Monday, April 6, 2026 - 12:00pm
MUS 345
Shipibo-Konibos in the Peruvian Amazon want Facebook to be a community-centered space, but this desire collides with Facebook’s profit-driven logic and the internal fractures of Shipibo social life. Existing digital media frameworks—which analyze how social media participants relate to others online as a process of imagination, epitomized by the concept of “imagined audiences” —fall short in understanding online relationality. They treat “community” as imagined, an abstract individual cognitive process, rather than as contingent, something that must be materialized through semiotic work. By attending to the semiotic specifics of how Shipibo users actually articulate community on Facebook—through genres like "indirectas" and death announcements —we can better understand both what Facebook is doing to Indigenous sociality and what Indigenous Amazonian users are doing with Facebook.

Department of Anthropology