Networking Peripheries reveals a Peru moving towards a dynamic and diverse future, in terms of both technology and culture. Chan clearly has a high regard, and legitimate concern, for the people and organizations she has engaged with—artisans, teachers, government officials, activists. Anyone who feels that they already understand the full impact of Internet technology on human culture and community may be surprised and intrigued by the first-hand material presented in this important text.
John Gilbey
Nature
Anita Chan's outstanding book stages a fascinating contest over the stubborn difference of human culture and the universalizing aspirations of the Internet and digital culture. Her tour of contemporary Peru shows the reader how Chulucanas pottery can become the digital future of the country and cheap American laptops an object of local artisanal struggle. Whether it is IP Law, entrepreneurialism, software coding or educational technology, she elaborately details the surprise that comes of experiencing a cultural difference in exactly the place one expected more of the same. Networking Peripheries is that rare book that captures the integration of the necessary particularity of life, and universalizing pressures of global technology, finance and politics. It joins a growing body of scholarship that provides rich, well-researched alternatives to the boring echo chamber of Internet punditry.
Christopher M. Kelty, Department of Information Studies, Department of Anthropology, UCLA
Digital media is all too often cast in terms of the contemporary moment, a set of technologies that will usher us into a better future. Anita Chan's rich ethnography of ICT projects in Peru questions this naïve framing by insisting these initiatives are part of a longer Utopian Enlightenment and colonial drive. The ethnography traverses an impressive range of digital endeavors—from MIT's One Laptop per Child to Free Software initiatives—to demonstrate the historical logics at work that nevertheless play out uniquely in different places and contexts. Written with nuance and verve, Networking Peripheries is not only a true pleasure to read but essential reading for all scholars working on the political life of digital media.
Gabriella Coleman, The Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University
Chan's elegantly written book challenges the idea that nations such as Peru are passive recipients of high-tech culture. By drawing our attention to forms of Peruvian creative production, Chan helps us see the cultural complexities in intellectual property initiatives and the anxieties and aspirations that shape our increasingly networked society.
Eden Medina, author of Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile
