ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we use ethnographic data from fieldwork in a village in Botswana to reflect critically on some central premises in domestication theory. After having used domestication theory in many research projects on media use in Norway, we did not make extensive use of it in the Botswana project we started in 2015. In this text, we explain why. We highlight three factors: (i) that we find some theoretical fundamentals in domestication theory to be ethnocentric and hence not well applicable to media-related practices in Botswana; (ii) that our already solid ethnographic competence on Botswana – from a time where media technologies were almost non-existent in the Kalahari village – made us see that a more radical non-media-centric approach than we felt domestication could offer was needed. We hold this view because we contend that it is only the radical Copernican turn of non-media-centric media theorising that can reveal the radically different socio-historical framework of Botswana compared to the Western framework that domestication is usually applied on. Moreover, we argue (iii) that to reach such insights solid ethnographic fieldwork is a necessity, which (for good reasons) is a rarity in domestication research. Still, we believe that these shortcomings can easily be rectified by addressing these critiques. If so, we believe that the domestication approach can be an important correction to perspectives on media and society dominant in the Global South today.
