GGA (Geoffrey) Hobbis PhD

I am an Assistant Professor with the Knowledge, Technology and Innovation Group at Wageningen University & Research. In February 2024, I started a new comparative project on ‘Digitizing Other Economies’ (DOE), funded through an ERC Starting Grant. DOE investigates possibilities for economic diversity in the digital age based on cross-cultural comparative research among hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, horticulturalists and non-industrial agriculturalists. For more information about the project, check out this short manifesto published open access in Geoforum: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.08.006

My research combines anthropologies of technologies and material culture with economic anthropology. It is driven by a desire to understand how people living on the margins of global capital negotiate places of their own in a rapidly digitizing world. This quest began during my doctoral fieldwork among the Lau-speakers of Malaita Province, Solomon Islands (February 2014-February 2015). Here I completed the first in-depth study on the shifting moralities of smartphones, as capitalist technologies, in horticultural Solomon Islands, published most comprehensively in my monograph, The Digitizing Family: An Ethnography of Melanesian Smartphones (Palgrave, 2020).

I have, for example, examined how digital technologies, infrastructures and media have become integrated into reciprocal gift-giving within contexts of circular labour migration and urban diasporas (Digital Cultures & Society, 2017; Ethnos, 2020). More recently, I explored how Solomon Islander horticulturalists have transformed Facebook’s capitalist markets (buy and sell groups) into online iterations of non-capitalist bush markets (Media, Culture & Society, 2022; Journal of Cultural Economy, 2023).