The rapid spread of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) is often seen as heralding the arrival of an Information Age. One prominent field of policy and practice to emerge in recent years is known as 'e-government' - the use of the internet and other ICTs to deliver government services. Thus the EU has developed the action plan 'e-Europe' aimed at dramatically expanding e-government services across Europe. Likewise, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) has recently launched its E-Asean Task Force. Other economic blocs and national governments are pursuing similar strategies .

Yet despite these ambitious plans, the relationship between technology and praxis remains elusive. Indeed, it is clearly recognised that not all groups have equal access to ICTs. A deep 'digital divide' is said to be hampering efforts to provide e-government services to low-income families, immigrant groups, rural populations, women and the elderly (DDN 2002). At the heart of these difficulties lie two related problems. First, a widespread ambivalence towards ICTs derived from their perceived duality as potential tools of both state control and civil liberties. Second, a dearth of empirical research into the actual and potential uses of e-government services.

This study seeks to fill this research gap by researching e-government policies and practices aimed at multi-ethnic urban areas in four different countries. All four areas have the potential for inter-ethnic conflict, and e-government is seen as a crucial means of defusing future tensions. In Europe, there is an added economic rationale at work: with the erosion of the welfare state, it is hoped that the sponsored 'community' networks (families, peer groups, neighbourhoods, clubs, etc) will shoulder responsibilities and costs once borne by the state. So the ultimate goal - at least in the official discourse -- is not merely to reach ethnic minorities but rather to devolve power to them through new technologies.

Our guiding research question is:
How are current e-government policies influencing, if at all, the formation of ethnic identities in urban areas? To answer this common question, the team shall pursue the following three lines of inquiry:

1. Ambivalence. How is the ambivalent nature of the new ICTs (i.e. their association both with state control and civil emancipation) played out in the chosen e-government projects? Is this ambivalence felt more acutely by policy-makers, community mediators or the intended recipients? What kinds of reactions (anxiety, resistance, rejection, etc), if any, can be linked to this chronic ambivalence? Or is it largely an artefact of scholarly reflection?

2. Appropriation. How do the target groups appropriate the e-government projects? On what terms do they negotiate the (partial) adoption of the state-sponsored ICTs? What processes of selection (of participants, hardware, software, ideals, etc) accompany these projects at both the policy-making and receiving ends? Who are the mediators or 'cultural producers' (Marcus 1998) linking officials and citizens, and what part do they play?

3. Ethnicity. Finally, given 1. and 2., What can we infer about the relationship between e-government and ethnic identity processes in the urban sites under study? For example, how does the technocentric discourse of e-government advocates articulate with local ideas and practices? Do key e-government 'beneficiaries' employ idioms of ethnic essentialism and technophilia as 'useful fictions' (Bauman 1996) in order to attract public funding? Do these initial fictions and their related ICTs practices, in turn, eventually become social facts as local people realise the benefits of online ethnicity?

The main research methods will be participant observation, semi-structured interviews and network analysis at a number of field sites, including both state agencies and their target groups. To avoid the pitfalls of single-site fieldwork, each individual researcher will be working towards a 'multi-sited ethnography', a form of ethnographic tracking that proceeds from a social phenomenon and follows some of its myriad ramifications (Marcus 1995). In addition, we will all undertake library and archival research (including internet archives) into the history of e-government in the chosen country. We do not expect our four separate sets of findings to mirror one another. In fact, the advantage of open-ended ethnographic research over, say, statistical surveys, is precisely that it generates new questions and incommensurable sets of data impossible to anticipate at the outset.

While drawing on a number of disciplines, this research project has a strong anthropological character. All team members are anthropologists at various stages in their careers. Furthermore, the study brings together three strands of anthropological thought hitherto separated, namely the anthropology of ethnicity, media and policy. It is at this intersection that we hope to make a contribution aimed not only at fellow anthropologists, but also at other scholars as well as policy-makers, ICT technicians and social activists.

Over the decades, three main anthropological approaches to ethnicity have developed: primordialism (the idea that ethnicity has solid cultural foundations), instrumentalism (ethnicity as a political myth fostered by elites), and constructivism (ethnicity as a negotiable ascription that classifies people by origin) (Solokovskii and Tishkov 1996: 191-2). Although the team has no a priori commitment to any single approach, the link between e-government and ethnicity would seem to lend itself both to instrumentalist and constructivist analyses of primordial idioms (about 'deep roots', 'common origins', etc) current in our chosen field sites. At the same time, as anthropologists we still need to try to understand and respect 'collective identities deeply and sincerely felt' (Hann 1994:22). In addition to ethnicity, our project will be dealing with new media. Over the past decade there has been a surge of anthropological work on the media (see Ginsburg et al 2002, Askew and Wilk 2002). This includes some outstanding work on new ICTs (e.g. Hirsch 1994, Miller and Slater 2000). A more established research tradition yet to be integrated into 'media anthropology' is the study of orality and literacy (Goody 1986, Street 2001). Georgina Born's (1997) ethnography of an artificial intelligence research centre in Paris proves the undiminished importance of orality in the acquisition of various forms of literacy (including computer literacy). Finally, the project will also contribute to the fledgling anthropology of policy. Shore and Wright (1997) have described policy as both 'a tool of government' and 'a tool for studying government'. We concur with these authors that policy is becoming a 'central organizing principle' in the contemporary world - a principle, therefore, deserving comparative anthropological research.

References:

Askew K, Wilk R. 2002. The Anthropology of Media: A Reader Oxford: Blackwell.

Baumann G. 1996. Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-ethnic London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Born G. 1997. Computer software as a medium: textuality, orality and sociality in an artificial intelligence research culture. In Rethinking Visual Anthropology, ed. Banks M, Morphy He, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Digital Divide Network. 2002. http://www.digitale-chancen.de [05.03.2003]

Marcus, G.E. 1995. Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi?sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95?117.

Marcus G.E. 1998 Ethnography through Thick and Thin. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Miller D, Slater D. 2000. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach Oxford: Berg.

Shore C, Wright S. 1997. Anthropology of Policy London: Routledge.

Solokovskii S, Tishkov V. 1996. Ethnicity. In Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, ed. Barnard A, Spencer J, London and New York: Routledge.

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