Anthropology Guest Speaker

Hsain Ilahiane is Professor and Head of the Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures at Mississippi State University. He is author of Ethnicities, Community Making, and Agrarian Change: The Political Ecology of a Moroccan Oasis (2004); Historical Dictionary of the Berbers (Imazighen) (2017); and of The Mobile Phone Revolution in Morocco: Cultural and Economic Transformations (2022). 

Abstract:

Agricultural decisions regarding timely soil preparation and planting, irrigation and weeding, cultivating and harvesting, and storage and marketing have always been key concerns to farmers. Although many forms of indigenous knowledge are still central in managing agriculture, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have made an impact over the years.  The introduction of mobile phones has been one of the most transformative of these ICTs in farming.  They have sped up the ways in which farmers get, exchange, and manipulate information. They allow farmers to rework the way they interact with rural and urban markets. Increasingly, they enable farmers to focus, search, and extract useful and up-to-date market information from social and business networks.  In this presentation, I examine how and to what effects mobile phones are used by smallholder farmers in Morocco. Second, I contend that the mobile phone is a tool of re-organizing production and marketing strategies, leading to higher farming revenues. Third, I claim that mobile phones have deepened and expanded market participation, resulting in intensive cultivation of “market-friendly” crops. Fourth, I argue that mobile phones have enabled farmers to take risks more easily than before, creating a spirit of risk taking.  Fifth, I contend that mobile phone use for market information search has led to the flattening of information asymmetry between farmers and footloose middlemen.  Finally, I discuss the ways in which mobile phones are different from old technologies such as snowmobiles and trucks in the development space.