New publication: overview of "anthropology of media in Africa"

Katrien Pype co-authored with Alessandro Jedlowski a chapter that provides an overview of the main themes of the anthropology of media in Africa”. The chapter is included in A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa, 2019, co-edited by R.R. Grinker, S.B. Lubkemann, C.B. Steiner, and E. Gonçalves.

You can read a summary of the chapter here:

Karin Barber's emphasis on an anthropological approach to the study of cultural texts, publics and audiences, and modes of address had a particular influence on emerging research on African media. This chapter focuses on a variety of different topics: from the role of media in shaping political communities to their interaction with the emergence of new modes of conceiving intimacy, morality, and religion, from the role of media in the mobility of people across Africa and beyond, to the impact of technological innovation on the mobility of media contents and on the emergence of new genres and styles. One of the more common topics in the study of African media is political communication. The emergence of new media technologies has also transformed the way space and distance are understood and managed by people around the African continent and in the diaspora.

NEW PUBLICATION a media ban and religious competition in Kinshasa

Katrien Pype's chapter on "Nzete Ekauka versus the Catholic Church. Religious Competition, Media Ban and The Virgin Mary in Contemporary Kinshasa." has been published in Religion, Media and Marginality in Modern Africa, eds. F. Becker, J. Cabrita and M. Rodet, Cambridge African Studies Series, Ohio University Press, 2018, pp. 202-228.

Since 1986, Brother Raphael Minga Kwete has been receiving divine messages from the Virgin Mary, Jesus, the saints, as well as Catholic leaders such as Padre Pio and Francis of Assisi in his compound commonly known as "Nzete Ekauka" ("the dessicated tree"). During the 1990s, this compound was the arena of fervent prayer gatherings where Catholic clergy, intellectuals, politicians, and even figures of the local music scene could be seen praying. Nowadays, the compound is nearly empty. The exodus started in the early 2000s, and today only a few dozen people (mainly women) continue to attend daily prayers, donate money, and spread the Virgin’s messages more widely. An informal media ban was issued by the Catholic Church in the early 2000s. The Nzete case-study will situate media presence, production, and aesthetics within a larger field of competition between orthodox Catholicism and more popular forms of engagement with Catholic spirits. In addition, the idea of the Virgin Mary as a spirit who addresses the Congolese through the prophet, draws our attention to the transformations urban religiosity has undergone in the late postcolonial era, and to the enduring role of Catholic clergy in urban Africa.

a pamphlet produced by the prophet Frère Raphael Minga-Kwete (picture taken in 2012)

Participation in Electronic Modernity - Reflections Based on Ethnographic Research in Kinshasa

On May 9 2018, Katrien Pype delivered a key note at the Participatory Videofilm Festival #1 (organized by researchers at the University of Ghent, Belgium).

She introduced three different ways of alternative forms of "participation", beyond the act of filming and performing. First, her ethnographic research on the production of evangelizing television serials has drawn her attention to the fact that, if people act and watch filmed drama, this can have spiritual consequences. Participation in electronic modernity here also includes participation of one's soul, of spirits, and of invisible powers. Second, her research on political subjectivities in the Congolese blogosphere has pushed her to reconsider acts such as clicking and remediating digital content. Digital citationality, so she argues, connects to the emergence of the political subject in similar fashion as citing other people's voices construes the social person in local pedogagical understandings. Finally, participation by proxy, as informed by her research on elder people's usage of mobile phones (they often ask others to send text messages or make phone calls on their behalf) can often be the only way in which people can participate in electronic modernity while respecting local parameters of seniority and bigmanity.

Technology & Witchcraft - new publication on media cultures and religion in Kinshasa

Katrien Pype contributed a chapter to the open access edited volume on Pentecostalism and Witchcraft. Spiritual Warfare in Africa and Melanesia. Co-edited by Knut Rio, Melissa McCarthy, and Ruy Blanes. The full book is freely available here:  https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-56068-7#editorsandaffiliations 

Katrien's chapter, "Chapter 5 Branhamist Kindoki : Ethnographic Notes on Connectivity, Technology and Urban Witchcraft in Contemporary Kinshasa", explores the entanglements of theories of the occult and science, and technology. She explores the analytical value of "connectivity", the modality to connect with (social and spiritual) others in light of sociality in contemporary electronic modernity.

chronotopes of media in Sub-Saharan Africa - Vokes and Pype (Ethnos, 2018)

Richard Vokes and Katrien Pype collected a special issue of the journal ETHNOS in which contributors propose ethnographies of electronic modernity in Africa. They also wrote the introduction to the special issue - it is supposed to be out in print in 2018, yet now, we already have access to the online ahead of print publication by clicking here. 

The four articles collected in the volume which trace the movements of media and persons from the bedrooms of young women in Nigerian Calabar (Juliet Gilbert), through the living rooms of Kinshasa’s elderly (Pype), to the taxis of rural Uganda (Vokes), and to the virtual spaces of a live radio show in Uganda (Florence Brisset-Foucault) – offer rich ethnographic case studies of the temporalizing and spatializing work that various kinds of new media (electronic and non electronic) are allowed to do by their users. In these particular locales, mobile phones and radio sets are extensively used to experiment with new, sometimes virtual, identities, to initiate and deepen social relationships, and to open up new realms of the past and present. These same objects also facilitate new dreams for a better future. 

The particular assemblage of a media object in a space and associated with a new experience of time encourages us to think with the concept of ‘chronotopes’, as a useful tool for understanding how in different spaces and times, according to different generations, genders, religious groups and the like, the radio, the television, the smartphone bring in locally informed understandings of the here and now and the there and then (i.e. of the present, past and future). The introduction explores the analytical opportunities of the notion of the chronotope for our understandings of the experience of electronic modernity.

studying digital creation stories - new challenges for media research in Africa - book chapter (2018)

Katrien Pype has contributed a chapter to the book "Palgrave Handbook for Media and Communication Research in Africa", edited by Bruce Mutsvairo, and published with Palgrave MacMillan (2018).

The goal of the volume is to identify new challenges and opportunities for media research in Africa. Contributors work in African universities and beyond.

Katrien's paper is called "The Devil is in the Rumba Text. Commenting on Digital Depth", and deals with the possible meanings of digital clips that circulate in the Congolese digital sphere in which music (and audiovisual clips) of contemporary Congolese rumba musicians are interpreted as embedded in occult worlds, especially the Illuminati world.

The main challenges described are (a) the lack of a generic label for this genre of instructive clips; (b) the inaccessibility of the uploaders and producers (refusal to be interviewed, to identify themselves); and (c) the lack of interest or consideration by many of my interlocutors in Kinshasa regarding the message and intentions embedded in these clips. 

Methodologically speaking, I was inspired by Fabian's proposal (2008) for producing commentaries - as a more appropriate genre of ethnographic writing in the digital era. In Ethnography as Commentary. Writing from the Virtual Archive (2008), Fabian argues that the easy accessibility of empirical data online significantly transforms theory production, ethnography and analysis. 

update (May 16 2018): The chapter has now been published - DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-70443-2_14
In the book: The Palgrave Handbook of Media and Communication Research in Africa, pp.245-262

love over Facebook : transnational connections, digital flirtations and the economy of sexuality - conference presentation - University of Birmingham (May 30-June 2 2017)

Katrien Pype attended the Cadbury Workshop on "Marriage in Africa" organized by the Department of African Studies & Anthropology at the University of Birmingham (UK).

She presented preliminary research findings on sexual play and flirtation in Kinshasa's digital sphere. 

Bolingo ya Face - stranger sociality, digital marriages, and family dilemmas in contemporary Kinshasa

In Kinshasa, social network sites such as Instagram, WeChat, Facebook and Whatsapp are mostly used as dating apps. Kinshasa's youth have easily embraced these new platforms to enlarge their social networks because they play into the desire for stranger sociality so striking for the lifeworlds of Kinois (inhabitants of Kinshasa). It also leads to an expansion of potential love partners. In the playful digital courting and flirting, the lines between "sexual play" and 'matrimonial commitment" have been blurred. This presentation starts from the premise that electronic networks are epitomizing the possibilities of love relationships that the urban context of the megapolis already offered. Virtual networks now also make the dream of "marrying a djika" (someone from the diaspora) actually possible. The analysis will focus on how electronic marriages come into being, are managed, and very often, dissolve, and how families respond to these new strangers. New dangerous categories of "risky lovers" are identified and debated, especially "mibali ya poto" (husbands from Europe) and "basi ya face" (girls from facebook). The material shows how electronic social networks not only enlarge users' social lifeworlds, but also how these tie into aspirations for "foreign" sexual and marriage partners, and how this leads to new moral debates, social opportunities but also risk.

two-way radio systems in Kinshasa: connecting the rural and the urban - Seminar presentation in Brussels (May 2017)

On May 9 2017, Katrien Pype presented preliminary analysis of her research on CB radio communications in Kinshasa. The presentation was part of the seminar series of the (Belgian) Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences.

Here you can find the abstract of that presentation:

Living with Interference. Ethnographic Notes on Affect in Translocal Connectivity (Kinshasa)

Mobile phone technology constitutes only one, and a fairly recent, platform for connectivity with “elsewheres”. I focus here on radio phonie communication, a technology commonly known as citizen broad band radio, that has ensured long-distance dyadic communication in DR Congo since colonial times, and doubles as a money transfer agency. Recently, this outmoded communication platform has known an upsurge in Kinshasa in order to enable connectivity with regions in the former Bandundu and Equatorial Provinces, areas without cellular coverage. First, I examine phonie connectivity, and especially the affective dimensions of this long-distance interaction and link this tot the position of Kinois as “city-dwellers” trying to cope on the one hand with the socio-economic predicaments of life in an African metropole, and with claims –interpellations- made by relatives or intimate Others residing in the hinterland. Second, I highlight a material dimension to Kinois’ connectedness in order to acknowledge the role of technology in the shaping of modern sociality. Finally, I argue that the publicness of phonie talk – usually acted out in front of other phonie clients and the phonie operator, who contribute to the conversations – offers techniques for living with the interference from the urban into the rural and vice versa. By exploring “interference” as a technical and a social experience that people – not just in Kinshasa, but anywhere, where long-distance connectivity is lived – actively manage, the paper highlights the affective dissonances associated with the reduction of spatial distance through modern communication technologies, and thus brings nuance to the narratives of hope and anticipation, especially expectations for economic and material betterment, accompanying innovation in communication and the trope of global connectedness.

The material thus offers an interesting perspective on the co-habitation of so-called "old" and "new media"; while also bringing to the fore the longue duree of electronically mediated translocal connectivities. 

Katrien is currently transforming the presentation into an academic article to be submitted to the journal of the Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences. 

Communicating with bofania, sitting in a phonie house in kimbanseke (kinshasa) - april 2017

new book chapter on technology and the city

I am very pleased to announce the publication of a chapter in open access. You can find the whole book via this url: http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=631166

The chapter is an attempt to call for more attention to the cohabitation of techne experts in African societies. In this way, I propose an alternative interpretation of "the smart city". There is considerable attention to the continuation of the social positioning of healers, blacksmiths, media practitioners and engineer students. 

In addition, I explore the linguistic closeness of various forms of knowledge in the urban sphere and the handling of tools.

The endeavor of the whole book is to propose an Africa-centered understanding of technological innovation, going beyond the familiar tropes of appropriation and creativity. The book is the outcome of a workshop at MIT held in October 2014.

The full bibliographic reference for the book chapter is 

Pype, K. 2017. "Smartness from Below. Variations on Technology and Creativity in Contemporary Kinshasa." In: Mavhunga, C.C. (ed.), What do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? Cambridge: MIT Press. Chapter 5: 97-115.

http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=631166

Do mobile phones set citizens free?

In postcolonial Kinshasa, citizens use mobile phones (and smartphones) are as tools to deceive the state but also to expose fraud. The Congolese government is also strongly aware of the revolutionary capacities of new media. In 2011, text messages were blocked; and in January 2015, the government shut the Internet for a few weeks, gradually opening up Internet while blocking social media platforms such as Whatsapp, Facebook, Viber and Skype.

It is clear that political change on the continent is not only documented by citizens filming and photographing protest and abuse, but these also feed into the ways in which citizens and the state interact. One should however always be careful to situate these mass-mediated interactions within complex postcolonial histories of governance and political communication.

Read more in the blogpost on the SAPIENS website that discusses research on the embedment of mobile phones, and increasingly smartphones, in processes of political change

The blogpost is a summary of the academic article "‘[Not] talking like a Motorola’: mobile phone practices and politics of masking and unmasking in postcolonial Kinshasa" (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2016, 22 (3): 633-652)

Kinshasa's elderly people dance in TV music shows to counter the negative stereotypes of "African elders"

Fieldwork on media participation among Kinshasa's elderly people has shown that they are not that invisible in the city's popular culture. Rather, TV dance shows in which elderly Kinois (inhabitants of Kinshasa) perform cha cha cha, bolero and rumba (among others) and in which they speak about the earliest days of Kinshasa's nightlife scene are important platforms through which the elderly communicate with the city at large, and especially with the youth's popular culture.

The study shows that elderly people are not necessarily passive consumers of media content, but actually contribute to TV and radio shows as well. 

The data are discussed in the academic journal article “Dancing to the Rhythm of Leopoldville: Nostalgia, urban critique and generational difference in Kinshasa’s Music TV Shows” 

The following four blogposts provide additional ethnographic and visual material:

1. Old age - Categories

2. Dancing elders

3. Papa Wemba and the confusion of generations

4. Photographing the Bana Leo shows