Identities in Flux and Ethics of Technology Change
- Vol - XLIX No. 34, August 23, 2014 | Pankaj Sekhsaria Notes
This article raises and deals with a set of questions and reflections on identity construction, projection and interpretation of a particular context in rural India. It revolves around the story of V Venkataswamy, a cotton handloom weaver in Adilabad in Telangana. It is also based on a particular narrative about this individual and a photograph of an identity he projected of himself. The article pleads for an engagement with the ethics involved in technology change and the impact it is having on millions of people across the length and breadth of the country.
Pankaj Sekhsaria (psekhsaria@gmail.com) is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Technology and Society Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, the Netherlands.
I would like to acknowledge the contributions of Uzramma, M Annapurna, Latha Tummuru, B Syamasundari, Radhika Gajjala Jo Wachelder, Wiebe Bijker and the CAST Masters Class of 2009-11, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University to the ideas in this article.
This article is constructed upon the story of V Venkataswamy, a man I actually never met. It is also based on a particular narrative someone else told me about him and a photograph I have of an identity he projected about himself. The choice of this single exemplar has its obvious limitations: just one “absent” individual, a very specific and localised context and too many assumptions that will necessarily have to be made.
The reasons, therefore, for making this choice are important to explain and I begin by narrating Venkataswamy’s story and explaining the photograph I made more than a decade ago. I then explore some issues around identity construction itself, particularly those that are created and/or located in situations of societal and economic flux. This is followed by a discussion on the issues of ethics in present-day discourses around modern technologies, something that is particularly evident in the medical field.
I conclude by seeking an extension of the ethics discussions to a larger basket of technologies, particularly the “traditional technologies”. It is one possible way of seeking greater engagement, understanding and empathy for individuals and communities who, like in the case of Venkataswamy, appear to be creating new identities, but are most likely, in fact, experiencing unprecedented erasures of their existing “sense of self”.
Paradoxical Reality
The photograph is a very simple one. It shows “V Venkataswamy U/s” – a small sign in grey, painted besides the door of Venkataswamy’s locked house located in the small town of Chinnur in central India. The U/s besides his name stands for unskilled and this is what Venkataswamy had painted about himself on the wall of his own house.
The story that I was told went something like this: The painted name plate on the wall was in fact from an identity (ID) card he had been issued a while ago when he worked as a gatekeeper – an obviously unskilled job – in the Mineral Exploration Corporation Limited (MECL). It was in this ID card that he had been identified thus.
He worked here for a while, then moved to a nearby steel-producing city to work as domestic help and then came back to his hometown of Chinnur to earn a living by driving people around in an autorickshaw. This is what I was told he was out doing when I had visited his house.
It is a classic representation of the situation across rural India – a complex landscape of tremendous inequities, deprivations and challenges; of people in constant flux as they try to find a living and a livelihood. While this is true of Venkataswamy, his story is also representative of another equally important but paradoxical reality.
Venkataswamy was, in fact, one of the most skilled cotton handloom weavers in the entire region, an integral part of one of the finest and richest traditions that India has been and continues to be known for. The products were and are even today known internationally for their skill and quality (Prasad 1999: 13) and the industry is also considered the country’s second largest employer after agriculture (Sekhsaria 2009: 50, 51). Estimates1 of the actual number of people employed and the value of the output vary considerably, but there is agreement that the handloom industry is a significant and important contributor (Liebl and Roy 2003: 5368; Sekhsaria 2009: 50, 51).
Handloom weaving has other important characteristics too. It is a livelihood that is rooted in the local context of the weaver, is completely in control of the weaving family, involves high skill and precision and is an environment-friendly and decentralised industrial enterprise.
This is the background against which the “unskilled” Venkataswamy’s story has to be read. For me it has continued to be important for two reasons. The first was the realisation that this story, albeit limited and incomplete, is not a stray one.
Many Venkataswamys we do not know about are being labelled U/s in a variety of ways and there is something deeply disturbing about this. Second, the story has stuck vividly in my mind for over a decade now and there are a whole set of unresolved questions that I continue to carry with me.
Why did Venkataswamy give up weaving? Why did he get the U/s label? Why did he accept it? Did he not believe that weaving needed skill? These are not questions about Venkataswamy alone, but questions of societies and systems that turn a skilled craftsman into a daily wage earner and then brand him U/s. Can we provide a coherent explanation? Is a larger understanding possible?
Constructing Identity
A common thread visible in literature on identity is of its construction being a dialectic between the individual and the world around him/her. Elias (2000: 284) finds it peculiar that it should not be so and that “people often speak and think of individuals and societies as if they were two phenomenon existing separately – of which…one is often considered ‘real’ and the other ‘unreal’…”
Bhiku Parekh (2008: 2) describes human beings as bearers of universal and particular identities where they share a common human identity and are different things at the same time – “fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, and spouses as well as members of different ethnic, cultural, political and other communities”, while Gordon Mathews (2000: 17) defines identity “as the ongoing sense the self has of who it is, as conditioned through its ongoing interactions with others”.2
While this interaction between the world and the self might explain a part of Venkataswamy’s story, ambiguities remain. I would argue that while the nature of the world’s influence on an individual’s notion of self or identity is a more tangible entity, the process by which an individual constructs identity for himself or herself is far more difficult to fathom. Casting the net wider might helps, but it also increases the complexity. Juliet Steyn (1997: 1) brings in the temporal dimension that identity, “… may be as much about the future and the past, as the present…” and Stuart Hall (2000: 16) discusses identity as a “…concept operating ‘under erasure’ in the interval between reversal and emergence; an idea which cannot be thought in the old way, but without which certain key questions cannot be thought at all”. Brubaker and Cooper (2000: 6-8) attempt a synthesis as they explain identity in five broad categories – as a ground or basis of social or political action; as a specifically collective phenomenon; as a core aspect (or individual or collective) selfhood; as a product of social or political action and as the evanescent product of multiple and competing discourses.
The larger the catchment, the more elusive the notion of identity seems to become. Pinning it down then seems like an extremely difficult undertaking and Venkataswamy’s case seems to prove this empirically, as it is capable of finding resonance of some sort or the other within any discourse and/or definition of identity that one might choose to engage with. In some senses it fits into all the categories and yet it cannot be located with certainty into any. The fluidity and the challenge is evident in Brubaker and Cooper’s (2000: 9) articulation that “identity bears a multivalent, even contradictory theoretical burden” and that inspite of its “ambiguity…most sophisticated theorists, while readily acknowledging the elusive and problematic nature of identity, have argued that it remains indispensable”.
Venkataswamy’s Choices
All the limitations and ambiguities notwithstanding, Venkataswamy does appear, prima facie, to “choose and accept” his own identity when he paints his ID card on the wall of his house. There is a neat closure, particularly if one were to look at “what was” the identity to “what it is” now. The complexity and the question that arises is not when one is looking at and understanding the question of “what”, but that of “how” and “why”? What happens in the period of transition? How do people negotiate identities in times of flux governed by forces and powers far beyond their individual control or even understanding – a combination, perhaps, of processes of a distant history on the one hand and, overarching present-day discourse of globalisation that challenges traditional identities, “…be they ethnic, cultural, religious or national” on the other. “And as these come under pressure, personal identity too cannot remain stable” (Parekh 2008: 1). The closure, then, is not as neat and many questions arise if one seeks to unravel its finer details.
If identity involves choice (Parekh 2008: 11; Sen 2005: 350) I would inquire about the trueness of the choice available. If identity is about multiple things (Gay, Evans and Redman 2000: 1; Sen 2005: 350), the question would be about the choice and its hierarchy, of what is chosen as more important and why; if “identity can be described as a process which entails differentiation between the self, not-self and other” (Steyn 1997: 1) what decides the choice of this “other”?
The concern would be that Venkataswamy’s own construction is not anymore of an identity but that of a “non-identity”. It is an identity of erasure, of a voluntary (or perhaps involuntary) disappearance of the individual, his skill, livelihood, his past and therefore, a future that has any links with the past. He lives in the present and simultaneously in the past from which he is seen to have transitioned and if matters were not complex enough, also inhabits at the same time the very space and time of this “transition”. We have clearer vocabularies to define what exists at the beginning of these transitions and what comes at the end, but much less understanding of what happens in between. How do these multiple negotiations take place? Is self-erasure an outcome or a determinant of this world in flux? Can or should anything be done about this, if anything can be done at all?
One way of engaging with this bind may be to give up the quest to “pin down” and understand Venkataswamy’s identity, and try instead to plot the trajectory that brought him where he presently is. It is here that technology plays a very crucial role, both in terms of the specific history of weaving and also in the more general interface of technology and the notion of identity.
History of Weaving Technology
While it is neither possible nor relevant here to go into a detailed historical analysis, it is important to understand the framework for the same. Historical studies closely link the decline of handloom weaving in India with the rise of British colonial power; with increased mechanisation and the deliberate construction of colonial policy “to convert India into a source of raw material and a market for finished products” (Prasad 1999: 14).
Historical accounts (based, ironically, on colonial sources) provide rich evidence of the quality of cotton grown in India, the quality and superiority of the hand-spun yarn and hand-woven fabric. Hand-spun fibres were said to have better adhesion and were therefore stronger and finer than machine-made yarn. The fineness, silkiness, softness, durability and absorbency (of Indian cotton) were seen as being enhanced by low speed operations (Prasad 1999: 16).
Yet, handloom weaving was and continues to be constructed as primitive, inefficient and non-productive, laying the ground in the process for its replacement by more mechanised and “efficient” forms of production or retraining of those involved in weaving with a different set of skills. It was not the British alone who constructed handloom weaving in this light. Important sections of the Indian nationalist and freedom movement in the past and very influential and important sections of the Indian polity today (Prasad: 1999: 16) have a very similar opinion. This has itself been closely linked to the rapidly advancing spinning and weaving technologies for more than two centuries now – developments that have without doubt increased the output, variety and speed at which fabric is produced today.
It is significant to note that more than two centuries of technological developments and a range of incentives notwithstanding, there is considerable evidence (as seen earlier) that the handloom industry continues to survive, if not thrive across large parts of the Indian subcontinent. This is extremely important because it is in this historical framework on the one hand, and rapidly changing technological practices on the other that the perceived lack of skill of Venkataswamy is firmly embedded.
Technology and Identity
In its more generic context, technology appears to interface with identity in two broad ways.
The first is related to the concern that rapidly accelerating technology is eroding our sense of who we are (Molony 2001). While the outcomes will be as varied as the context and the nature of technology in question, in Venkataswamy’s case it is clear that this is indeed what has happened. It can also then be argued that this would also be the case for a majority of people associated with a certain set of technologies that are generally considered “traditional”. It is not so much about the fact that the technologies are traditional, as it is with the huge flux that these technologies (particularly traditional technologies) and their practitioners are forced to negotiate. What exists does not seem valuable or viable anymore; what will come is not clear or then perhaps out of reach for want of resources or necessary skills. It is a subject we will return to later in this article.
The other technology – identity interface is of identity management technologies and tools – is about creating newer, more complex and presumably more secure protocols for identification. Technologies like photography, finger printing, biometrics, and genetics among others are being used increasingly and in different ways to create an ID card of some sort or the other. ID cards have come to occupy a central role in modern society – providing access, security and resources, not to say of “identity” itself.
If rapidly changing technology did lead to an erosion of Venkataswamy’s sense of self it is ironic indeed that it was his ID card that he chose to reinforce his changed identity with. The system certainly deskilled Venkataswamy, but it also seems to have provided him some sense of self – an identity, applied here after (Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 4) as a “category of practice (which) …is used by ‘lay’ actors in some (not all!) everyday settings to make sense of themselves of their activities, of what they share with, and how they differ from others”.
ID cards have, in a more general sense, become tools to individualise members of society. At the same time, however, they make it mandatory for the individual to provide considerable information about himself/herself. It allows, therefore, for a larger scrutiny and surveillance of and control over the individual, leading to serious questions about freedom and right to privacy. In his discussion on privacy, identity and technology (primarily internet technology), Richard Warner (2004: 859) points out the irony that “Technological innovation has flourished in this environment (of the development of democratic nation states and their market economics), producing among other things, the surveillance technologies that threaten privacy.” The same can easily be applied to the ID card as well – as technology that reduces our control over what the other knows about us. The ID card, then, is a trade-off between its benefits and individual freedom and privacy, a trade-off that individuals understand only partly and have little say over.
Technology and Ethics
There are important ethical issues involved here just as they are in the development and use of modern biomedical technologies – organ transplant, genetic testing, and scientific imaging and visualisation of the human body. There are significant implications for notions of identity and self too. Margaret Lock (2008: 875, 876) points out for instance that “genetic test results (cause) …boundary reformulations (that) challenge normative expectations about embodiment, identity and relationships of individuals to familial and other social groups, as well as conventional cultural horizons and even global politics;” and that “biomedical technological practices can bring about radical transformations in self, identity, and human relationships (Lock 2008: 879). In the case of recipients of donated organs, for instance, “…(the organs) are experienced by recipients as personified with an agency that manifests itself in some surprising ways and profoundly influences the recipient’s sense of self” (Lock 2008: 885).
Linda Hogle (2008: 854) notes the following about the impact of these emerging technologies: “Boundaries, often assumed to be sacred and static are easily transgressed by emerging biological technologies that create artificial cells and chromosomes, life forms made from minimal genomes” and that “Adult and embryonic stem cell research raises questions about the moral status of the embryo...” (Hogle 2008: 861)
These technologies are bound, therefore, to have “profound social effects” (Lock 2008: 893); are characterised by significant discussions around “ethics” (Lock 2008: 875, 877) and how, for instance, work “on the part of scientists, politicians and public interest groups may exemplify a new form of ethics in which responses to public accountability are built into emerging technologies” (Hogle 2008: 862).
This is understandable considering that it is the human body that is directly involved, but surely ethics can and should come into discussions on other technologies as well – their impact can be just as profound, though perhaps in different ways. If the human-technology interface can transform identities and disrupt received notions of what it means to be human in the use of prosthetics, implants and enhancement of the human body (Hogle 2008: 858), other human-technology interfaces could surely do the same. While ethics becomes a key concern in the development and use of technologies in medicine, very few if any similar questions are ever asked about a faster car, a more powerful personal computer or for that matter, of a weaving technology that replaces the traditional handloom. What we have instead is a deterministic discourse; of inevitability even invincibility of the new technology that replaces the old.
Deterministic Discourses
Richard Sennet (2008: 266) illustrates this when the solution he offers for the crisis being faced by artisanal craftsmen is to learn a new skill, because as “the ‘skills society’ is bulldozing the career path….craftsmanship seems particularly vulnerable…since (it) is based on slow learning and on habit….” He says that he is not convinced that this is the craftsman’s fated end and that, “Schools and state institutions, even profit-seeking businesses, can take on concrete steps to support vocations. This is to build up skills in sequence, especially through job re-training.”
The obvious implication is that the traditional craftsman – the book binder, the carpenter, the goldsmith and the weaver have no space to survive through the crafts they know and skills they have. Does this have to be the case? If schools, state institutions and profit-seeking businesses can seek to retrain artisans why can they also not create spaces, support mechanisms, interest, respect and markets for the products that the craftsman is already producing? Sennet’s only way out for them is in retraining – the very process of flux and change that could cause a serious erasure of identity; the job-retraining might ensure that the artisan might survive but the craft itself does not have a future.
Amartya Sen too takes a line similar to that of Sennet’s. The significant evidence of quality and viability notwithstanding he constructs hand spinning (and by extension handloom weaving)3 as primitive and not capable of surviving without the help of government subsidies (2005: 101).
These kind of deterministic approaches fail to notice and account for the fact that handloom weaving and other traditional occupations still support millions in large parts of the world. For them complex realities on the ground and narratives like those of Venkataswamy do not seem to exist at all. It is also unlikely, then, that Sen and Sennet will be able to provide an explanation (or justification) for the presence of the debates and discussion on ethics and “right and wrong” in biomedical technologies. We have to look elsewhere. Anderson and Adams (2008: 188), for instance, point out how practitioners of traditional medicine “…begin to develop uncertainty about traditional knowledge and practice not because they are presented with empirical evidence that what they do is ineffective but because the terms on which biomedical efficacy rests deny the validity of their knowledge.” Andrew Feenberg (1995: 12) argues similarly, that the “legitimating effectiveness of technology depends on unconsciousness of the cultural-political horizon under which it is designed”, and that a “recontextualising critique of technology can uncover the horizon, demystify the illusion of technical necessity and expose the relativity of prevailing technical choices”.
Conclusions
It is in the absence of this “recontextualising” that narratives of the traditional (technology, crafts, agriculture, tribal world view’s) continue to be marked by “technological determinism” on the one hand and only limited, if any discourse at all, around ethics on the other. While technological determinism has been challenged to some extent through constructivist approaches, the same cannot be said in matters related to ethics. This need not be the case as is illustrated in a field such as engineering ethics. Engineering ethics which “critically examines the behaviour of engineers and engineering institutions; identifies activities, practices and policies that are morally problematic (or exemplary)…” (Johnson and Wetmore 2008: 568) has itself been inspired, in part, by the developments in the field of bioethics and medical ethics (2008: 569). “Engineering Ethics” could be extremely relevant and useful if, in addition to understanding from mega-incidents like the nuclear disaster of Chernobyl and the gas tragedy of Bhopal, it also dealt with technology change in general and the future of traditional technologies in particular – some kind of technology ethics.
Venkataswamy offers an illustration of this because his story, though limited and constructed by someone else, is at least still available. Millions of others including farmers, tribals and traditional craftsmen are experiencing tremendous flux as displacement and dispossession occurs on a massive scale in India today. In most cases they disappear into a huge void of imposed and accepted erasure as they trade place and profession with each other in some cases and dislocate both in many others.
It is not (and perhaps will never be) fully clear what we should make of Venkataswamy’s identity and the use of the U/s label, but that is only part of the story. The notion and the construction of identity which is inherently complex becomes even more so in situations of vulnerability and flux.
The social, political and economic implications of this are bound to be huge and it is crucial, even critical that we understand this and issue a call for action to “do something about it”.
Notes
1 Handloom in Andhra Pradesh alone provides direct employment to 2,00,000 families and generates an annual output of about $2 billion. National estimates of employment in cotton handlooms vary from 0.7 to 3.4 million. Export earnings from handloom increased nearly 60% from $0.32 billion in 1993 to about $0.5 billion in 2000 (Liebl and Roy 2003: 5366).
2 Mathews definition of identity itself relies on formulations by Anthony Giddens (1991: 52-54).
3 The extension to handloom weaving is my inference from Sen’s text.
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