ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an anthropologically informed approach to the relationship between media technologies, culture, and politics that advocates the significance of non-Western perspectives and realities in conceptualizing and understanding the diversity of digital life. The relationship between indigenous people(s) and digital media technologies is ambivalent and enthusiastic at the same time, reflecting individual experiences and expectations as well as collective sociocultural contexts and developments. Indigenous people(s) have been utilizing digital media technologies, such as the Internet and the World Wide Web, since the early 1990s to communicate, represent, connect, network, and cooperate on a local, regional, and global scale. However, indigenous people’s articulations of their own “digital realities” are rarely noticed by the nonindigenous public, policymakers, and the technology industry. Digital media making has become an important part of the indigenous cultural and sociopolitical project, particularly because this also means to establish social relations to other indigenous people and to nonindigenous agents alike.
