Paper
Understanding a Women’s WhatsAPP Group: Continuities between the physical and digital
presenters
Indrani Mukherjee
Nationality: India
Residence: India
Indian Anthropological Association
Presence:Online
Keywords:
Digital Anthropology, Women, WhatsApp
Abstract:
Williams et al. (2021) point out that the spatiotechno imaginary of the digital living room, as a place within the home, frames the living room as a place of security and inclusion. However, they also point out that “WhatsApp’s ‘digital living rooms’ draws attention to the digital-physical, private-public spaces in and through which relations, imperatives, interests, and identities play out” and this need to critically question the lived politics of dwelling and the home. They further emphasize that the digital living rooms can be sites of home making and unmaking (Baxter and Brickell, 2014), that include and exclude, and engender intimacy and alienation. They reflect that feminist geographers and anthropologists have observed that home can be a space of oppression rather than nurture; “the home is an ambiguously experienced ‘space of belonging and alienation, intimacy and violence, desire and fear’” (Blunt and Varley 2004), a perceived sites of stability homes can function to obscure the fields of power within which people dwell (Carsten 2004; Ingold 2005). With this as the backdrop, the present research reflects on the confluence between the western imaginary and traditional gendered spaces alongside new evolving structural politics within an urban conglomerate, in Gurgaon India.
Augé (2009) conceptualizes anthropological places as 'places of identity, of relations, and of history'. The research is the ethnographic continuity between the physical space of a gated community and a WhatsApp group that is a semi-official association of the women of the community. This paper explores the WhatsApp group as an integral part of women’s everyday life, in terms of ‘domestication of digital technology’ (McDonald, 2015). The focus remains on the negotiations of the physical and the digital space, and its continuities, reflecting on the uniqueness of WhatsApp group in not just broad cultural context, but also specific socio-cultural lived realities.