Ancestral Technology

Forms of world-making primarily supporting cultural cohesion, rooted in bounded geography and with a history that lives through collective memory

2021 - Present
MIT Media Lab | Diversa
Colombia
#PD #STS
︎ In progress

Motivation

From university classrooms to sites in the tech industry, all the way to makerspaces and digital communities, the logics of how technology is designed appears to gravitate around similar underlying, dominant ideas: technology should scale, technology should be profitable, technology should aim to be universal, technological innovation is to be unbounded. Often, within the domain of technology design, these imaginaries simultaneously serve as mechanisms to create and maintain conditions of sustained ecological harm, oppressive socio-technical systems, and cultural and socio-economic injustice worldwide.

As a counter-narrative, my collaborators and I introduce the concept of ancestral technology: a form of world-making (design) that primarily supports cultural cohesion, rooted in bounded geography and with a history that lives through collective memory. In approaching technology as a tool for sustaining cultural fabric, we argue that a multiplicity of technological trajectories and imaginaries will appear, many of which counter the current dominant frame on technology design described earlier. In considering the possibility of technology as a function of territory, we are faced with an opportunity to escape the universalizing assumptions of all-encompassing, border-free socio-technical systems, and the misleading narrative of globalization. In deepening our commitments to historicity, especially to local histories, we will be better positioned to see technology as a tool to enhance local knowledge and serve local visions of the future.

Picture of a wooden gold-panner with green leaves and water in it. In the background, there is an artisanal miner working with a shovel in a river stream

Left/Up: the “batea”, ancestral tool for artisanal, small-scale gold panning
Right/Down: traditional bead-plating of Kamëntsá masks

Multicultural community organizing as conservation technology in the La Cocha Lagoon

What we are doing

We are building a series of case studies characterizing ancestral technology across multiple geographies in Colombia through the lens of artifacts locally made by various collectives in rural Colombia including farmers, Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant enclaves, and fisherman communities. Through ethnographic work, heavily influenced by local and Indigenous research methods, we focus on exploring the roles that certain locally-made artifacts play in expressing and reproducing culture. We highlight the similarities and contradictions in the making, usage and maintenance of these artifacts in relation to dominant forms of technology design.

This work is the central argument of my doctoral dissertation to be published in June 2024, and the underpinnings of an upcoming collaborative book titled: “The Atlas of Ancestral Technology of Colombia”

The “guanga”, weaving loom used across the South American Andes.
Pictured during the fabrication of a traditional tšombiach sash.

Contributions

Research design, Ethnographic field studies, Digital ethnography, Qualitative data analysis, Field methods design

Collaborators

Jaison Villafaña, Arhuaco Indigenous community, Gilberto García, artisanal mining community of Zaragoza, Baco Cauca, Luz Marina Burgos, Quillasinga Indigenous community, Omaira Bonilla, ancestral farmers collective Asoyarcocha, and Gerardo Chasoy, Kamëntŝa Indigenous community.

Outputs

Reynolds-Cuéllar, P. (Upcoming 2024) Contesting Design: Ancestral Technology as Portal to Post-Design(s). Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.