Between incursions and appropriations: digital technologies and pluriversal modernities in the Global South.

This article examines the adoption and appropriation of mobile phone technologies in rural communities of the Global South, specifically in India, Nepal, and Colombia, challenging the dominant linear model that equates technology use with progress toward Western industrial modernity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2021/22, the authors argue that digital technologies are integrated into local ancestral epistemologies and cultural practices, resulting in "contaminated modernities" where traditional lifeways and digital media coexist and interact. The study highlights how mobile phones serve as communal tools, portals to spiritual worlds, and mediums that revitalize oral traditions, emphasizing the importance of context-specific political economies, histories, and epistemologies in understanding technology use. The authors propose a pluriversal, decolonial theoretical framework that foregrounds multiple temporalities and polyphonic assemblages, moving beyond crisis-driven or teleological narratives of development in the Global South.