Dr John Postill

From action-sets to smart mobs: a review of old and new conceptualisations of sociality in action

Paper to the workshop 'Old And New Reconceptualizations of Sociality' Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) Annual Conference, Toronto University
8-12 May 2007

Dr John Postill, University of Sheffield, UK

Abstract

This paper reviews the history of anthropological and other efforts to describe and theorise the political significance of ad-hoc, ephemeral groups of people that come together to attain a particular goal only to disperse almost as swiftly as they arose. Two trajectories are compared and contrasted. First, the collective trajectory of the Manchester School of political anthropology whose members sought to understand increasingly mobile and ‘complex’ societies in Africa and elsewhere by moving away from an earlier stress on lasting ‘groups’ towards what Adrian C. Mayer termed in 1963 ‘quasi-groups’. In this context, Mayer spoke of ‘action-sets’ not as groups but rather as the sets of people who are mobilised in a given situation. Later, in the mid-1970s, Victor Turner sought to use the notion of action-set to reunite two estranged Manchester School approaches that were once closely allied  field theory and network analysis – yet his efforts had little impact. The second trajectory considered in this paper is that of the social technology pioneer and analyst Howard Rheingold who is credited with coining the term ‘virtual community’. In recent years, Rheingold’s research focus has shifted from relatively static online ‘communities’ to what he terms ‘smart mobs’, e.g. the 1999 Seattle protesters who used mobile phones, websites and ‘swarming’ tactics to demonstrate against the WTO. Rheingold’s analytical shift away from community is strikingly reminiscent of that by Manchester School anthropologists half a century earlier.

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