This groundbreaking volume showcases the exciting work emerging from the ethnography of media, a burgeoning new area in anthropology that expands both social theory and ethnographic fieldwork to examine the way media-film, television, video-are used in societies around the globe, often in places that have been off the map of conventional media studies. The contributors, key figures in this new field, cover topics ranging from indigenous media projects around the world to the unexpected effects of state control of media to the local impact of film and television as they travel transnationally. Their essays, mostly new work produced for this volume, bring provocative new theoretical perspectives grounded in cross-cultural ethnographic realities to the study of media. 23 b/w photographs
Author(s): Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, Brian Larkin
Publisher: University of California Press
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 410
illustrations......Page 12
preface......Page 14
Introduction......Page 20
Part One: Cultural Activism and Minority Claims......Page 56
1. Screen Memories: Resignifying the Traditional in Indigenous Media......Page 58
2. Visual Media and the Primitivist Perplex: Colonial Fantasies, Indigenous Imagination, and Advocacy in North America......Page 77
3. Representation, Politics, and Cultural Imagination in Indigenous Video: General Points and Kayapo Examples......Page 94
4. Spectacles of Difference: Cultural Activism and the Mass Mediation of Tibet......Page 109
Part Two: The Cultural Politics of Nation-States......Page 132
5. Egyptian Melodrama—Technology of the Modern Subject?......Page 134
6. Epic Contests: Television and Religious Identity in India......Page 153
7. The National Picture: Thai Media and Cultural Identity......Page 171
8. Television, Time, and the National Imaginary in Belize......Page 190
Part Three: Transnational Circuits......Page 206
9. Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai Notes on (Re)Cosmopolitanism in a Chinese Metropolis......Page 208
10. A Marshall Plan of the Mind: The Political Economy of a Kazakh Soap Opera......Page 230
11. Mapping Hmong Media in Diasporic Space......Page 248
Part Four: The Social Sites of Production......Page 264
12. Putting American Public Television Documentary in Its Places......Page 266
13. Culture in the Ad World: Producing the Latin Look......Page 283
14. “And Yet My Heart Is Still Indian” The Bombay Film Industry and the (H)Indianization of Hollywood......Page 300
15. Arrival Scenes: Complicity and Media Ethnography in the Bolivian Public Sphere......Page 320
Part Five: The Social Life of Technology......Page 336
16. The Materiality of Cinema Theaters in Northern Nigeria......Page 338
17. Mobile Machines and Fluid Audiences: Rethinking Reception through Zambian Radio Culture......Page 356
18. The Indian Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction......Page 374
19. Live or Dead? Televising Theater in Bali......Page 389
20. A Room with a Voice: Mediation and Mediumship in Thailand’s Information Age......Page 402
contributors......Page 418
index......Page 422
