755
Current Anthropology Volume 46, Number 5, December 2005

2005 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2005/4605-0003$10.00
From Kinship to
Link-up
Cell Phones and Social
Networking in Jamaica
1
by Heather Horst and Daniel
Miller
On the basis of lists of numbers saved on individuals’ cell
phones and other evidence, it is argued here that low-income Ja-
maicans use the cell phone to establish extensive networks, a
practice identified as “link-up.” Link-up has many of the same
characteristics as those found by R. T. Smith in a classic study of
Jamaican kinship and genealogy. However, the new evidence sug-
gests that kinship merely exemplifies a pattern that may be
found in a wider range of Jamaican networking strategies includ-
ing the creation of spiritual and church communities, the search
for sexual partners, and the coping strategies adopted by low-in-
come households. Link-up also accounts for the rapid adoption of
cell phones and the patterns of their use by low-income Jamai-
cans and highlights the importance of understanding the local in-
corporation of cell phones and local forms of networking enacted
through new communication technologies.
heather a. horst is a postdoctoral research associate at the
Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of
Southern California (3502 Watt Way, Los Angeles, CA 90089-
0281 [h.horst@ucl.ac.uk]). Born in 1973, she was educated at the
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (B.A., 1996), the University
of California, Santa Barbara (M.A., 1998), and the University of
London (Ph.D., 2004). Her research interests include new com-
munications technologies and the matrial culture of the house in
Jamaica. Her publications include “A Pilgrimage Home: Tombs,
Burial, and Belonging in Jamaica” (Journal of Material Culture
9[1]:11–26) and “Building Home: Being and Becoming a Returned
Resident,” in Returning to the Source: The Final Stage of the
Caribbean Migration Circuit, edited by Dwaine Plaza and Fran-
ces Henry (Mona: University of the West Indies Press, in press).
daniel miller is Professor of Material Culture in the Depart-
ment of Anthropology of University College London. Born in
1954, he received his B.A. (1976) and his Ph.D. (1983) from Cam-
bridge University. His current research is on loss and separation,
the experience of au pairs, and a theory of value. Among his re-
cent publications are the edited volumes Materiality (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2005) and (with Susanne Ku¨chler) Cloth-
ing as Material Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2005) and The Dialectics
of Shopping (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
The present paper was submitted 31 i 05 and accepted 7iv05.
1. We thank Phil Burnham, Fiona Parrott, Anastasia Panagakos,
Anat Hecht, Eric Olive, and the journal reviewers for advice and
corrections on the text. We are grateful to Digicel for sharing com-
mercial information with us and an anonymous reviewer for draw-
ing our attention to the work of Lars Hinrichs.
Far from the homogenization that might be expected
from the global appropriation of new technologies, eth-
nography reveals considerable variation in what tech-
nologies have become in different regions. For example,
no one in the cellular phone industry denies that the
rapid and widespread adoption of texting in Europe was
largely unpredicted. Yet the texting capital of the world
soon established itself in an even less likely place, the
Philippines, where according to Nokia 100million texts
were being sent daily from 10 million cell phones by
2002 (Pertierra et al. 2002:88). With respect to the In-
ternet, Miller and Slater (2000) argue that a study of the
localization or appropriation of the Internet does not ap-
propriately conceptualize our relationship to technology
because it presupposes a fixed entity called “the Inter-
net.” Rather, the Internet is something created by Trin-
idadians, for example, in that the particular relationship
between e-mail, web surfing, and chat that makes up the
Trinidadian Internet has as much claim to being called
“the Internet” as the usage of any other region. These
researchers found that, despite predictions that its glob-
alizing effects would erase conventional boundaries and
notions of territory, the Internet in Trinidad was the
most nationalistic medium they had encountered.
The global development of the Internet was accom-
panied by an almost uncontested set of inaccurate pre-
dictions that finally led to what Cassidy (2002) has called
the “dot.con” fiasco. Similarly, in the development of
cell phones, one of the biggest gambles in business his-
tory—the worldwide sale of licences for third-generation
phones for US$125 billion—has led to a situation in
which it is their inexpensive voice facility rather than
any of their new features, such as video phoning, that
has generated the most sales (Economist 2004). The re-
cent history of telecommunications is, then, a story of
the failure of prediction by industry, investors, and ex-
perts. It therefore seems reasonable to propose that the
social imperatives of consumers and not just the de-
mands and influences of commercemay be amajor factor
in accounting for patterns of usage.
Initial research on the impact of the cell phone on a
regional basis has indeed already suggested a wide range
of local patterns of usage (Katz and Aakhus 2002). That
this is the case evenwithin the Caribbean is evident from
the contrast between Trinidad and Jamaica. Trinidad has
approximately half of Jamaica’s population of 2.6million
(cf. Henry 2004) but nearly three times its per capita
income in 2003, US$7,260 as compared with Jamaica’s
US$2,760 (World Bank 2004). The ethnography of Inter-
net usage in Trinidad in 1999 demonstrated great enthu-
siasm and considerable sharing of access, while our study
of Jamaica in 2004 revealed much less interest and shar-
ing. Although government statistics suggest 7% pene-
tration of the Internet in Trinidad and 3% in Jamaica,
2
our evidence is that actual usage is considerably greater
2. The Jamaican figure comes from a survey by Don Anderson’s
Market Research Ltd. carried out in 2003 for JAMPRO, the Jamaican
promotion corporation. This suggested that there were 95,000 In-
ternet users, 60% of them residential (Kirton 2003).

756 F current anthropology Volume 46, Number 5, December 2005
in Trinidad (Henry 2004). With respect to the use of cell
phones, there were also clear differences but in the op-
posite direction. By the end of 2004 Trinidad had ap-
proximately 600,000 cell phone subscribers (Trinidad
Guardian 2004), whereas there were 2 million subscrib-
ers in Jamaica (Digicel, personal communication). The
latter figure reflected an average of three phones per
household. Given themuch higher income levels of Trin-
idadians and their sense of themselves as a First World
nation (Miller and Slater 2000:118), these numbers were
quite surprising.
One reason for these differences was the different re-
sponses of the two governments to the liberalization of
the telecommunications sector prompted by the World
Bank and others.
3
The Trinidadian government encour-
aged the development of the Internet and computers
with interest-free loans to public-sector workers that,
combined with much higher income levels, made com-
puters more affordable. By contrast, it was slow to grant
licences to the cell phone sector. The Jamaican govern-
ment showed less appreciation of the potential of the
Internet but was quick to grant licences for the cell
phone industry.
The role of companies has been as important as that
of the state. As it has for much of the Caribbean (Maurer
2001), the Cable and Wireless Corporation has domi-
nated the telecommunications industry in Jamaica for a
century and has attempted to retain the various privi-
leges associated with its monopoly. Not surprisingly, it
has come to be regarded as impeding the development
of the telecommunications industry (Miller and Slater
2000:117–43; Stirton and Lodge 2002). This perception
proved decisive when it came face to face with the mod-
ernizing commercial strategy adopted by Digicel, a cell
phone company capitalizing on its success in developing
media in Ireland in entering the Caribbean market (Boy-
ett and Currie 2004). Since commencing operations in
2001, Digicel has achieved extraordinary success in Ja-
maica. By the end of 2004 it had sold nearly 1.5 million
cell phones in a country of only 2.6million people. Cap-
italizing on many Jamaicans’ visceral dislike of Cable
and Wireless, Digicel created an impressive marketing
campaign led by the highly experienced Jamaican Harry
Smith. Smith successfully used many populist images,
such as Rasta or “roots” colours and prominent spon-
sorship of sports and entertainment such as the TV series
Rising Stars, the local equivalent of Britain’s Pop Idol or
American Idol in the U.S.A.
To suggest that the comparative success of the Internet
in Trinidad and the cell phone in Jamaica is entirely due
to the actions of the state and the companies involved,
however, would miss the story that emerges from the
ethnography of usage.
The research described here is based on a year’s eth-
nography divided between an urban and a rural site in
3. Jamaica is party to the World Trade Organization’s General
Agreement on Trade in Services of 1995, including the annex on
basic telecommunication services, and also subscribes to the Con-
nectivity Agenda for the Latin American and Caribbean Region.
Jamaica. Funded by the British Department for Inter-
national Development, the study was carried out si-
multaneously with research in Ghana, India, and South
Africa.
4
The goal of the project was to assess the impact
of new communication technologies on low-income
households and thereby to help agencies determine
whether they should be a priority in future aid policy.
Since our research in Jamaica was limited to low-income
households in which we observed very little Internet
use,
5
our ethnography essentially developed into a study
of how low-income Jamaicans constructed the cell
phone. The ethnography was based upon traditional an-
thropological methods of participant observation while
living with families in the two sites over the course of
a year.
6
We also carried out a general household survey
of 100 households and an intensive budgetary survey of
20 households and investigated the commercial and gov-
ernmental bodies concerned with the provision and us-
age of new communication technologies (see Horst and
Miller n.d.). Given the project’s focus upon policy and
poverty, our study concentrated on low-income house-
holds, with low income being defined as less than
JA$3,000 (US$50)
7
per week in the rural area and
JA$5,000 (US$80) in the urban one.
The rural site is located in the hills of central Jamaica,
where Horst has been visiting and working for over ten
years. The “town”we call Orange Valley has only around
500 core residents but serves a hinterland of some 14,000
persons living in small districts and individual home-
steads in the surrounding hills. Depending upon the sea-
son, as little as 10% of the population is formally em-
ployed, but most residents grow some of their own food.
Men typically work intermittently as labourers in con-
struction or as seasonal labourers for crops such as or-
anges and cocoa, while women market foods or raise
chickens. Were it not for the income provided by remit-
tances from relatives and friends living abroad, it is likely
that the area would be rather less populous. Since until
recently Cable and Wireless Jamaica supplied no land-
lines to much of this area, our rural research is, in many
respects, a study of the introduction of the telephone.
The urban site, here calledMarshfield, is a low-income
(relative to other urban areas) settlement in Portmore, a
dormitory community of 200,000 developed by the gov-
ernment with the aim of providing the opportunity for
4. The other ethnographies were led by Don Slater in Ghana, Jo
Tacchi in India, and Andrew Skuse in South Africa.
5. Indeed, most of the Internet access we observed for low-income
Jamaicans was through the cell phone, not the computer.
6. Horst spent the year in Jamaica, while Miller made three visits
of a month each. Both Horst and Miller divided their time between
the two sites.
7. Throughout 2004, the exchange rate was approximately $JA60
to $US1. Mean per capita consumption in Jamaica was estimated
at $JA2,277 weekly in 2004 from figures provided by the Planning
Institute of Jamaica (2003) and the Bank of Jamaica (2005).Our def-
initions of low income reflect the national profile of higher urban
incomes. Our analysis of 20 low-income households revealed av-
erage weekly consumption of JA$3,983 for a household of 2.7 per-
sons in Orange Valley (or JA$1,475 per capita) and JA$6,584 for a
household of 3 persons in Marshfield (or JA$2,194 per capita).