Geoffrey Hobbis
Biographic Data
| ID | 90136 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Geoffrey Hobbis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Geoffrey |
| FAMILY NAME | Hobbis |
| SIGNATURE | HOBBIS G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Groningen |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8644-6916 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 43 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Waiting for power: Mobile phones off the grid and the ethnographic method
This article examines the methodological consequences of conducting technographic research in low-infrastructure contexts through ethnographic fieldwork on mobile phone use in the Lau Lagoon of Malaita, Solomon Islands. The argument is that infrastructural constraint actively shapes both everyday technological practice and the production of ethnographic knowledge. Drawing on longterm ethnographic fieldwork, the analysis shows how delay, waiting, …
Demonstrably sustainable technics: Endangered material knowledge and paradoxical resilience
The Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (EMKP), hosted by the British Museum and financed by the Arcadia Fund, exemplifies initiatives that aim to preserve diverse material knowledges and practices variously threatened with disappearance. Based on insights from six EMKP projects, we critically interrogate such an emphasis on “endangerment,” highlighting how endangerment is closely entangled with resilience. Spanning six distinct material know…
Platformizing the hunt for dolphins: Beyond industrial-capitalist encounters with Nature 2.0
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: Outline for a Holistic, Qualitative Mobile Method
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 …
Rural media studies: Making the case for a new subfield
It is time for a rural turn in media studies. Media studies are deeply imbricated in urban life. It is where most universities are located. It is where many media scholars live and work. Media workers, too, predominately exist in the urban – at least for now. Embedded in these urban settings, media studies have too often focused on urban perspectives and considered rural dimensions largely from a ‘divides’ perspective, wherein the rural has someh…
Digitizing other markets: Lessons from the Bush Internet of Island Melanesia
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: Critical perspectives on Facebook markets from Melanesia
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: The Cables, Waves and Brokers of Solomon Islands Internet
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: Negotiating Distance in Centralized Solomon Islands
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…
Digitizing other economies: A critical review
Contemporary hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, pastoralists, agriculturalists and, on a much smaller scale, feudalists are threatened continuously by dominant (post-)industrial, often capitalist, economies. The latter perpetually seek to dominate the former through colonialism and development, violent resource extraction, and the more insidious effects of environmental change. Multidisciplinary research on digital economic transformations post…
An ethnography of deletion: Materializing transience in Solomon Islands digital cultures
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…
The Digitizing Family: An Ethnography of Melanesian Smartphones
Cowboys and Aliens: Body Techniques and Audience Reception in Malaita, Solomon Islands
Based on ethnographic fieldwork among the Lau of Malaita Province, Solomon Islands, this article revisits the “imperial cowboy problem” through an anthropology of technology approach. It examines audience preference for Westerns, or “cowboy movies,” and their rejection of science fiction, or “new technology movies.” Non-verbal, visual communication, material cultures and body techniques are shown to be particularly significant for how unintended …
Voter Integrity, Trust and the Promise of Digital Technologies: Biometric Voter Registration in Solomon Islands
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…
The Shifting Moralities of Mobile Phones in Lau Communicative Ecologies (Solomon Islands)
In the past decade, digital technologies and especially mobile phones have spread rapidly across the Solomon Islands. This process has been surprising not only in how quickly many Solomon Islanders have become digitally savvy, but also in rapidly emerging moral debates that pit the ability to stay in touch with family and friends against the dangers of immoral behaviour, especially sexual promiscuity, and of malevolent sorcery. Based on a communi…
Non-/Human Infrastructures and Digital Gifts: The Cables, Waves and Brokers of Solomon Islands Internet
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…
Voter Integrity, Trust and the Promise of Digital Technologies: Biometric Voter Registration in Solomon Islands
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…
Rural media studies: Making the case for a new subfield
It is time for a rural turn in media studies. Media studies are deeply imbricated in urban life. It is where most universities are located. It is where many media scholars live and work. Media workers, too, predominately exist in the urban – at least for now. Embedded in these urban settings, media studies have too often focused on urban perspectives and considered rural dimensions largely from a ‘divides’ perspective, wherein the rural has someh…
Beyond platform capitalism: Critical perspectives on Facebook markets from Melanesia
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: Materializing transience in Solomon Islands digital cultures
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…
Cowboys and Aliens: Body Techniques and Audience Reception in Malaita, Solomon Islands
Based on ethnographic fieldwork among the Lau of Malaita Province, Solomon Islands, this article revisits the “imperial cowboy problem” through an anthropology of technology approach. It examines audience preference for Westerns, or “cowboy movies,” and their rejection of science fiction, or “new technology movies.” Non-verbal, visual communication, material cultures and body techniques are shown to be particularly significant for how unintended …
The Shifting Moralities of Mobile Phones in Lau Communicative Ecologies (Solomon Islands)
In the past decade, digital technologies and especially mobile phones have spread rapidly across the Solomon Islands. This process has been surprising not only in how quickly many Solomon Islanders have become digitally savvy, but also in rapidly emerging moral debates that pit the ability to stay in touch with family and friends against the dangers of immoral behaviour, especially sexual promiscuity, and of malevolent sorcery. Based on a communi…
Platformizing the hunt for dolphins: Beyond industrial-capitalist encounters with Nature 2.0
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: Outline for a Holistic, Qualitative Mobile Method
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: Lessons from the Bush Internet of Island Melanesia
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…
Voter Integrity, Trust and the Promise of Digital Technologies: Biometric Voter Registration in Solomon Islands
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…
The Shifting Moralities of Mobile Phones in Lau Communicative Ecologies (Solomon Islands)
In the past decade, digital technologies and especially mobile phones have spread rapidly across the Solomon Islands. This process has been surprising not only in how quickly many Solomon Islanders have become digitally savvy, but also in rapidly emerging moral debates that pit the ability to stay in touch with family and friends against the dangers of immoral behaviour, especially sexual promiscuity, and of malevolent sorcery. Based on a communi…
Cowboys and Aliens: Body Techniques and Audience Reception in Malaita, Solomon Islands
Based on ethnographic fieldwork among the Lau of Malaita Province, Solomon Islands, this article revisits the “imperial cowboy problem” through an anthropology of technology approach. It examines audience preference for Westerns, or “cowboy movies,” and their rejection of science fiction, or “new technology movies.” Non-verbal, visual communication, material cultures and body techniques are shown to be particularly significant for how unintended …
The Digitizing Family: An Ethnography of Melanesian Smartphones
Leadership in Absentia: Negotiating Distance in Centralized Solomon Islands
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…
Digitizing other economies: A critical review
Contemporary hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, pastoralists, agriculturalists and, on a much smaller scale, feudalists are threatened continuously by dominant (post-)industrial, often capitalist, economies. The latter perpetually seek to dominate the former through colonialism and development, violent resource extraction, and the more insidious effects of environmental change. Multidisciplinary research on digital economic transformations post…
An ethnography of deletion: Materializing transience in Solomon Islands digital cultures
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: Critical perspectives on Facebook markets from Melanesia
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: The Cables, Waves and Brokers of Solomon Islands Internet
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 …
Rural media studies: Making the case for a new subfield
It is time for a rural turn in media studies. Media studies are deeply imbricated in urban life. It is where most universities are located. It is where many media scholars live and work. Media workers, too, predominately exist in the urban – at least for now. Embedded in these urban settings, media studies have too often focused on urban perspectives and considered rural dimensions largely from a ‘divides’ perspective, wherein the rural has someh…
Digitizing other markets: Lessons from the Bush Internet of Island Melanesia
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: Beyond industrial-capitalist encounters with Nature 2.0
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: Outline for a Holistic, Qualitative Mobile Method
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…
Waiting for power: Mobile phones off the grid and the ethnographic method
This article examines the methodological consequences of conducting technographic research in low-infrastructure contexts through ethnographic fieldwork on mobile phone use in the Lau Lagoon of Malaita, Solomon Islands. The argument is that infrastructural constraint actively shapes both everyday technological practice and the production of ethnographic knowledge. Drawing on longterm ethnographic fieldwork, the analysis shows how delay, waiting, …
Demonstrably sustainable technics: Endangered material knowledge and paradoxical resilience
The Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (EMKP), hosted by the British Museum and financed by the Arcadia Fund, exemplifies initiatives that aim to preserve diverse material knowledges and practices variously threatened with disappearance. Based on insights from six EMKP projects, we critically interrogate such an emphasis on “endangerment,” highlighting how endangerment is closely entangled with resilience. Spanning six distinct material know…
Sociology (13 works) · Ethnography (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Geography (6 works) · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs (6 works) · Anthropology (5 works) · Digital Economy and Work Transformation (5 works) · Media studies (5 works) · Art (4 works)