K Hobbi
Biographic Data
| ID | 30667 |
|---|---|
| NAME | K Hobbi |
| GIVEN NAMES | K |
| FAMILY NAME | Hobbi |
| SIGNATURE | HOBBI K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Wageningen University & Research |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7038-7413 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 61 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Technology
Technology broadly refers to objects or actions that are linked to tekhne, an ancient Greek term for 'skill' or 'craftmanship'. Anthropologists of technology sometimes employ this understanding as a starting point, but many study technology in a much broader sense. They ask instead how humans and non-humans purposefully make or do things, and how such activity is shaped by broader sociocultural dynamics. Framing the topic in such terms allows ant…
Platformizing the hunt for dolphins
The Lau-speakers of Malaita, Solomon Islands, hunt dolphins for their teeth. Used as traditional currency and part of a broader, long-standing approach to marine resource management, the future of the hunt is uncertain and this uncertainty is intrinsically entwined with processes of anthropogenic climate change and social media spectacles. The habitat of the dolphins is threatened by a confluence of factors beyond the control of the Lau such as r…
A Sociotechnical Approach to Smartphone Research
Smartphones have become crucial for understanding how digital technologies are adopted and adapted into people's lives, while also emerging as tools for studying social phenomena more broadly. Drawing on insights from our own longitudinal work in Solomon Islands, this article details a sociotechnical approach to smartphone research that combines both potentialities. It distinguishes itself from other smartphone-based methods by connecting media-c…
Beauty for Development? Betel Aesthetics and Socioeconomic Stability in Urban Solomon Islands
Betel users are easy to identify. When chewed, betel colours its consumers’ saliva, teeth and lips in a distinct bright red. Since proper use of betel requires spitting of excess saliva, the practice also tends to stain the spaces surrounding its consumers. Because of these distinct aesthetic markers, betel has become a site of contestation in urban Solomon Islands. The practice is publicly discussed as a failure to realise the country’s tourist …
Knitting for conservation
We critically reflect on a conservation project in the Ecuadorian Amazon that was designed to promote biodiversity conservation among lowland indigenous communities involved in eco-tourism initiatives by teaching them how to knit a particular set of local animals. We use interpretive qualitative research and draw on social practice theory to examine the ways that participants’ engagement with new knitting in participatory knitting workshops chang…
Digitizing other markets
Digital markets are regularly equated with digital capitalism. However, markets are also central features of longstanding other economic systems, such as the bush markets of Malaita, Solomon Islands, where saltwater and bush people have traded with each other for at least seven hundred years, if not longer. This article interrogates the digitization of this bush market system based on classically-conceived long-term ethnographic fieldwork that ai…
Beyond platform capitalism
This article argues for a need to move beyond studies of platform capitalism and inter-capitalist struggles to also account for inter-economic struggles, the platformization of longstanding primarily non-capitalist societies, the same kind of societies that have conceptually inspired discussions of platforms as hi-tech gift economies. Based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork on digital transformations among the horticulturalist Lau of Malaita…
Non-/Human Infrastructures and Digital Gifts
This article demonstrates how nonhuman and human infrastructural assemblages, and the brokers that operate as assemblers within them, give rise to localised Internets. With an ethnographic emphasis on the digital transformations of Solomon Islands, we examine agentive brokerage practices surrounding digital multimedia files, downloaded off the global Internet and circulated offline as gifts via MicroSDs. We show how digital brokers use their comp…
Leadership in Absentia
This article examines a tension at the heart of national leadership in Solomon Islands today: a conviction that national leaders need to spend more time in rural environments to better represent rural interests, needs and values, while having to be in town to access the individuals and organizations that, essentially, make them national leaders in the first place. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in urban Honiara and the rural…
Vacating place, vacated space? A research agenda for places where people leave
An ethnography of deletion
This article demonstrates the fragility of digital storage through a non-media-centric ethnography of data management practices in the so-called Global South. It shows how in the Lau Lagoon, Malaita Province, Solomon Islands, the capacity to reliably store digital media is curtailed by limited access to means of capital production and civic infrastructures, as well as a comparatively isolated tropical ecology that bedevils the permanence of all t…
Beyond electrification for development
Based on an in‐depth examination of the acquisition, use, maintenance and deterioration of solar home systems in a village in Malaita, Solomon Islands, this article challenges the analytical focus of current debates on electrification in Pacific Island countries – why Pacific Island countries have not yet sufficiently electrified to achieve their development goals. Alternatively it examines what is, how, in this case, rural Solomon Islanders have…
A road to development? Rural perspectives on infrastructure maintenance in Solomon Islands
The Solomon Islands Government and its development partners are heavily investing in road maintenance programmes to promote development in the small islands least developed state. Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article challenges the future orientation of these programmes. Instead it emphasises rural Solomon Islanders’ past and present experiences with road-based mobilities and state-sponsored road maintenance projects. These …
Rescuing Honiara, rescuing Gwou'ulu
Speaking to debates about the management of difference in and between towns and villages as well as secondary conversions and breakaway movements in Melanesia, this article examines the efforts of an Anglican village church to maintain social cohesion through politico-religious unity in Gwou’ulu, a multi-clan village in North Malaita, Solomon Islands, and its urban enclaves in Honiara. It focuses on an Anglican “rescue mission” that Gwou’ulu send…
Mobile phones, gender‐based violence, and distrust in state services
This paper examines the potential benefits and pitfalls of mobile phones for accessing social services, particularly in response to gender‐based violence, in Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic field research, I show how mobile phones increase rather than decrease perceived distances between social service providers and those they intend to serve. Mobile phones exaggerate the visibility of the shortcomings o…
Peacebuilding, foodways and the everyday
This article situates peace research in the messy ambiguities of everyday encounters between foreign peacebuilders and local populations in post‐conflict environments. It suggests that anthropology allows for moving the liberal/hybrid peace debate beyond its immediate boundaries – a focus on governance systems and the intervention itself – towards a more comprehensive examination of mundane experiences in shared places and their possible influenc…
The Comic and the Rule” in Pastagate
When the OQLF, Quebec’s language police, ordered an Italian restaurant to use the French “pâtes” instead of “pasta,” Pastagate broke. Initial (global) laughter about the events quickly turned into public outcry resulting, among others, in a partial reform of the OQLF. This article examines the dynamics that drove the scandal and that subsequently engendered political change, and more broadly the intersections of food and language as identity mark…
Voter Integrity, Trust and the Promise of Digital Technologies
Drawing on the anthropology of technology, this article examines the introduction of a digital biometric voter registration for Solomon Islands 2014 national election. Four perspectives on biometric voting are brought into dialogue: (1) the technological particularities, strengths and shortcomings of biometric voting registration (BVR), (2) a global and international embrace of the technology for its perceived ‘universal’ tendency to secure ident…
Popular Democracy in Japan
Tensions internationales autour d'un concombre tueur
Au printemps 2011, des consommateurs de l'Allemagne du nord tombèrent gravement malades, et certains moururent, après avoir, dit-on, consommé des concombres et des tomates provenant d'Espagne infectés par la bactérie ECEH. Dans cet article, nous proposons de faire l'analyse de cette crise alimentaire en nous intéressant à sa représentation dans les courriers des lecteurs de trois journaux européens (Die Welt, El Mundo, Le Monde). Nous montrons co…
Recreating Japanese Men
Sabine Fruhstuck and Anne Walthall (eds). Recreating Japanese Men . University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2011. pp. ix + 347. Tables. Illust. Notes. Refs. Bibliog. Index. Hb. £44.95/$65. IS
Non-/Human Infrastructures and Digital Gifts
This article demonstrates how nonhuman and human infrastructural assemblages, and the brokers that operate as assemblers within them, give rise to localised Internets. With an ethnographic emphasis on the digital transformations of Solomon Islands, we examine agentive brokerage practices surrounding digital multimedia files, downloaded off the global Internet and circulated offline as gifts via MicroSDs. We show how digital brokers use their comp…
Mobile phones, gender‐based violence, and distrust in state services
This paper examines the potential benefits and pitfalls of mobile phones for accessing social services, particularly in response to gender‐based violence, in Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic field research, I show how mobile phones increase rather than decrease perceived distances between social service providers and those they intend to serve. Mobile phones exaggerate the visibility of the shortcomings o…
Voter Integrity, Trust and the Promise of Digital Technologies
Drawing on the anthropology of technology, this article examines the introduction of a digital biometric voter registration for Solomon Islands 2014 national election. Four perspectives on biometric voting are brought into dialogue: (1) the technological particularities, strengths and shortcomings of biometric voting registration (BVR), (2) a global and international embrace of the technology for its perceived ‘universal’ tendency to secure ident…
A road to development? Rural perspectives on infrastructure maintenance in Solomon Islands
The Solomon Islands Government and its development partners are heavily investing in road maintenance programmes to promote development in the small islands least developed state. Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article challenges the future orientation of these programmes. Instead it emphasises rural Solomon Islanders’ past and present experiences with road-based mobilities and state-sponsored road maintenance projects. These …
Beyond platform capitalism
This article argues for a need to move beyond studies of platform capitalism and inter-capitalist struggles to also account for inter-economic struggles, the platformization of longstanding primarily non-capitalist societies, the same kind of societies that have conceptually inspired discussions of platforms as hi-tech gift economies. Based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork on digital transformations among the horticulturalist Lau of Malaita…
An ethnography of deletion
This article demonstrates the fragility of digital storage through a non-media-centric ethnography of data management practices in the so-called Global South. It shows how in the Lau Lagoon, Malaita Province, Solomon Islands, the capacity to reliably store digital media is curtailed by limited access to means of capital production and civic infrastructures, as well as a comparatively isolated tropical ecology that bedevils the permanence of all t…
Vacating place, vacated space? A research agenda for places where people leave
Rescuing Honiara, rescuing Gwou'ulu
Speaking to debates about the management of difference in and between towns and villages as well as secondary conversions and breakaway movements in Melanesia, this article examines the efforts of an Anglican village church to maintain social cohesion through politico-religious unity in Gwou’ulu, a multi-clan village in North Malaita, Solomon Islands, and its urban enclaves in Honiara. It focuses on an Anglican “rescue mission” that Gwou’ulu send…
Beyond electrification for development
Based on an in‐depth examination of the acquisition, use, maintenance and deterioration of solar home systems in a village in Malaita, Solomon Islands, this article challenges the analytical focus of current debates on electrification in Pacific Island countries – why Pacific Island countries have not yet sufficiently electrified to achieve their development goals. Alternatively it examines what is, how, in this case, rural Solomon Islanders have…
Recreating Japanese Men
Sabine Fruhstuck and Anne Walthall (eds). Recreating Japanese Men . University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2011. pp. ix + 347. Tables. Illust. Notes. Refs. Bibliog. Index. Hb. £44.95/$65. IS
Platformizing the hunt for dolphins
The Lau-speakers of Malaita, Solomon Islands, hunt dolphins for their teeth. Used as traditional currency and part of a broader, long-standing approach to marine resource management, the future of the hunt is uncertain and this uncertainty is intrinsically entwined with processes of anthropogenic climate change and social media spectacles. The habitat of the dolphins is threatened by a confluence of factors beyond the control of the Lau such as r…
A Sociotechnical Approach to Smartphone Research
Smartphones have become crucial for understanding how digital technologies are adopted and adapted into people's lives, while also emerging as tools for studying social phenomena more broadly. Drawing on insights from our own longitudinal work in Solomon Islands, this article details a sociotechnical approach to smartphone research that combines both potentialities. It distinguishes itself from other smartphone-based methods by connecting media-c…
Digitizing other markets
Digital markets are regularly equated with digital capitalism. However, markets are also central features of longstanding other economic systems, such as the bush markets of Malaita, Solomon Islands, where saltwater and bush people have traded with each other for at least seven hundred years, if not longer. This article interrogates the digitization of this bush market system based on classically-conceived long-term ethnographic fieldwork that ai…
The Comic and the Rule” in Pastagate
When the OQLF, Quebec’s language police, ordered an Italian restaurant to use the French “pâtes” instead of “pasta,” Pastagate broke. Initial (global) laughter about the events quickly turned into public outcry resulting, among others, in a partial reform of the OQLF. This article examines the dynamics that drove the scandal and that subsequently engendered political change, and more broadly the intersections of food and language as identity mark…
Tensions internationales autour d'un concombre tueur
Au printemps 2011, des consommateurs de l'Allemagne du nord tombèrent gravement malades, et certains moururent, après avoir, dit-on, consommé des concombres et des tomates provenant d'Espagne infectés par la bactérie ECEH. Dans cet article, nous proposons de faire l'analyse de cette crise alimentaire en nous intéressant à sa représentation dans les courriers des lecteurs de trois journaux européens (Die Welt, El Mundo, Le Monde). Nous montrons co…
Recreating Japanese Men
Sabine Fruhstuck and Anne Walthall (eds). Recreating Japanese Men . University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2011. pp. ix + 347. Tables. Illust. Notes. Refs. Bibliog. Index. Hb. £44.95/$65. IS
Popular Democracy in Japan
Tensions internationales autour d'un concombre tueur
Au printemps 2011, des consommateurs de l'Allemagne du nord tombèrent gravement malades, et certains moururent, après avoir, dit-on, consommé des concombres et des tomates provenant d'Espagne infectés par la bactérie ECEH. Dans cet article, nous proposons de faire l'analyse de cette crise alimentaire en nous intéressant à sa représentation dans les courriers des lecteurs de trois journaux européens (Die Welt, El Mundo, Le Monde). Nous montrons co…
Peacebuilding, foodways and the everyday
This article situates peace research in the messy ambiguities of everyday encounters between foreign peacebuilders and local populations in post‐conflict environments. It suggests that anthropology allows for moving the liberal/hybrid peace debate beyond its immediate boundaries – a focus on governance systems and the intervention itself – towards a more comprehensive examination of mundane experiences in shared places and their possible influenc…
The Comic and the Rule” in Pastagate
When the OQLF, Quebec’s language police, ordered an Italian restaurant to use the French “pâtes” instead of “pasta,” Pastagate broke. Initial (global) laughter about the events quickly turned into public outcry resulting, among others, in a partial reform of the OQLF. This article examines the dynamics that drove the scandal and that subsequently engendered political change, and more broadly the intersections of food and language as identity mark…
Voter Integrity, Trust and the Promise of Digital Technologies
Drawing on the anthropology of technology, this article examines the introduction of a digital biometric voter registration for Solomon Islands 2014 national election. Four perspectives on biometric voting are brought into dialogue: (1) the technological particularities, strengths and shortcomings of biometric voting registration (BVR), (2) a global and international embrace of the technology for its perceived ‘universal’ tendency to secure ident…
Mobile phones, gender‐based violence, and distrust in state services
This paper examines the potential benefits and pitfalls of mobile phones for accessing social services, particularly in response to gender‐based violence, in Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic field research, I show how mobile phones increase rather than decrease perceived distances between social service providers and those they intend to serve. Mobile phones exaggerate the visibility of the shortcomings o…
A road to development? Rural perspectives on infrastructure maintenance in Solomon Islands
The Solomon Islands Government and its development partners are heavily investing in road maintenance programmes to promote development in the small islands least developed state. Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article challenges the future orientation of these programmes. Instead it emphasises rural Solomon Islanders’ past and present experiences with road-based mobilities and state-sponsored road maintenance projects. These …
Rescuing Honiara, rescuing Gwou'ulu
Speaking to debates about the management of difference in and between towns and villages as well as secondary conversions and breakaway movements in Melanesia, this article examines the efforts of an Anglican village church to maintain social cohesion through politico-religious unity in Gwou’ulu, a multi-clan village in North Malaita, Solomon Islands, and its urban enclaves in Honiara. It focuses on an Anglican “rescue mission” that Gwou’ulu send…
Beyond electrification for development
Based on an in‐depth examination of the acquisition, use, maintenance and deterioration of solar home systems in a village in Malaita, Solomon Islands, this article challenges the analytical focus of current debates on electrification in Pacific Island countries – why Pacific Island countries have not yet sufficiently electrified to achieve their development goals. Alternatively it examines what is, how, in this case, rural Solomon Islanders have…
Leadership in Absentia
This article examines a tension at the heart of national leadership in Solomon Islands today: a conviction that national leaders need to spend more time in rural environments to better represent rural interests, needs and values, while having to be in town to access the individuals and organizations that, essentially, make them national leaders in the first place. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in urban Honiara and the rural…
Vacating place, vacated space? A research agenda for places where people leave
An ethnography of deletion
This article demonstrates the fragility of digital storage through a non-media-centric ethnography of data management practices in the so-called Global South. It shows how in the Lau Lagoon, Malaita Province, Solomon Islands, the capacity to reliably store digital media is curtailed by limited access to means of capital production and civic infrastructures, as well as a comparatively isolated tropical ecology that bedevils the permanence of all t…
Beyond platform capitalism
This article argues for a need to move beyond studies of platform capitalism and inter-capitalist struggles to also account for inter-economic struggles, the platformization of longstanding primarily non-capitalist societies, the same kind of societies that have conceptually inspired discussions of platforms as hi-tech gift economies. Based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork on digital transformations among the horticulturalist Lau of Malaita…
Non-/Human Infrastructures and Digital Gifts
This article demonstrates how nonhuman and human infrastructural assemblages, and the brokers that operate as assemblers within them, give rise to localised Internets. With an ethnographic emphasis on the digital transformations of Solomon Islands, we examine agentive brokerage practices surrounding digital multimedia files, downloaded off the global Internet and circulated offline as gifts via MicroSDs. We show how digital brokers use their comp…
Beauty for Development? Betel Aesthetics and Socioeconomic Stability in Urban Solomon Islands
Betel users are easy to identify. When chewed, betel colours its consumers’ saliva, teeth and lips in a distinct bright red. Since proper use of betel requires spitting of excess saliva, the practice also tends to stain the spaces surrounding its consumers. Because of these distinct aesthetic markers, betel has become a site of contestation in urban Solomon Islands. The practice is publicly discussed as a failure to realise the country’s tourist …
Knitting for conservation
We critically reflect on a conservation project in the Ecuadorian Amazon that was designed to promote biodiversity conservation among lowland indigenous communities involved in eco-tourism initiatives by teaching them how to knit a particular set of local animals. We use interpretive qualitative research and draw on social practice theory to examine the ways that participants’ engagement with new knitting in participatory knitting workshops chang…
Digitizing other markets
Digital markets are regularly equated with digital capitalism. However, markets are also central features of longstanding other economic systems, such as the bush markets of Malaita, Solomon Islands, where saltwater and bush people have traded with each other for at least seven hundred years, if not longer. This article interrogates the digitization of this bush market system based on classically-conceived long-term ethnographic fieldwork that ai…
Platformizing the hunt for dolphins
The Lau-speakers of Malaita, Solomon Islands, hunt dolphins for their teeth. Used as traditional currency and part of a broader, long-standing approach to marine resource management, the future of the hunt is uncertain and this uncertainty is intrinsically entwined with processes of anthropogenic climate change and social media spectacles. The habitat of the dolphins is threatened by a confluence of factors beyond the control of the Lau such as r…
A Sociotechnical Approach to Smartphone Research
Smartphones have become crucial for understanding how digital technologies are adopted and adapted into people's lives, while also emerging as tools for studying social phenomena more broadly. Drawing on insights from our own longitudinal work in Solomon Islands, this article details a sociotechnical approach to smartphone research that combines both potentialities. It distinguishes itself from other smartphone-based methods by connecting media-c…
Technology
Technology broadly refers to objects or actions that are linked to tekhne, an ancient Greek term for 'skill' or 'craftmanship'. Anthropologists of technology sometimes employ this understanding as a starting point, but many study technology in a much broader sense. They ask instead how humans and non-humans purposefully make or do things, and how such activity is shaped by broader sociocultural dynamics. Framing the topic in such terms allows ant…
Sociology (18 works) · Political science (14 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Geography (7 works) · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Anthropology (5 works) · Art (5 works)