica are extensive andmultiple rather than tightly structured.

Smith and other anthropologists of his era were stud-ying kinship and drawing conclusions about kinship.What we cannot determine from their findings iswhether the properties that they uncovered pertain ex-clusively to kinship or whether kinship is merely symp-tomatic of a wider range of forms of networking. Ratherunintentionally, our interviews bore some similarity tothose of Smith and his colleagues in that both produceda “universe” of names defined by a certain principle, inour case the list of names saved in the cell phone. Giventhe tradition of anthropological scholarship in Jamaicaand the Caribbean, we expected that kinship would formthe bedrock of individuals’ social connections. In prac-tice, the prominence of kin varied, but it was much lesssignificant than expected. Family and kin were most im-portant to women, who led relatively sheltered lives and,on average, had fewer than 30 numbers saved in theirphones. Kin were almost entirely absent from a surpris-ing number of larger phone lists, especially those of men(see table 1), although a separate survey of 100 low-in-come households suggested that kin might be calledmore frequently than some others. On average only 13of the 95 names were kin. The most common inclusionswere immediate relatives such as members of the nu-clear family, followed by a number of what are generi-cally called “cousins” and “aunts.” The lists also regu-

9. “Baby-father” is a term used in Jamaica for a woman’s biologicalchild’s father. The use of the term presumes neither the continu-ation nor the termination of the relationship between the two.


larly featured a prominent category of relatives living in“foreign” (Chamberlain 1988, Goulbourne and Cham-berlain 2001, Soto 1987, Thompson and Bauer 2000).

This is not to say that family could never dominate.Dorothy, a woman in her forties living in a district highabove Orange Valley, for example, listed 42 numbers, ofwhich 19 were family, including her husband, children,nieces, nephews, sister, brother, and members of her hus-band’s family living in her district. Dorothy regularlyphoned her husband, whose job took him away from thearea almost every day. She also rang one of her daughtersseveral times a week and called relatives in the area ifsomething needed to be done. She admitted that manyof the family members listed would not have been calledrecently had it not been for a death in the family a fewmonths back that had necessitated a flurry of family net-working. Apart from family, 8 of her numbers were con-nected with her business of raising chickens and the saleof small foodstuffs. Dorothy also spent much of herphone card money on the key leisure activity in OrangeValley, cashpot (a lottery scheme). She spoke regularlyto her friends, family, and neighbours about what bet toplace (i.e., how to “read” her dreams) and to individualswho helped her place bets. Indeed, on many weekdaysthis activity dominated her phone usage. Other entriesranged from a dressmaker and a taxi driver to a friend’sdaughter who asked for advice when her baby was sick.

One of the most important uses of the phone in re-lation to kinship derives from the common practice ofhaving a child looked after by someone other than thebiological mother, who in turn usually lives apart fromthe biological father (Soto 1987). While the baby-mothermay not be the primary child care giver, she often seesthe phone as a source of daily contact with other childcare givers. Relationships with baby-fathers vary consid-erably, but there are many cases in which baby-fathersand baby-mothers are in daily contact. In other instances,contact remains restricted to issues of economic respon-sibility and requests for money. The cell phone has be-come central to child rearing in Jamaica and very likelyameliorates some of the contradictions posed by the fre-quent separation of child care from a biological connec-tion that is nevertheless acknowledged as critical.Yvette, for example, looked after only one of her ownfour children, but she was in constant contact with oneof her baby-fathers regarding their son and also talkedon a weekly basis to her two eldest children, who wereliving with their baby-father’s family.

The case of Bridgette, the 18-year-old daughter of ahairdresser in Marshfield, brings together the relation-ship between family, parents, and children and morepragmatic concerns. For Bridgette, the distinction be-tween relatives and friends was not particularly impor-tant. Most of her calls to relatives (including her father,stepfather, and two sisters who lived abroad) were shortand occasional. Her relatives in Jamaica phoned onlywhen they wanted something in particular. For example,her stepbrother called her to “check out” a girl who livedin her road, while an uncle usually rang when he wantedto “beg” a phone card from her. A few basic functional

numbers such as a doctor, a teacher, the person whobraided her hair, and the person who helped her to obtaincheap phones were also listed. Far more important werethose she tended to speak to nearly every day, who in-cluded several of her female friends. Although kin wereincluded, it was in much the same way as friends andacquaintances, all of them representing potential con-nections that were usually operationalized only at thetime of a specific need.

The primary way in which Bridgette used her phonecan be summarized as “link-up,” in which the most im-portant element is not the content of conversations buttheir use to maintain connections over time. Link-upcalls dominate the phone usage of low-income individ-uals. Calls often consist of exchanges such as “Hi, howis everything?”—“Oh, I’m OK, I’m just enjoying thesummer.” There are many strategies for maintainingsuch connections, even if there is little to them at thetime. For example, Bridgette summarized the content ofa recent call from a male friend: “I haven’t called himfor a while and him ask if mi get rich an switch—that’swhat he call mi an’ ask mi.” In other words, he impliedthat to fail to keep in touch, even about nothing in par-ticular, would be like her saying that she was too goodfor him now.

The numbers saved in the majority of phone books areprincipally relationships of this link-up variety. The po-tential contacts are much, much greater than those inoperation at any particular time, as are the number ofkin known to individuals in Smith’s study. But the ac-tivation of any particular potential relationship is ex-pected to occur only when, in some sense, one personcan respond to the need of another. Consequently, evenif one has not visited a particular cousin living in townfor five years, when one’s child receives a place in aschool near that cousin it is largely assumed that thecousin’s house may represent a possible boarding place.A link to a person one knew from school or met througha mutual friend may remain dormant but can also beactivated when the need arises. The only real differencebetween friendship and kinship is that with the formera minimal degree of sociality to preserve the relationshipis preferred. We would therefore argue that Smith’s re-search can be viewed as a study of link-up that can nowbe expanded from its initial base in the anthropology ofkinship.

A primary characteristic of this link-up usage of thephone was the effort and expense put into keeping theselists constantly active; in some cases a large proportionof the names were called every couple of weeks. Thesewere often very short calls. Almost all Jamaicans basedtheir calls on JA$100 (US$1.50)10 phone cards and usedthe free service that allowed them to check exactly howmuch credit they had remaining on their phone aftereach call. Indeed, Digicel workers credited much of thecompany’s immediate success in Jamaica to charging bythe second rather than by the minute. A few of the par-ticipants noted that they could make a JA$100 phone

10. With tax, a JA$100 card costs around JA$125.


card (at JA$8 per minute for a Digicel-to-Digicel call)“serve” them for over a week because they knew howto “economize.” Others used a timer feature on thephone to limit conversation to a designated limit (typi-cally two minutes), citing the common cell phone prov-erb “If yu follow da phone, it broke yu.” According toDigicel (personal communication), the average length ofa cell phone call in Jamaica is a mere 19 seconds. It isno wonder, then, that our initial attempt to concentrateupon the content of conversations as a research tool waslargely ineffective.

While our research was limited to low-income house-holds, a recent study of Jamaican university students’use of e-mail reveals an almost identical pattern (Hin-richs 2004). Students sent religious texts or jokes to allof the addresses saved in their computer address book,which effectively served the same function as the cellphone list of numbers. As Hinrichs (personal commu-nication) notes, “It is especially frequent and strikinglycommon to the European researcher for Jamaican stu-dents to write e-mail messages that contain nothing buta reproach to the addressee for not keeping in touch.”His results suggest that link-up may be present for othersocioeconomic sectors of Jamaican society and othertechnologies than the ones we studied.

Coping Strategies

Given the goals of our project, we were particularly con-cerned with the income-generation activities associatedwith the cell phone. Phone lists may be used for pursuingmore conventional economic advantage. Junior, for ex-ample, uses the phone to recruit good dancers to attendthe dances he organizes, and Peter takes orders for theanimals and produce on his farm from local groceries. Ingeneral, however, the phone is used much less amongstlow-income Jamaicans in connection with either jobs orentrepreneurship than we anticipated. Our study sug-gested what in some ways was a still more basic role ofthe cell phone in helping low-income households makeends meet. Indeed, it became both tempting and plau-sible to account for the existence of link-up in terms ofits role in what we shall call coping strategies.11 Muchof the early anthropological interest in personal net-works was based on a concern with how low-incomeindividuals managed in difficult situations such as im-migration into towns (Mitchell 1966), often with an em-phasis upon kin (Stack 1974). Link-up fits well withinthe conclusions of studies carried out by social scientistsworking in Jamaica and the Caribbean (Barrow 1986,Clarke 2002, Henry-Lee 2002, Rickets 2002). For ex-ample, a recent study that focused upon domestic work-ers, security guards, and workers in export-processingzones concluded, “One of the most critical finds of the

11. There is a considerable literature that tries to differentiate cop-ing strategies as short-term responses to a crisis as against longer-term adaptive strategies (Clarke 2002, Ricketts 2002), but we havenot been concerned with this distinction.

study was the significant reliance on the personal andkinship networks for survival” (Henry-Lee et al. 2001:37). This finding confirmed the results of an early ex-tensive study of women in the Caribbean that empha-sized the centrality of networking to the general projectof “making do” (Senior 1991:129–47).

Our own research came to similar conclusions. In astudy of rural budgets we found that only 10% of thepopulation were employed formally in reliable, regularlypaid jobs (such as cashiers, shop workers, and teachers).12

Around 20% of households made money through farm-ing, and 30% earned income from work which rangedfrom somewhat reliable domestic and taxi work to ir-regular and intermittent work such as building, masonry,and shopkeeping. Another 30% received money almostexclusively through connections with other people. Putanother way, more than half the household incomes inour survey came from social networking rather than anykind of labour or sales.

Typically, the individuals we worked with felt thatgaining educational qualifications or skills failed to re-sult in employment (even though many were assiduousin trying to gain such qualifications) and emphasizedthat jobs were always obtained through social connec-tions. Similarly, marked disparities in income were oftenbased upon connections abroad that provided access toremittances. For instance, Keisha, a 33-year-old womanliving in a shared rental house in Marshfield with herone-year-old daughter, had worked as a secretary at afactory in Kingston and in telesales at a Portmore com-pany. However, after her daughter’s birth she had quither job to care for the baby. With the support of hermarried baby-father (JA$10,000 per month) and the smallprofits from the sale of an average of 25 Digicel phonecards each week, Keisha was able to meet her basicmonthly rent payment and food expenses, which totalledJA$8,400 per month, and pay her phone card bill ofJA$2,400. It was far more difficult for her to meet ad-ditional expenses. When she announced her plan to at-tend teacher’s college, her baby-father, boyfriend, and sis-ter all agreed to help her cover the difference betweenthe savings remaining from her previous employmentand the school and boarding fees of JA$60,000. However,books, uniforms, shoes, and other incidentals remainedto be paid for. Two weeks before the start of term, Keishaturned to her cell phone and scrolled through the num-bers. After passing by Adrian, Alston, Andrea, Bups, andCuzzi, Keisha saw the name of a local businessman whohad always encouraged her to continue with her edu-cation. She called him and explained that she had beenaccepted for school and paid her fees but needed moneyfor books and supplies. He told her that he could not

12. Jamaica, like other Caribbean countries, is marked by occu-pational multiplicity (see also Besson 2002). All of the individualsin regular jobs utilized other skills and resources to supplementtheir main income, and those with less reliable sources of incomedepended on a number of strategies to meet their day-to-day ex-penditures. As a result, these figures should be understood as themain sources of income and provide a picture of the range of pos-sible money-generating activities.


help her at the moment, having recently extended him-self helping others. Next she scrolled through her listand called Doreen, an old co-worker from her telesalesdays, “Miss D,” her office-procedures teacher, Shernette,a friend with whom she used to go out, and Tomoya,another friend from school days. Over the weekend shealso tried her niece, who had a good job in Spanish Town,another former co-worker, a former teacher, a friend, andher daughter’s godmother, for a total of 14 people. Sheasked some of them for money for her school books andothers for money for uniforms. She asked Tomoya forhelp with school shoes and her daughter’s godmother formoney for towels, saying that her “yard” towels had be-come so tattered that she was embarrassed to take themto school. In the end, she received JA$1,000 for the towelsfrom her daughter’s godmother and a total of JA$2,500from her teacher, a former co-worker, and the friend whoworked in Spanish Town. These three people had man-aged to “have it” at the time and had been willing toshare their money with her. In addition, her sister inFlorida sent her JA$6,000 (US$100) to help her out.

Keisha’s SIM card contained 100 numbers. She hadregular contact with two sisters, a niece, her mother, aboyfriend, and a baby-father, some on a daily basis, butthe vast majority of numbers were friends whom shecontacted “once in a while.” Link-up was the most im-portant foundation for her coping strategies and her mainsource of income. It hardly seems surprising, therefore,that the purchase of a cell phone is regarded as a priorityby those who might otherwise be considered least ableto afford them. This dynamic is quite unapparent towealthier Jamaicans, who often denigrate impoverishedindividuals for continuing to buy and use cell phoneswhen they claim to have no income.

Responding with considerable business acumen to thespecifics of Jamaican cell phone usage, Digicel intro-duced the “call-me” text to facilitate the often complexnegotiations over paying for a call. With this feature aperson with only JA$3 (US$0.05) credit remaining couldsend text messages to more than 20 others with thewords “Please call me at” followed by the number. These“call-me” texts quickly became the primary form of text-ing used by many low-income Jamaicans; according toDigicel, Jamaicans sent 21 million “call-me” messagesper month (personal communication). Even prior to thisinnovation, Jamaicans had established a complex systemfor the buying and reselling of phone cards that appro-priated the commercial system and extended it into alocal informal economy (for details see Horst and Millern.d.).

The temptation was to analyse “call-me” in terms ofanthropological theories of the gift and reciprocity(Mauss 1966, Godelier 1999), but our evidence failed tosupport any such analysis. Individuals recognized that“call-me” could be abused and took offence if individualswho were approximately equal in terms of income con-stantly tried to persuade other people to use their credit,but this response was confined to very sustained andexploitative asymmetries. There was no evidence for amore careful monitoring of “call-me” or even the con-

ceptualization of “call-me” in terms of general reciproc-ity, despite our attempts to discern them. Rather, “call-me” worked within an established pattern of small-scalebegging of favours without the expectation of reciprocity.The same lack of reciprocity seemed characteristic oflink-up more generally. The issue was not, as many Ja-maican journalists contended, why people felt free to askor “beg” (in local terms) but why individuals who seemedto have no particular obligation or reason to give actuallyagreed to do so. We found this question critical in manyarenas, including the day-to-day survival of children. Theindividuals who contributed to a child’s education andupkeep included not only close relatives but also neigh-bours, friends, and others. Rather than pointing to anyexpectation of reciprocity, many people who contributedto the development of others’ children reported that theychose to give simply because they liked or felt sorry forthe children.

The implication of all this is that this general systemof asking and giving is part and parcel of the powerfulconcern for the building of extensive social networks.What many low-income Jamaicans found difficult wasthe rejection of any opportunity to establish a relation-ship that might one day turn into something more sub-stantial. Giving a JA$50 bill (less than US$1) or replyingto a “call-me” request seemed generally worthwhile ifit initiated or maintained a connection that helped de-velop a larger social network. To regard this practice asapproaching some kind of long-term generalized reci-procity would be misleading. First, it is clear from ourstudy of “call-me” texting that Jamaicans generally donot see it this way, even in the short term. Rather thanforce the evidence to fit a given anthropological model,it seems to us preferable to recognize that much of link-up is autonomous from any such instrumentality, be-coming instead a continual search for opportunities toexpand the universe of connectedness in and of itself.

Moreover, the link-up mode of “wa gwaan” calls bearslittle resemblance to the usage of cell phones observedin various European countries or Japan (Katz and Aakhus2002, Ito 2004). In Norway, for example, women havedominated phone usage as an extension of their respon-sibility for the maintenance of a family’s wider socialnetworks (Ling 1998; see also Wellman and Wellman1992). In Jamaica, men’s cell phone books were oftenlarger than women’s (averaging 126.5 names as opposedto women’s 74), reflecting the assiduity with which theycollected potential sexual partners. In contrast, women’snetworking was primarily concerned with coping strat-egies, which often subsumed sexual relations. The con-stant concern with budgeting among low-income Ja-maicans makes each call look superficially similar tothose of children in the United Kingdom whose phoneusage depended upon pocket money (Taylor and Harper2003), but while reciprocity seemed central to the U.K.children’s usage it was far less important for low-incomeJamaicans.

Link-up does not constitute a complete network in theanthropological tradition established by Mitchell (1969)or as exemplified by networks such as guanxi in China


(Yan 1996). Nor do we view our account as an exampleof formal social network analysis (exemplified by SocialNetworks). It is tempting to view link-up as an unprec-edented development of personalized networking facil-itated by these new technologies and as signifying theincreasing importance of what Castells (1996) has calledthe network society (for a critique, see Miller and Slater2000:8). It may be the case in other parts of the worldthat the spread of the cell phone leads to the rise ofindividual-centred networks (Wellman 1999, 2001), andmuch of the literature on social networking makes thepoint that an ego-centred web of relationships is becom-ing the dominant form of sociality in the modern world.This is taken to be itself a response to both technologicalchanges such as the advent of the cell phone that makeit possible and social changes such as the decline of com-munity that make it desirable. Our evidence, contex-tualized by R. T. Smith’s work on the nature of kinshipnetworks over the past 30 years, does not support thisconclusion.

What Smith’s work demonstrates is that this type ofextensive rather than intensive ego-centred networkinghas been prevalent in Jamaica for quite some time. As aresult, there is no case for a technological determinism.It is, however, entirely possible that the prior importanceof these networks created an affinity for the cell phoneand has been responsible for the particular pattern ofusage we have described. Although there are commonstrands to kinship and social relations in the Caribbean,our ethnography suggests that the particular type of in-dividualism and ego-focused networking that Smith re-ports for kinship and that we found more generally pres-ent in our own study goes much farther in Jamaica than,for example, in Trinidad (Miller 1994:135–202). Indeed,Miller and Slater’s (2000) work in Trinidad also examinedthe specific use of the Internet for the development ofrelationships, showing how it strengthened family re-lationships that had previously been in jeopardy. It isreasonable, therefore, to suggest that the particular formof social relations characteristic of low-income Jamai-cans may contribute to an understanding of cell phoneuse in Jamaica.

Conclusion

Although coping strategies emerged as an important fea-ture of link-up, it cannot be reduced to any particularsocial or economic imperative. After all, Smith and hisassociates reached an analogous conclusion regarding thequantity of social connections when focusing specifi-cally on kinship. Just as Smith could assume that thiswas an attribute of kinship, we could easily have con-cluded that it was the coping strategies of low-incomeJamaicans that were primarily responsible for this phe-nomenon. But each study simply reflects its particularinterests.

The similarities between the two studies are striking.For example, Smith argued that rather extensive kinshiplinks could be expanded via fragile initial connections

such as an otherwise uninvolved baby-father. We foundthe same in non-kin networks. A friend may be the con-duit for an attachment to the friend’s own network thatpersists after the friendship has ended. The dissolutionof a sexual relationship does not necessarily break thelinks that followed from that relationship; indeed, theymay provide the route to the next sexual relationship.Often the two networks are intermixed; a family maydevelop a close relationship with its neighbours andthrough them become involved in an extensive networkof its neighbours’ kin. Members may, for example, feelobliged to attend the funeral of an “auntie” who is ac-tually a quite distant relative of their neighbours some-where “up-country.” One may equally become involvedwith the extensive network of a relative’s friends. Theuse of kinship terms is often quite loose. From the pointof view of our analysis what is important, however, isnot who would be regarded as kin or indeed fictive kin13

but the fact that very little differentiation is made be-tween kin and non-kin with respect to link-up.

When viewed in relation to coping strategies, it is theinstrumental aspects of link-up that come to the fore.Indeed, some Jamaicans almost delight in giving a cyn-ical, manipulative account of what they generalize astypically Jamaican behaviour. But what this ignores isour evidence that attempts to find other people to payfor one’s phone calls and an unwarranted and almostinexplicable generosity (for example, in sharing the bur-dens of child care) are two sides of the same coin. If thisgenerosity is not based on reciprocity, then it seems rea-sonable to suggest that it is asking and giving that pro-mote link-up.

In short, any division of relationships into particulardomains of enquiry looks artificial. One Jamaican mayknow another mainly through the church or a flirtation,but the two may also be friends or indeed distantly re-lated and may help each other in finding or promotingwork. From an anthropological perspective the term“link-up” is useful because it is not just people who arethereby connected but also separate domains of anthro-pological research. As with the relationship between thestudy of commerce and the state as against the study ofconsumption with which we began, there are many plau-sible and effective accounts which may explain thesedifferences. For instance, it would be simple to explainthe contrast between Trinidadians’ adoption of the In-ternet and Jamaicans’ affinity with the cell phonethrough a study of the companies and the different re-sponses of the state to liberalization. After all, if it hadbeen given a licence there, Digicel would have gone firstto Trinidad not to Jamaica. We also might have effec-tively argued the point largely in terms of differentialincome, given that Trinidadians’ income is nearly threetimes Jamaica’s. The study of link-up provides a com-

13. Smith (1996) noted that his interviews on kinship identified awide range of individuals who were not kin but “like family,” andhe struggled with how to account for them. In the end, he countedthem as “kin” only if a shared relative (however distant) could beestablished.


pletely different account of these differences. In our eth-nography, Jamaicans showed very little of the boundlessenthusiasm for the Internet encountered in Trinidad,even when they had experience of it and found an af-fordable or even a free connection. By contrast, the evi-dence for Jamaican enthusiasm for the cell phone ap-peared quite similar to Trinidadian reactions to theInternet. It was difficult to take at face value the com-mon claim made by Jamaicans that house phones werebeing cut off in favour of cell phones for reasons of ex-pense when our evidence suggested that cell phone useresulted in increased expenditure at a household level.Rather, it seemed that cell phones were well suited tothe particular kind of communication that is representedby link-up calls. These calls focused more on individualsthan households, and usage often consisted of large num-bers of very short calls, with the emphasis upon makingthe connection rather than the content of the call. Inaddition, individually based calls provided the added ben-efits of privacy and individual control. But, again, thisdoes not imply technological determinism; elsewherework on the social consequences of cell phones con-cludes that cell phones tend to be used for intensifyinga limited number of existing relationships (Haddon 2004:81–82). While in many contexts the Internet lends itselfto lengthier communications, there is evidence that Ja-maican students have also created a link-up genre ofusage.

One of the aims of our research was to understand thenuances of phone conversation. We became increasinglyfrustrated by the perfunctory nature of phone calls until,as is common in fieldwork, we realized that we neededto focus on a different dynamic—the absence of conver-sation. While house phones are potentially excellent andinexpensive media for long, deep, and protracted rela-tionships, they are not well suited to the link-up natureof Jamaican social networks, which often require indi-vidual privacy. Link-up provides an alternative to thestudy of commerce and the state in accounting both forthe differential interest in cell phones and for differencesin usage patterns.

Just as we would not wish to adjudicate between kin-ship and coping strategies as more important in account-ing for link-up, so we would not wish to favour eitherlink-up or liberalization as a factor in the differentialadoption of technologies. Rather, there is a constant in-teraction between production and consumption. Boyettand Currie’s (2004) work on the way Digicel as a com-pany has had to change its structure and ways of workingto adapt to Jamaican conditions shows the importanceof localization in the study of capitalism (see also Miller1997). Equally, Digicel demonstrated its understandingof the issues involved in link-up by its introduction ofthe “call-me” text in 2004, and this, in turn, extendedthe love affair between low-income Jamaicans and thecell phone in general and Digicel in particular.

In conclusion, it seems better not to privilege any oneperspective because, in the long and honourable traditionof anthropological holism, the primary concern may benot the retention of bounded, integrative categories such

as society, culture, and community but the recognitionof the irreducibility of social and economic practice toany one of its constitutive dimensions—in a word, link-up.

Comments

diane austin-broosDepartment of Anthropology, University of Sydney,Sydney, NSW, Australia ([email protected]). 20 vii 05

Returning from a period of fieldwork in Jamaica, I amalways struck by the absence in my own society of aJamaican practice of touching in most interactions—apassing tap on the shoulder, back, or arm as one greetsor farewells another. This is shown in a well-knownetching called Labrish, “gossip,” in which two youngwomen quietly exchange information with their armslightly resting on each other. The touching or connectingis also verbal: “Wha’appen?” “Come nu,” “Cho man,”“Come nu, man”, “Al right.” These short phrases thatopen, punctuate, or close a conversation act serve totouch the other person with the lightest of connections.There is a motorcar equivalent in crisp “beeps” that say“Hi there!” “Look out!” “Coming through!” “Thanks!”“You’re welcome!” and “Bye-bye!”. In middle-class id-iom, being “on the road” is driving to connect withfriends or family—just dropping in and then saying“Good night” and departing again. The lower-class vol-untary saving circles known as Partner rest on networksthat may be neighborhood-or lane-based or associatedwith a church, a village, or even a cultivators’ group.Anyone who has visited Browns Town in St. Ann Parishand reflected on its current and historical role as marketcentre feels the networks that resurface in Kingston—atPapine or the Harbour View roundabout or the super-market at Liguanea.

This idiom of speech and practice produces super-egos:the market woman who knows how to “marry” producefor sale better than her associates and, as a consequence,receives verbal deference; the don in his neighborhoodsauntering down a street with his lieutenants aroundhim, greeting and being greeted by baby-mothers andsometimes holding up a child—“Al right P ___” and “Alright W ___”—with an appropriate wave or smile. A pol-itician on a walk in downtown Kingston exhibits a sim-ilar style as both men and women rush to touch thisnexus of connections (Austin-Broos 1994). Most strikingfor me is that when I appear again, having been uncon-nected by telephone, mobile or other, a common com-ment from lower-class Jamaican friends is “Wha’ appenDiane? Me jus call yu nem yesterday.” In short, even ifwe seemed disconnected, this was only a surface ap-pearance; we have been connected all along. Undoubt-edly link-up is a style—social, embodied, spoken, andperformed—that extends across different domains. Horst


and Miller are correct to propose that this usage inter-prets technology rather than being created by it.

My recent fieldwork in central Australia among theWestern Arrernte has focused on the dynamics of asso-ciation among ego-centred bilateral networks of kin thatseem to have expanded with the advent and increasingcirculation of “things.” These networks expand and con-tract through dynamics that involve testing relatednessby demanding and sharing in response. Relatedness isregarded as a resource in itself, and the medium for test-ing it is a demand for ngkweltye, a small piece of some-thing. The term is used as a euphemism for smallamounts of cash. In Strathern’s terms, this demandingmakes relatedness “appear” out of the potentiality of alarger field of relations (Austin-Broos 2003). Within a so-ciality that is still kin-based, all of these relations arekin relations. I have been struck by the similarity of thisAustralian networking to the sociality of a market-basedJamaica in which laterally extended networks of kin aresignificant but not the only forms of relatedness in-volved. Both versions seem to be indicative of economicmarginalization in which networks maximize the op-tions available even when they are also social styles thathave value in themselves.

Horst and Miller’s argument seems to be that holisticanalyses of link-up could supersede kinship studies, butR. T. Smith did not suggest that Caribbean societies werekin-based in the way that classical ethnography under-stood a range of African societies to be. He used kinshipanalysis to comment on race and class. His point was aWeberian one—that power comes through status as wellas the market. With regard to the latter, Horst and Millerargue that link-up is a basic form of “social and economicpractice,” though it is not “a functional response to pov-erty.” Later they revise this latter assertion and acknowl-edge that link-up may be “a particular form of socialrelations characteristic of low-income Jamaicans.” Thisseems the more appropriate point, given that link-up isnot economy as such but rather a form of circulation ofinformation and some modest goods. It is as true todayas it was in the time of the Manchester School that net-working of this type becomes a pervasive social style injust those situations in which people experience mar-ginalization from powerful systems of production andconsumption—in a word, economies.

elaine bauer154 Clark St., London EH1 3HD, UK([email protected]). 18 vii 05

Horst and Miller’s research is certainly a new and in-ventive approach to the study of social networking. Ingeneral it is also a striking demonstration that particularcultures can foster very different patterns of use of thesame technologies.

Although the focus of this article is on the relationshipbetween kin and social networks in cell phone usage,the research revealed that kinship was much less sig-nificant than expected. At the same time, it revealed

similarities in function between kinship networks andthe social networks created by cell phone usage. Horstand Miller note that “one of the most important uses ofthe cell phone in relation to kinship derives from thecommon practice of having a child looked after by some-one other than the biological mother.” Like Jamaicankinship networks, cell phone networks provide mutualaid and coping strategies for families. Indeed, “the onlyreal difference between friendship and kinship” is thatwhile kin connections are latent and can be revived afterlong intervals, with friendship “a minimal degree of so-ciality that preserves the relationship is preferred.”

Horst and Miller present a telling analysis of genderdifferences in the use of cell phones in Jamaica. Theyfound that although “the most extensive form of phone-based networking revolves around the potential of sexualliaisons,” men were more likely “to see sexual relationsas ends in themselves” while women tended “to asso-ciate them with other needs, most often economic sur-vival,” which was often provided by men. They foundthat women used their cell phones as a means of contactwith their baby-fathers for economic support and contactwith children living with their baby-fathers’ families.

Through this interpretation, their analysis is linked toa key current issue in Caribbean anthropology—the roleand responsibilities of Caribbean men in family life (seee.g., Barrow 1998, Black 1995, Chamberlain 2003). Thus,Black (1995; 65), investigating the “connection of kin-ship and gender ideology and practice” in Antigua, con-cluded that

while mothers are responsible for the everydaythings and rearing practices that people take forgranted, for things that are so commonplace as notto count, many Antiguan children have the experi-ence of going to their father to get important neces-sities that their mothers cannot afford to provide—things like school fees or money for books or newshoes. Commodities that are marked as “important”and “unusual” are things that one gets from a lovingfather.

In our own research on Jamaican transnational families(Bauer and Thompson n.d.) we have similarly found thatJamaican fathers, grandfathers, uncles, and brothers wereall important in the functions and relationships of thekinship network not only in Jamaica but also across theAtlantic.

Horst and Miller argue that “Smith’s research can beviewed as a study of link-up that can now be expandedfrom its initial base in the anthropology of kinship,” andI would add that Clarke’s (1957) and Besson’s (2002) re-search on family land, with its emphasis on pragmatismalong with rights, provides another parallel with theworking of “link-up.” Horst and Miller demonstrate thepragmatic and inalienable value of link-up relationships:“the activation of any particular potential relationshipis expected to occur only when, in some sense, one per-son can respond to the need of another. Consequently,even if one has not visited a particular cousin living in


town for five years, when one’s child receives a place inschool near that cousin it is largely assumed that thecousin’s house may represent a possible boarding place.”

Lastly, there is another parallel with more recent re-search on transnational families (Goulbourne and Cham-berlain 2001, Bauer and Thompson n.d.). Horst and Millermaintain that “the most important element is not thecontent of conversations but their use to maintain con-nections over time.” As with local link-up among trans-national Jamaican families, telephones—cell phones andland lines—are crucial in maintaining connections withthe larger family network over time and space and some-times simply as a means of just keeping in touch. Addi-tionally, as with Horst and Miller’s research on cellphones, research on transnational families also demon-strates the importance of friends in providing mutual aidand support and the strategies used to create an extensivenetwork not just locally or nationally but also globally.Thus, just as R. T. Smith’s (1998) work on Jamaican kin-ship networks forms a bridge between the work of Clarke(1957) and Besson (2002), so Horst and Miller’s researchforms a link between those works and our studies of Ja-maican transnational kinship networks.

james g. carrierDepartment of Anthropology, University of Durham,Durham DH1 3HN, UK ([email protected]). 6v 05

Horst and Miller have addressed an important question—the relationship between the technical or material natureof objects (technology) and their social use (consump-tion). In much of the Western world the popular stressis on technology and the vistas it opens, including thoseopened by newer communications technology. In thissituation it is important to be able to remind those out-side the discipline, as well as ourselves, that perhaps weought to attend not so much to the vistas as to the use.

Echoing the point that people use many objects inways that allow them to maintain and extend valuedsocial relationships (Douglas and Isherwood 1978), Horstand Miller locate the use of mobile or cell telephonesamong poor people in Jamaica in their sociality. Whatthey call “link-up,” which, they say, is typical of thecountry, involves the maintenance of an extensive webof weak social connections. The study that they presentis exemplary in relating patterns of telephone use to themaintenance of such networks and in showing how theleading telephone company in Jamaica, Digicel, hasadapted its marketing and service to take advantage ofthose patterns, thereby reinforcing them. Thus the po-tentials in the technology interact with the social prac-tices of Jamaicans and the strategies of the pertinentcompany to generate the existing form of telephone use.

Like any stimulating work, theirs raises questions. Iwant to mention two.

The first concerns telephone use and sociality gener-ally. It would be interesting to know if there are otherplaces that have the sort of sociality that Horst and Mil-

ler describe and what sort of telephone use these placeshave. For instance, they note that Trinidad has a differentform of telephone use. Is sociality amongst poorer Trin-idadians characterized by this web of weak ties? If so,why is telephone use different?

More broadly, while this sort of sociality may be pro-nounced amongst poorer Jamaicans, it is not restrictedto them. As Horst and Miller indicate, it seems to existamong university students in the country. Perhaps moreunexpectedly, it was noted in the United States severaldecades ago (Granovetter 1973), and presumably it con-tinues to exist there, in light of the salience of such weakties for important aspects of people’s lives. It would beinteresting to know how weak ties are maintained inother settings where they are significant or, indeed, inplaces where mobile telephone technology is not avail-able (e.g., Jamaica of 20 years ago). Is Jamaican telephoneuse the equivalent of, perhaps, sending lots of Christmascards in the United States or the United Kingdom?

The second question is more peripheral to the article’score argument but is intriguing even so. It concernsHorst and Miller’s consideration of how Jamaican soci-ality fits with existing anthropological models of ex-change. They argue that it does not fit, even with a modelof long-term, generalized reciprocity. I am not sure aboutthis. The reciprocity they seem to be thinking of doesnot, as their discussion implies, entail alternating obli-gation: because I have helped you, you owe me. It canimply only that those to whom I grant favours are thosefrom whom I may request a favour in the future, shouldI find myself in need.

This in turn raises the question of the nature of socialobligation in Jamaica and its converse, social expectationor right. This is a complex issue. However, descriptionsof family land in Jamaica and elsewhere in the English-speaking Caribbean (e.g., Clarke 1971[1953], Olwig 1997)suggest that expectation and obligation within extensivegroups are tied to need in a way that is not stressed innormal anthropological accounts of generalized reci-procity (e.g., the description of open-handed transactionswithin ego’s group in Sahlins [1974: chap. 5]). The ap-parent significance of need for expectations in Jamaicamay complicate the analytical apparatus somewhat, andcertainly it deserves investigation. However, it seemslikely to offer a useful way of framing the sociality thatHorst and Miller describe in a country where many peo-ple suspect that need may well be right around thecorner.

These two questions are, in some sense, tangential tothe focus of Horst and Miller’s article, but they are ques-tions that can help us extend our understanding of thesorts of processes that this rewarding article describes.

barry chevannesUniversity of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica([email protected]). 10 vii 05

If ever there was any doubt about the value of the eth-nographic method, with its reliance on the cultivation


of trust between researcher and researched, Horst andMiller’s article should go a long way toward dispellingit. That the authors were able to produce valuable in-sights into the culture of globalized Jamaicans by beingallowed into the very private lives of men and womenthey spent only a few months living among is testimonyto their skills in gaining the trust of their informantsthat the information they freely gave would not be usedagainst them or theirs. In light of the Central IntelligenceAgency’s planting of trainees in anthropology pro-grammes under the Pat Roberts Intelligence ScholarsProgram, I believe it important to reaffirm that as humanbeings we cannot live without trust. The membershipof the American Anthropological Association must becommended for voting to rescind the 86-year-old censureof Franz Boas for publicly opposing four of his colleagues’using anthropology “as a cover for their activities asspies.”1

Globalization as the interconnectedness brought aboutby the new communications technologies flows largelyone way—southward, given the technological advan-tages of the North. This fact has raised concerns aboutcultural imperialism and the threat to the cultural iden-tity of recipient countries. What Horst and Miller in thisarticle and Miller in his Trinidad and Tobago work (Mil-ler 2005a) show is that the uses made of the technologiesare very much determined by local cultural (my word)and social imperatives. The implication of this is that,as far as the technologies go, globalization is not muchto be feared, for whatever capacities (or contents?) theybring are subject to local mediation, interpretation, andeven innovation.

In the Jamaican case, the use of cell phone technologyby low-income earners is determined by the need forextensive personal networks of friends and kin butmainly friends, who may prove instrumental for one’seconomic or sexual needs. The network is maintainedby “link-up”—short simple calls or text messages devoidof content in which the link is the message, establishinga kind of visibility that may prove useful to one’s futureneeds.

That such extensive networking already existed priorto the introduction of cell phones, as Raymond Smithfound in his study of kinship as far back as the late 1960s,leads Horst and Miller to conclude that the peculiar Ja-maican adaptation is prompted neither by government’sliberalization policy nor by company promotion but by“a continual search for opportunities to expand the uni-verse of connectedness in and of itself.” In other words,Jamaicans have a compulsion to be connected. This, theyargue, provides an adequate explanation and not any the-ory of reciprocity, which, although they do not entirelydismiss it, they find not to fit the facts mainly becausethose who give say they do so out of generosity and not,presumably, to build up credit.

1. See Anthropology Today 21(3):27.

In research I conducted in 1988,2 Jamaicans explainedtheir volunteerism as doing to others what they hopedothers, not necessarily the recipients of their generosity,would do to them if and when they were in need. Linkingthis to their deep-seated belief in the inevitability of ret-ribution, I concluded that they viewed the world as beingin a kind of equilibrium such that good would never gounrewarded or bad unpunished. Could this be at workhere in the link-up networks?

Every link-up establishes a dyadic relation in whichthe linker is a potential recipient and the linked a po-tential giver. The linked gives because in her/his ownnetwork there are potential givers including the recipientof her /his generosity. The wider the network, the greaterthe possibilities. This is not the same as reciprocity ascommonly understood, but it produces the kind of sym-metry implied in systems of reciprocity. Jamaicans arecontemptuous of asymmetrical relations. People who al-ways receive but seldom if ever give are appropriatelycalled “parasites.” People who are always giving and sel-dom receiving are called “boops,” a disparaging term thatreserves its sharpest edge for men who satisfy the ma-terial wants of women but are not recipients of theirsexual favours. In the universe of link-up networks, ev-eryone is linking and being linked in a process of askingand giving that in the end allows everyone to cope.

Horst and Miller are dead-right on the importance ofthe cell phone to low-income earners but possibly tooquick to rule out reciprocity and mutual dependence.

lars hinrichsUniversity of Freiburg, Freiburg D-79106, Germany([email protected]). 10 vii 05

My comment consists of an elaboration of the parallelsbetween Horst and Miller’s findings and my own and asuggestion for a theoretical improvement.

As they mention, my work on computer-mediatedcommunication among Jamaican university studentsprovides evidence that “link-up” is not confined to low-income Jamaicans or to the medium of the cell phone(Hinrichs 2005). For this comment, I will concentrate onmy primary corpus, a collection of 209 e-mails (ca. 40,000words) written by students or recent graduates of theUniversity of the West Indies Mona in Kingston.

The type of extensive, individually based social net-working that Horst and Miller describe as emerging onthe basis of the cell phone is demonstrably rooted inmuch older, specifically Jamaican kinds of kinship net-works. This type of communicative and networkingstrategy, which gains its unique qualities from the easeand efficiency characteristic of the new electronic media,is evident even in e-mails by informants who are fullyindependent economically, that is, who came from thehigher spheres of society. This supports Horst and Mil-

2. Volunteerism in Jamaica, AFS International, New York and SocialWelfare Training Centre, University of the West Indies, Mona, Ja-maica, 1989.


ler’s claim that the impetus toward extensive, individ-ually based link-up-network building is “autonomousfrom any . . . instrumentality” and not primarily gearedtoward creating economic subsistence, even though thetrading of favors in these networks can contribute tosubsistence.

They report a high frequency of interactions devotedexclusively to the aim of staying in touch, interactionswhich are not known in any similar prominence or fre-quency from studies of other geographical settings, as animportant feature of link-up. While e-mails that are writ-ten only for the sake of staying in contact are not unheardof in other parts of the world (cf. Georgakopoulou 2004on e-mails among London Greeks, where this type iscalled “keeping-up messages”), they are strikingly fre-quent among Jamaicans. They also show a specific localquality in their use of code-switching into “Patois,” theisland’s English-based creole language (in linguistic ter-minology, Jamaican Creole). I reproduce here a completee-mail message, one of about 20 in my corpus which areobviously aimed at nothing except maintaining contact:

I THINK U DESERVE THE BIGGEST TRACINGEVER IN YOUR LIFE TIME.WHY U NUH CALL MI. WHAT HAPPEN U DASHMI WHEY. [Why don’t you call me? What hap-pened, have you abandoned me?] WELL UR PUN-ISHMENT IS THAT U WILL NOT BE RECEIVINGANY EASTER BUN1 THIS YEAR. By the way EasterMonday is my birthday I at least deserve a card.How are things over there. Life could not be so hardthat I cannot even get a phone call. Anyways I havesomething to tell u but u have to call me to hear it.Hail up [name] for me and hail up u mother and theahhhhhhhhhhh the police guy (can’t remember hisname right now (ur stepfather).Love[name]

As in several other e-mails of this type, this messagetakes the form of a reproach: a quite direct reprimandfor not having been in contact for a while, complete withthe threat of punishment (the speech act could be inter-preted as the performance of a mother-type role). Theinsertion in Patois functions as a repair device. JamaicanCreole is the informal code in the Jamaican sociolin-guistic spectrum, complementing Standard Jamaican En-glish, which is the code used in official settings such aseducation. Since no orthographic standard for writtenJamaican Creole exists, its use in writing amounts to thetranscription of oral language and therefore comes at acertain cognitive cost, which explains the quantitativedominance of English over Creole in the material (Hin-richs 2004). The discourse function of the Creole code-switch here is to soften the blow of the reproach (cf.Brown and Levinson 1987 on linguistic face-saving strat-egies). In combination with the code-switch, the re-

1. Easter Bun is a roll of sweet white bread seasonally shared amongfamily and friends.

proach at the start of the message is altogether quiteharmless—it is practically neutralized—and it is clearthat the act of writing and sending an e-mail was thewriter’s only goal. The high frequency of messages likethis can certainly be considered evidence that link-up isa strategy reflected in e-mails of educated young Jamai-cans as well.

Language use among the informants who supplied e-mails to my corpus is certain to be different from thatamong Horst and Miller’s informants. Since the level ofeducation is considerably higher among the universitystudents in my study, their proficiency in written stan-dard English is also very likely to be higher. As Devonish(1996) points out, this crucial social skill in turn makesfor a “linguistic confidence” among Jamaican universitystudents that allows them to use Creole in writing morefreely and experimentally and in fact to produce twodistinct codes, English and Patois, in writing. Thus, link-up networking employing two codes, as in the aboveexample, might be more restricted to educated Jamai-cans. Because of the limited uptake of the Internet inJamaica compared with Trinidad and compared with thatof the cell phone, e-mail is probably the more elitistmeans of communication. Nonetheless, both the cellphone and computer-mediated communication have be-come the sites of a new kind of social interaction basedon traditional Caribbean types of kinship network.

For future uses of the link-up concept it may be usefulto distinguish more clearly between link-up as a kind ofsocial network and as the communicative strategy de-signed to create and maintain such networks. The termis probably best suited to denoting the communicativepractice, bearing in mind the meaning of the Patois tolink someone ‘to get in touch with someone.’

aisha khanDepartment of Anthropology, New York University, 25Waverly Place, New York, NY 10003, U.S.A.([email protected]). 7 vii 05

Identifying a particular pattern of cell phone use amonglow-income Jamaicans that they call “link-up,” Horstand Miller conclude that technological determinismdoes not accurately explain the use or significance of newcommunication technologies and call for investigationof specific sociocultural contexts of local use. Fittingsquarely within abiding anthropological premises, theirconclusion is a reliable one. In addition, to extend thisreasoning, we need to ask why certain cultural repre-sentations of cultures, peoples, and countries are thetouchstones against which our surprise at prediction fail-ure is registered. What is required, then, is a simulta-neous investigation of ethnographic specificity and of thecultural assumptions that foster that surprise.

The paper’s presenting kinship in terms of wider formsof networking and other social relationships rather thanas a bounded domain points to a social science proclivityfor reifying interpretive categories and to Caribbean stud-ies’ long tradition of treating kinship (primarily family


and household) almost as an independent variable, a keyfoundation of society but allegedly riddled with pathol-ogy (see, e.g., Simey 1946; cf. Barrow 1996). Kinship’salleged foundational status (or alleged lack thereof) inCaribbean societies, however, has been a reflection ofother concerns, largely those of imperial rule (e.g., Khann.d.). And as a means of creating and making sense ofcertain kinds of social bonds, the forms that kinshiptakes and the work it performs are diffuse. As this papersuggests, R. T. Smith considered kinship extensive ratherthan tightly structured in his discussion, for example, ofWest Indian dual marriage system principles which arenot enunciated in oral tradition or documented but“must be inferred from a wide range of manifestations,both historical and contemporary” (1982:120–21). Fromthis vantage point, we can incorporate “ambiguity, un-certainty, and contradictions,” which, Smith argued, areindispensable considerations and which in turn presup-pose the unlikelihood of kinship’s being a concentratedphenomenon.

The paper’s call for ethnographic specificity raisesother interesting issues, especially in connection withkinship and its articulation with other domains of sociallife such as reciprocity and coping strategies. One is thedistinction between cell phone conversation content andconnection (“link-up”). Averaging 19 seconds, conver-sations are important not for their content but “as ameans to maintain connections over the longer term.”This raises the issue of what culturally constitutes “con-tent.” Cell phone conversations 19 times longer than 19seconds may appear vapid to those overhearing them,and two or three words can speak volumes. While mas-saging sociality with conversation appears not to be afactor in cell phone use in Jamaica, clearly somethingdeeper is being communicated in the few words ex-changed, as this paper implies, in terms of the ties thatbind people together.

The second issue concerns coping strategies and rec-iprocity. An important finding of the research is the roleof cell phones in coping strategies, countering what isoften a misguided moralizing indignation leveled at low-income people everywhere about their supposedly mis-placed economic priorities. The paper spends more time,however, arguing that link-up should not be seen as “anemanation of reciprocity,” that link-ups are “autono-mous from any such instrumentality, becoming insteada continual search for opportunities to expand the uni-verse of connectedness in and of itself,” irreducible to“any particular social or economic imperative.” Yet cop-ing strategies could be viewed in terms of instrumen-tality (e.g., sources of income or other “continualsearch[es] for opportunities”) without the connoted dis-approval that Horst and Miller seem to want to avoid.There is nothing necessarily objectionable or reductiveabout instrumental objectives, which are culturallymeaningful and ethnographically specific and carry di-verse moral valences. (One might think of, for example,Michel de Certeau’s [1984] concept of the “tactic.”) Thebroader question here is pinpointing what “connected-ness” is about if it is not about reciprocity. It seems that

there is an implicit suggestion of altruism, even if theresearchers would not directly express it as such. If peo-ple agree to give without the pressure of obligation (what-ever both “pressure” and “obligation” might culturallyentail), what is the precise relationship with coping strat-egies if reciprocity is not a factor? As we know fromMarcel Mauss and others, reciprocity can come in manyforms and interpretations. Indeed, sentiments (e.g.,“liked,” “felt sorry for”) can be their own reward.

karen fog olwigDepartment of Anthropology, University ofCopenhagen, Øster Farimagsgade 5, 1353 CopenhagenK, Denmark ([email protected]) 8 vii 05

Horst and Miller’s article provides a fine example of theway in which a study of a fairly narrow topic, the use ofcell phones in Jamaica, can bring fascinating new in-sights into a much broader subject matter, the nature ofsocial relations in modern society. The authors con-vincingly demonstrate how this new piece of commu-nication technology has fed into and reinforced localpractices for the building up of extensive networks inwhich lines to as many individuals as possible are keptopen. Thus, they show that link-ups through calls on thecell phone have become an important mode wherebynetworks of relations are constructed and maintained inthat they allow individuals to engage in extended con-versations with a large number of people through regularbut ultra-brief and cost-effective conversations that man-age, somehow, to keep social relationships going. Thisethnographic study therefore points to the emergence ofwhat one might call, using Appadurai’s (1966) notion ofthe “-scape,” a “chatscape”—a fluid, mobile, multipur-pose ego-centered form of sociality based on fragmentary,informal chats that is negotiated by individuals in ac-cordance with their particular life circumstances.

The large lists of phone numbers that individual Ja-maicans develop to maintain these networks apparentlyinvolve a wide variety of people. The callers, accordingto Horst and Miller, do not distinguish between familyand kin, on the one hand, and friends, on the other, ex-cept that they note that more effort has to be put intomaintaining a relationship with non-kin. Relations, ap-parently, assume importance when they are incorporatedinto individuals’ social worlds as they continuously con-struct the social networks that frame their lives.

This approach to social relations ties in well with R.T. Smith’s 1988 study of West Indian kinship, which alsodemonstrated the great significance of extensive net-works of relations, but also raises a number of questionsthat need to be addressed. Thus, if, as Horst and Millerassert, the Jamaicans studied do not distinguish betweenkin and friends, except for the fact that the relations withfriends need to be maintained whereas kin are expectedto offer help whenever needed, how are we to understandthe nature of kinship? What goes into the making ofkinship as a more permanent relation of expected reli-ability in this world of shifting relations of give-and-take,


adapted to changing circumstances of life? Recent theoryon kinship (Carsten 2000), drawing on the approach de-veloped by David Schneider (1968) and R. T. Smith(1988), has argued that kin ties, like all human relations,are socially constructed and need to be examined withina wider framework of ethnographic research on the “in-digenous” statements and practices in which notions ofrelatedness emerge. Kinship therefore does not precedesocial life but emerges as a special domain of relationsas it is practiced and given particular value in social life.How, then, do Jamaicans establish the domain of kinshipthat, as Jean Besson (2002) has shown, is associated withmore stable relations, often anchored in family land orfamily homes? And what is the relationship betweennotions of relatedness that emphasize the rather flightysociality played out in the “chatscapes” and notions ofrelatedness that emphasize more permanent relationscalled kinship? Are the two domains of relatedness an-tithetical, or do they offer complementary contexts ofequal importance to people in their everyday lives? Andhow do individuals juggle the two domains at variousvital conjunctures (Johnson-Hanks 2002)?

Horst and Miller do not address these questions,largely because theirs is primarily a study of the sociallife of cell phones, not of the social life of the peoplewho use the cell phones. While they have produced aninteresting “holistic account” of the significance of cellphones in Jamaican social networks, they do not providean ethnographic study of the role of cell phones in Ja-maican social life in general. This would require a focuson people’s everyday lives and the many different rela-tions that they construct and engage in the course of thislife, including those not maintained through cell phones.

don slaterLondon School of Economics, Houghton Street,London WC2A 2AE, UK ([email protected]). 12 vii 05

Writing as a sociologist, I feel that Horst and Miller’spaper moves the study of “media and society” towardsa sophistication (and “ethnographic holism,” as they putit) that only anthropology seems able to provide. Istrongly endorse their conclusion that “from an anthro-pological perspective, the term ‘link-up’ is useful becauseit is not just people who are thereby connected but alsoseparate domains of anthropological research.” Indeed,separate domains of social analysis more generally, par-ticularly sociology and media studies, are drawn to-gether. Broadened by the concept of link-up, the studyof the mobile phone becomes the study of different pat-terns of connectedness. Because they testify to the waysin which people innovate in relation to more long-termlocal modes of social networking, we cannot expect thesepatterns to observe disciplinary distinctions.

Moreover, this approach lays the basis for more com-parative analysis. My ethnography of new media inGhana (part of a programme comparing Jamaica, Ghana,India, and South Africa) indicates that link-up, definedas a prioritization of connectedness over content, is if

anything more extreme there than in Jamaica. The vastmajority of mobile phone use took the form of “flash-ing”: one person dials a contact and breaks the connec-tion after one or two rings; the receiver of this “call”interprets it contextually. Hence, most calls are farshorter than the 19 seconds Horst and Miller cite forJamaica—they are in fact uncompleted, entirely “con-tentless,” and intended to effect or simply signify con-nectedness. Many aspects of this can be interpreted en-tirely in line with Horst and Miller’s argument, as alocally typical aggregation of networks that is continu-ous with older modes but technologically extends andmaterializes them in a new form. Similarly, Ghanaianusers often ritualize this process: one person flashes an-other and says, “Now you’ve got my number,” and therecipient stores it and then reciprocates, thereby ac-knowledging right of access to the other and an extensionof their networks.

The major difference between Jamaica and Ghana con-cerns reciprocity and the role of new media in managingthe cost of social connectedness. Ghanaian social andkinship networks are certainly crucial resources in cop-ing strategies, as in Jamaica, but they are also perceivedas obligations or burdens to be carefully managed. Themobile phone reduces quite diverse costs: for example,one can discharge a familial obligation to look after arelative by flashing rather than making a time-consum-ing visit. Mobile phones are common gifts from abroad;while valued by the receiver, the gift reduces the cost ofstaying connected but usually enrols the sender in theongoing cost of keeping the connection active.

There is another comparative twist that emerges fromthe Ghana research: different media can be appropriatedto produce quite different kinds of connectedness.Whereas mobile phones are understood in terms of thepractical management of real social networks, most In-ternet use involved random chat or e-mail with mainlynorthern foreigners in the hope of money, visas, invita-tions, or foreign contacts. This use was entirely consis-tent with a central livelihood strategy—emigration andescape—but opposed and unconnected to the equallycentral livelihood strategies effected through mobilephones. In the Ghanaian case, we need to look at theopposition between two different technological modes ofconnectedness in order to achieve the anthropologicalholism that Horst and Miller advocate.

The issue here is rather more than the pointing outthat Ghana is different from Jamaica. Horst and Millerask us to look at connectedness by analogy with Smith’sanalysis of kinship as an “extensive network of potentialconnections expressed through the recognition of indi-viduals as relatives,” and they pursue this analogy byinvestigating the “‘universe’ of names defined by a cer-tain principle, in our case the list of names saved in thecell phone.” In the Ghanaian case, I would point to mul-tiple, ambivalent and changing principles by which peo-ple define connectedness and to the mobile phone (andmobile/Internet opposition) as both reflecting and ef-fecting the complexity of these principles. For example,a major Ghanaian mobile operator talks about “funeral


traffic”: a significant proportion of mobile phone use isto manage the complex arrangements of this central so-cial institution, which usually involves the coordinationof large numbers of dispersed people. The mediation offuneral arrangements by mobile phone both reflects andperforms changes in kinship structures as these net-works extend into urban and foreign contexts with aconsequent hybridity of kinship connections.

What is valuable here is the capacity to convey a senseof ethnographic integrity to the particular Jamaican con-textualization of the mobile phone while at the sametime hinging the analysis on a concept that allows a moregeneral and comparative consideration of “connected-ness” that is not substantively confined to one technol-ogy or one locally particular kind of social network.

karla slocumDepartments of Anthropology and African & Afro-American Studies, University of North Carolina,CB#3115, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3115, U.S.A.([email protected]). 16 vii 05

Horst and Miller make a much-needed contribution toCaribbean studies of global telecommunications, an areascarcely covered in the literature. Specifically, theywiden our understanding of the intersection of local pat-terns of sociality and cell phone use in one Caribbeancontext (nicely distinguished from others). Further, bycentering their inquiry on modes of telecommunicationsconsumption on Jamaica and addressing how thesemodes influenced the prospects and possibilities for adeveloping cell phone industry on the island, Horst andMiller push the debate regarding the determinacy of glob-alizing strategies. Indeed, their point that the state andforeign capital were not the only shapers of the island’sindustry is an important one, reminding us that glob-alizing processes must contend with existing and devel-oping local formations. I also find especially importantthe distinction they accentuate between the uses of cellphones and the Internet in Jamaica and Trinidad, un-derscoring that the particularity of locality is essentialin mediating how and whether globalizing projects un-fold. Not only is the point instructive regarding the waysin which “global” and “local” inform each other but alsoit presents Caribbean people as actively engaged withmodern technology rather than as necessarily socially oreconomically marginalized by it. In this regard, I appre-ciate the sense we get of how Jamaican cell phone usersparticipate in the path that global processes follow.

Horst and Miller’s attention to the organization of so-cial networks around global technologies also buildsupon a rich tradition in Caribbeanist anthropology. Formore than half a century, North American anthropolo-gists have been examining the shape and shaping of fam-ily and extrafamily networks in the Caribbean. This ar-ticle intersects with current studies on modes ofengaging and extending social ties transnationally andwithin the contemporary global political economy. It isrefreshing to see the authors pick up on this work and

extend it into the area of global technologies. As theystress the extensive nature of cell phone users’ socialnetworks, Horst and Miller reveal to us that a social facetof Caribbean life that has long been documented (by R.T. Smith and others) remains significant amidst monu-mental economic and technological shifts.

In this context, their analysis points to the (numerical)centrality of nonkin in cell phone users’ activities, buttheir discussion leaves me with a few questions. First,if calls to specific kin are more frequent and calls to avariety of nonkin are more numerous, what can we takefrom this difference? The relative frequency of calls tokin seems significant to an understanding of the poten-tial differential intensity and richness of the relationsmaintained with kin versus nonkin. Second, if callingkin who live abroad is one of the main features of kincalls, what might this suggest about the transnationalties that cell phones engender for kin in particular? Whatis it about kin relationships that could lead to more over-seas and more frequent calls? Is it possible that kin tiesare more intensive (more frequent and engaged in acrossgreater distances) and nonkin ties more extensive? Whatmight this say about the quality and meaning of kinversus nonkin relationships? Also, with comparative in-formation on uses of land lines in rural versus urbanareas, we might better understand whether cell phones(and not other forms of telecommunications) are partic-ularly important to transnational kin relationships.Third, I am uneasy with the suggestion that women workcell phone lists primarily to secure economic benefitsthrough liaisons with males. I wonder if more researchinto the quality and experience of those liaisons mightshow economic motivations to be only part of the pack-age. There has been a long-standing suggestion in theliterature that Afro-Caribbean women engage in serialand shifting sexual relationships from which they derivefinancial support, but there is also evidence that the re-lationships are more complex than this one feature. Per-haps an extended study on this topic would yield moreinsights on this possibility for cell phone contacts. Ofcourse, studies are limited by space and time, but ex-ploring some of these questions would round out an al-ready intriguing and insightful study.

Finally, the connection that Horst and Miller draw be-tween cell phone lists and networking may indeed returnus to R. T. Smith’s seminal study, but it also returns usto other Caribbean literature on social networks. Theyreference some of this material but measure their find-ings most directly and systematically against those ofSmith, which I think narrows the conclusions they draw.I am thinking in particular about the vast amount ofwork on flexibility in Caribbean social interactions, re-lationships, and modes of social organization. If cellphone users shift ties rapidly as Horst and Miller de-scribe, this seems to signal a flexibly resourceful ap-proach to building long-range social ties not unlike anapproach noted elsewhere in the region by otherresearchers.

These issues notwithstanding, the implications andcontributions of this study are important, particularly its


interventions into work on intersections of the globaland the local.

richard wilkDepartment of Anthropology, Indiana University,Bloomington, IN 47405-7100, U.S.A.([email protected]). 19 vii 05

This is an important and innovative paper which usesnew methods to study very contemporary issues but con-nects with venerable and still important issues in generalanthropology and Caribbean studies. The ethnographicdetail on phone lists and the extension of networks isparticularly fascinating.

I have to admit to being alarmed by the introductorysection, in which Horst and Miller set up an oppositionbetween the kind of ethnographic analysis of technologythey are doing and the supposedly simpleminded andunsuccessful work of economists and other vulgar types.The dot.com bubble and the failure of many technologyschemes are fascinating and complex phenomena, hardlysomething that can be blamed on technophilia. And itis hardly news to experts, even some economists, thatthe consumption, marketing, and use of technologies aremediated by culture. These are central topics these daysin science, technology, and society studies, media stud-ies, and consumer research.

There is nothing novel, therefore, about an argumentthat local cultures make a difference in how new tech-nologies are accepted, adopted, and positioned. Evenhard-nosed neoconservative economists and political sci-entists are now willing to admit that “culture matters”(though their sort of cultural determinism [e.g., Harrisonand Huntington 2000] would give many anthropologistspause). The really important question is how much dif-ference culture makes. Would a cultural analysis like theone presented here have been able to predict that poorJamaicans would love their cell phones while Trinida-dians would connect with the Internet? Would you bewilling to bet a few million dollars on that prediction,or does the analysis derive its weight from hindsight?

Horst and Miller’s analysis leaves out everything butculture and local social organization. It would help usto assess their argument if they had developed the initialcontrast with Trinidad a bit further. What are the com-parative prices of air time in the two countries? Howmuch does the physical size of the islands make a dif-ference? Are Trinidadians, with better roads and morecars, able to meet and connect more easily than Jamai-cans? Since telecommunications monopolies and themassive profits they produce for rich multinationals area major political issue in the region, how did Jamaicamanage to open their market?

The section of the paper that deals with extensive non-kin link-up networks dramatically emphasizes one as-pect of working-class Caribbean social life—the fluidityof social relationships, a lack of clear distinction betweenkin and nonkin, flexible parenting, and explicit eco-nomic expectations in sexual relationships. This all rings

true with the Afro-Caribbean people I have worked within Belize. But the Caribbean kinship literature is alsoreplete with more stable long-term kin-based groups thatare not ego-centered, often being formed around familyland, yards, and houses. Horst and Miller tell us that thepeople they surveyed all live in households but give uslittle information about how those households are so-cially and economically linked to and through individualnetworks.

To my mind, the most interesting question posed butnot answered by the paper is how these two kinds ofnetworks connect and influence one another. For in-stance, does the cell phone lower the transaction costsof the link-up network to the point where people investless in their face-to-face domestic household arrange-ments? Or do the individual networks of close kin in-terconnect into larger structures that might actually re-inforce some householding groups? Can we expect along-term increase in the fragility of kinship groups? Andhow does cell phone use differ among older people whohave established more stable conjugal unions?

The only section of the paper I found obscure was theone that tries to show that the calling networks are notbased on reciprocity. I am not sure exactly what the au-thors are arguing against. Would anyone seriously sug-gest that people link-up just to express some primal needfor reciprocity? That people have few expectations, showunexpected generosity, or refuse to reciprocate canhardly be seen as proof that something other than reci-procity (at least as I understand it) regulates interpersonalrelationships. Perhaps the argument is actually againsta simplistic utilitarian approach, but I can see severalvery fruitful ways in which exchange theories could beused to understand how these networks grow and changeand why some connections persist while others evap-orate.

These complaints aside, I found the ethnographic ex-amples in the paper riveting and will look forward to thebook, as well as the collaborative comparative studies,which will undoubtedly address many of the issues Ihave raised here. Horst and Miller are to be congratulatedon a creative and fruitful project which is sure to havea major impact.

kevin a. yelvingtonDepartment of Anthropology, University of SouthFlorida, Tampa, FL 33620-8100, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 21 vii 05

Horst and Miller persuasively proffer “link-up” as a kindof a “concept-metaphor” (Moore 2004) through sugges-tive and evocative ethnography of cell phone use in Ja-maica. The idea of link-up is based on a composite ofemic notions and resonant with and related to even ifnot exactly coinciding with a local semantic domain.The question is whether it is theoretically robust enoughto become an etic/analytical category through which tounderstand the “concrete real.”

Horst and Miller call upon R. T. Smith’ s (1988) classic


research suggesting an extensive quality to the kinshipsystem, and they question whether kinship per se canaccount for link-up strategies or kinship-making is itselfa form of link-up. This is an important and creative pointof departure, but they might have also called upon an-other classic source. Mintz (1996:915, 931–37) discussesthe individualism characteristic of Caribbean social for-mations and cultures, attributing it to the long-term ef-fects of plantation slavery and the concomitant organi-zation of economic life, as well as the (related) patternof kinship, sexual unions, and domestic arrangements.While he is careful to acknowledge that community- andkinship-based groupings do exist in the Caribbean, hecontrasts their relative weakness there with both West-ern and non-Western counterparts. Instead, he highlightsthe existence of strong dyadic relationships. Socialgroupings like the church groups which Horst and Millermention exist in complex and contradictory interactionwith these strong dyadic ties.

Horst and Miller say that “much of link-up” is “auton-omous” from “instrumentality.” However, as they show,women’s networking was “primarily concerned with cop-ing strategies” even if these subsumed sexual relation-ships. By taking the instrumentality out of link-up, arethey contradicting their own assertion that “any divisionof relationships into particular domains of enquiry looksartificial”? Don’t we need to understand the nature ofthese relationships emically, as they themselves suggest?They dismiss the classic accounts of reciprocity beginningwith Mauss but seem perplexed as to the dynamics of“begging” and giving apparently without obligation to doso. But “begging” implies that the “beggar” must touchsome part of the norm of reciprocity in the potential ben-efactor. Shouldn’t we also investigate those norms? How,too, are we to reconcile Horst and Miller’s findings thatkin are a minority in phone lists with their report of aseparate survey of 100 poor households that suggests thatkin are being called more often than nonkin? Isn’t it pos-sible that kin are expected to deliver certain “goods” thatnonkin aren’t and vice versa?

Horst and Miller locate their study of cell phones inJamaica in an analysis of consumption with the proposalthat “there is a constant interaction between productionand consumption.” I am always interested in the impli-cations of the relationships between production and con-sumption (see, e.g., Marx and Engels 1986:28–29). Link-up could provide anthropological understandings of theseconnections, showing us how networks leading to in-formal and formal work are managed and what genderhas to do with their form and content (Browne 2000,2002, 2004) and illuminating Caribbean women’s “tripleshift” of formal work, informal work, and housework(Freeman 1997). The implications of link-up facilitatedthrough cell phone use might be pursued further to ex-plore what I have long thought of as a “fourth shift”(Yelvington 1991), that of finding the support that wouldenable the reproduction of labor and ultimately link usup—ethnographically and theoretically—to production.

The late William Roseberry once railed against theidea that social change as represented by the advent of

new technologies or “globalization” in general could besimply incorporated into existing cultural categories.The kind of perspective he criticized is found in the“globalization-localization” studies of which Miller hasbeen a pioneer, and the danger is that historical trans-formations will not be recognized. Rather than empha-sizing cell phone use as reflecting an underlying pattern,I would make a stronger case, using theoretical toolsincorporating a systematic dialectical perspective, for theadvent of cell phone’s having profoundly transformed theextent and content of these relationships.

Will “link-up” take its place alongside other “gate-keeping” concepts (Appadurai 1986, Fardon 1990) in Ca-ribbean ethnology, such as “respectability and reputa-tion,” “plural society,” “socialized ambivalence,”“matrifocality,” and “creolization” (see Trouillot 1992)?With some of the queries and caveats mentioned abovekept in mind, it has the potential to become a productiveparadigm and, perhaps more important, a guide to furthermethodological refinement, hypothesis testing, and the-oretical development.

Reply

heather horst and daniel millerLos Angeles, Calif., U.S.A. 8 viii 05

The supportive comments above extend the argumentsof our paper in a number of important directions. It isparticularly helpful that several of them not only requestmore contextual information but ultimately, as Olwigsuggests, constitute an appeal for a general ethnographyof the social uses of the cell phone. This is precisely howwe see the relationship between this publication and ourforthcoming book (Horst and Miller n.d.), which is in-tended to demonstrate the advantages of an ethnographicstudy as a contribution to the anthropology of commu-nication. In the larger format we are able to present de-tailed discussions of issues that can only be briefly al-luded to here. For example, there is a chapter onproduction and commerce, as called for by Yelvington,that incorporates the details on both the telecommuni-cations industry and phone usage that Wilk requests. Wealso present the evidence for many of our unexpectedfindings, such as the reasons cell phone use has not ledto a significant expansion of employment or entrepre-neurship.

One particularly welcome contribution from thesecomments is their celebration of cultural specificity de-spite the continued march of globalization. It is evidentthat some of us are entranced by the poetics of Jamaicancommunication, and both Austin-Broos and Hinrichshelp convey the subtle character of these brief com-munications. Although Hinrichs demonstrates that cer-tain additional qualities may characterize the commu-nication of his highly educated informants, parallelpoints could be made for some of the low-income pop-


ulations we worked with, as is exemplified in the ex-tensive literature on Jamaican music (Cooper 2004, Stol-zhoff 2000) and religion (Austin-Broos 1997, Besson 2002,Chevannes 1994). For instance, it is quite possible thatthe emphasis on “softening” the reproach has a classelement to it. Hinrichs’s attention to linguistic detailcontributes a great deal to our own analysis of com-municative content.

We were well aware that our rejection of reciprocityas a feature of link-up would be a red flag to an anthro-pological bull. Yelvington’s statement that “begging”implies that the “beggar” must touch some part of thenorm of reciprocity in the “benefactor” and Carrier’scontention that if the frame of reciprocity were suffi-ciently generalized we would see our exchanges as rec-iprocity expose a generic anthropological stance that hasbecome an axiom or even a tautology. Once it is assumedthat no one would give but for the norm of reciprocity,anyone who identifies some other underlying imperativemust be missing something. Let us be clear: We are notclaiming that reciprocity, whether immediate or gener-alized, does not play an important role here. Chevannesmakes the entirely reasonable point not only that someof what we are dealing with represents generalized rec-iprocity but that reciprocity may be used by those in-volved as the explicit legitimation for giving because forJamaicans as for anthropologists it makes clear sense ofsuch actions. He notes that Jamaicans have their ownclear norms with respect to reciprocity. We also have noparticular problem with calling a motivation altruisticfor the same reasons Khan applies to reciprocity, andthere is a rich local discourse concerning the ideals ofaltruism in Jamaican forms of Christianity. Indeed, if onewants to insist on generalized reciprocity, then the Chris-tian belief that one’s rewards will come in heaven ratherthan on earth seems to fit the situation quite well. Fi-nally, one also has to allow for pragmatism. A personwho does not respond to a “call-me” text may be as-sumed to have run out of credit or to need that creditfor some other purpose at the time. In addition, if onehas is less than $JA3 on one’s phone, a “call-me” textcan be returned, indicating to the recipient that thesender also has no credit but still wants to acknowledgethe relationship.

There have been several major revisions to the con-tributions of writers such as Mauss and Sahlins in es-tablishing this concept of reciprocity. Parry (1986), forexample, illustrates a quite different set of relationshipsbetween reciprocity, altruism, and pragmatism, and Wei-ner (1992) argues that the reductionist use of “reciproc-ity” may disguise more fundamental concerns. Thereforethere is considerable anthropological precedent for ourhesitation to call all exchange reciprocal. During our eth-nography we observed, detailed, and discussed many in-stances of the making and receiving of phone calls andtherefore feel confident in stating that there were manycases which did not appear to accord with any notion ofaltruism or generalized reciprocity. Rather, they seemedto evince a compulsion to make connections, which maybe more convincingly explained in terms of an anthro-

pology of communication than in terms of one of ex-change. There is a precedent in the compulsion to com-municate of Caribbean males who call out to passingfemales on the street. Ideally, men want to feel that theyhave said something clever, but, given the lack of re-sponse by most women (who often find these calls ag-gressive or disrespectful), it is clear that the main aim isnot necessarily to create a relationship but to assert pres-ence verbally (Abrahams 1983). In contrast to such call-ing out, in link-up there is a mutual desire to create arelationship, but a relationship based on communicationis not necessarily one based on reciprocity. Sometimesgiving money seems to us to be an extension of thiscommunicative imperative. From our perspective, rela-tionships created on the basis of this compulsion to com-municate are as interesting theoretically as reciprocityand exchange.

Closely connected to this issue of reciprocity is thediscussion of instrumentality. Hinrichs’s independentevidence supports our contention that link-up tran-scends the more obvious forms of instrumentality, butthe comments also raise questions concerning what wemean by this. Ultimately, it seems just as absurd to saythat nothing is instrumental as to say that everything isinstrumental. We agree with Khan that there is nothingnecessarily objectionable about instrumental objectivesand acknowledge that it is almost impossible to talkabout coping strategies without recognizing instrumen-tality. Similarly, instrumentality remains a key elementin the connections people are trying to establish withthe Jamaican diaspora even if, as Bauer notes, these con-nections cannot be reduced to instrumental concerns(see Horst n.d.). Although we feel that there is a theo-retical level at which a term such as “instrumentality”becomes indefensible, it would be a pity to miss out ona useful analytical concept out of a desire to remain, asit were, philosophically pure (see Miller 2005b:43–46).

Allowing for the use of a concept of instrumentalityis, however, a long way from reducing everything to thatimperative. Therefore our implied critique of a certainsimplistic and narrow economism is not, as Wilk sug-gests, a straw man, No doubt Wilk can find some cul-turally sensitive economists, but there remain a vastnumber of practicing economists, from Gary Becker on-wards, who are anything but attentive to cultural con-siderations, Moreover, the related contention that wehave left out everything but culture and local social or-ganization seems an example of the dismissive stancethat Wilk seems otherwise to criticize. Elsewhere we areable to discuss in more detail the ways in which cellphone usage corresponds with local communicationecologies, including the articulation between cell phonenetworks and the transport system, markets, and otherspaces (Horst and Miller n.d.) and the use of cell phonesin the organization and coordination of activities rangingfrom church services to the receipt of remittances. It isequally unfair to characterize Miller’s previous work aspresenting change as a seamless accommodation to thepast when his emphasis has always been dialectical inboth theory and ethnographic exemplification.


Perhaps the sharpest critique has been provoked by ouremphasis on the prominence of nonkin in the cell phonelists, and we concede that this is not just because an-thropologists have a great deal invested in the study ofkinship. As Slocum points out, it is also because kinshipremains important. We therefore wholeheartedly agreewith Wilk, Yelvington, and Slocum that an examinationof the differences in networking between kin and nonkinwould be a natural extension of this article, but here wehave focused upon the difference between extensive andintensive social networks (see Horst and Miller n.d.).While more intensive networking may involve kin, italso includes neighbors from whom food and other goodsare purchased or borrowed, coworkers who may alsoshare meals or transport, and boyfriends and then baby-fathers, whom one can regard as kin. Extensive net-working developed as link-up may include a similarlineup of friends, coworkers, old boyfriends, and family.

This relationship between kin and nonkin is a com-mon point of discussion in the anthropology of the Ca-ribbean, and we were interested in the ways in whichthe cell phone engaged with this well-established ten-sion. As Abrahams (1983), Wilson (1966), and others haveargued, friendship is often associated with the domainof “the street,” where men and women (Besson 1993)acquire reputations, but is also viewed as important andnecessary to maintaining the equilibrium of social life.Yet friends are also potentially divisive to the family,which is associated with respectability, the house, andthe yard. In the past, a woman who was more orientedtoward the house and household met with other womenonly when she left her yard on approved tasks, such asgoing to the market or making formal visits to houses.These brief encounters on the street and at the market,deftly sketched in Austin-Broos’s commentary, providean opportunity for keeping in touch. Yet, these engage-ments also possess the potential to spawn gossip, andthere is great disdain for women who sit “diaper-style”(with their skirts tucked under their legs) and labrish(Sobo 1993). By contrast, the cell phone facilitates per-sonal, private communication between girlfriends andreligious confidants outside of the family, but because itis not evidently gossip this communication is compat-ible with family dynamics. We would, however, tend tostress the contrast rather than the similarity with Abo-riginal kinship in Australia. What we found striking wasthe degree to which Jamaicans seem to ignore the qualityof relatedness itself, making the case very different fromthe recent examinations of this concept by Strathern(1992) and others.

Equally, we acknowledge Slocum’s point that the pau-city of kin in phone lists does not preclude some senseof kinship as a particular relationship, for example, oneof intensity or obligation. Transnational communica-tions via the cell phone have dramatically enhanced theconnection between many children and their parents liv-ing abroad. A number of children saved their lunchmoney in order to be able to call parents living in placessuch as Miami, Birmingham, and the Cayman Islands,and the increased contact fostered a feeling of closeness

and sometimes even co-presence. In addition, many chil-dren note that with the improved communication comesa heightened sense of obligation on the part of their par-ents (see Horst n.d.a). Our aim was not to repudiateSmith’s significant analysis, which we certainly do notview as having reduced Caribbean studies to kinship, butto examine how the principles that he found for kinshipcould be extended to Jamaican sociality more generally.

Similarly, we did not intend to give the impressionthat women’s networking (particularly with men) wasreducible to economic motivations. As Slocum suggests,these relations are far more complex, involving similarcombinations of economic, social, and emotional sup-port and an important element of flexibility and auton-omy that is also found in the relationships between par-ents and children. This understanding of gender relationshas been extended recently, as Bauer notes, with the re-alization that the role of men in the Jamaican family andsocial life is richer and more integrated than much ofthe previous work on the marginalized male has sug-gested.

In addition to kinship, Yelvington draws our attentionto the focus on individualism in studies of Caribbeansociality by Mintz and many others. This issue is per-tinent even at the level of a question raised by Wilk aboutdefining the household. As part of our work on copingstrategies, we committed ourselves to surveying 100households concerning (among other things) theirweekly, monthly, and annual income and expenditures.We soon learned how difficult this was and decided toreturn to 20 households to carry out in-depth daily anal-yses of budgets. One conclusion was that the householdwas an even more tenuous category than we had imag-ined. In effect we were studying complex flows aroundindividuals that involved both those living in the samehouse and many living elsewhere. (For example, it wasrelatively rare for a baby-father to be living in the house-hold of his child.) Indeed, the preference for the individ-ual cell phone over a land line was probably based aboveall on the preference for individual over household bill-ing systems.

Despite the strong tradition of individualism in Ja-maica, Wilk and Bauer remind us of the importance ofbalancing this with more collective forms of kinship andsocial groupings such as the Baptist free villages and ma-roon communities (Besson 1995, 2002). Austin-Broos(1997) has highlighted the importance of religious com-munity and its solidification through the use of siblingterminology in Jamaican Pentecostal churches. But thisliterature also contains many observations about thequarrelling and contentiousness that arise precisely outof this tension between collective and individual per-spectives, something that is highlighted in recent studiesof Caribbean migration and return migration showingthat returnees from the UK perceive the lack of desireof returnees from the United States to join the comm-unity-oriented returning-resident associations as selfish(Horst n.d.b). This tension is perhaps most prominent inthe work of legal anthropologists who detail court casesand local disputes over individual claims to corporately


owned family land (Lazarus-Black 1994, Maurer 1997).Wilson’s (1966) term “crab antics,” intended to highlightthis individualistic tradition, inspired decades of debatein Caribbean anthropology. From our perspective, whatis interesting is that communication becomes central tothe expression of this tension, with lack of communi-cation being perceived as “selfish” and too much com-munication or gossip as too communal or “fas” (seeAbrahams 1983, Chevannes 1999, Sobo 1993).

These debates implicate a final topic brought out bythe discussants, the importance of comparison. Carriersuggests that link-up is a common feature of the intro-duction of the cell phone more generally, but this is notthe case. Our description of the impact of cell phone usein Jamaica contrasts sharply with the main conclusionsof early research on cell phone use elsewhere, whichsuggest that the cell phone is used to intensify imme-diate relationships rather than to maintain extensiveones (Haddon 2004; Ling 2004:192). The Jamaican evi-dence stands as a critique of some of the assumptionsbeing made in the literature about the shift from com-munal to individual networking (see Wellman 1999,2001; Castells 2000). For this reason we look forward tobuilding on contributions such as that of Slater, whichforms part of a general comparison that is a major featureof our project. The initial results from his Ghanaianstudy already provide pointers with regard to the use ofthe different technologies to exploit distinctions inmodes of communication in different regions (see Millerand Slater 2005). Ultimately, of course this is the wayforward, inasmuch as all the ambitions that pertain tothis paper depend on comparative work that seeks todetermine the extent to which the concept of link-up isgeneralizable both within the Caribbean and morewidely. Such comparisons are essential not only to theproject behind this paper but to a more general anthro-pology of communication which is linked to an anthro-pology of the media and an anthropology of relationshipsbut cannot be reduced to them. We hope that this ex-change will be a step in that direction.

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