Explain how anthropology enriches the study of media.

Explain how anthropology enriches the study of media. Assignment should be 800-1000 words, with relevant citations in APA style.

You can explore these questions to guide you through the writing
What is the role of media in people’s lives?
What influences people’s interests and reactions to various forms of media?
How do scholars study media as a cultural phenomenon?

We’ve learned these things that in class that can be included as a part of our understanding ( cultural relativism, holism, ethnography, indigenous media..)

These are the readings in class if you want to add quotes or other works. I attached 2 and these are 2 others you can find online.
– Costa, E. et al. (2023). The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology. Routledge.
– Pertierra, A.C. (2018). Media Anthropology for the Digital Age. Polity.
IntroductionFaye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian LarkinThe questions this book addresses about the place of media in the world are not new; RaymondWilliams, among others, wrote about them over a quarter-century ago. But the questions feelmore pressing now because the ubiquity of media worldwide means that anthropologistsencounter it in the diverse places where we work. This empirically driven sense of urgencyled Arjun Appadurai to invent the concept of “mediascapes” in an article whose subtitle—“Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology” (1991)— deliberately recalls anearlier period of disciplinary self-definition in order to signal the centrality of mass media tolife in the late twentieth century and the concomitant requirement that anthropology explore itsanalytic and practical significance. A decade later, this collection of essays by anthropologistssuggests that we need no longer lament, as Debra Spitulnik did in her comprehensive reviewessay in the early 1990s, that “there is as yet no ‘anthropology of mass media’” (1993: 293).We now recognize the sociocultural significance of film, television, video, and radio as part ofeveryday lives in nearly every part of the world, and we bring distinctive theoretical concernsand methodologies to our studies of these phenomena.As we have recognized the place of media in a critical anthropological project that refusesreified boundaries of place and culture, so we have attempted to use anthropology to pushmedia studies into new environments and examine diverse media practices that are onlybeginning to be mapped. Media reception occurs “beyond the living room” and mediaproduction “beyond the studio” not only because they occur in places like the Amazonianrainforest or the Australian outback but also because, as Roger Silverstone notes, regardingtelevision watching, for example, they occur as part of “a set of daily practices and discourses… through which that complex act is itself constituted” (1994: 133). It is the anthropologicalcommitment to a wider concept of ethnography that gives us purchase on the wider socialfields within which media practices operate. Collectively, then, our work takes advantage ofand pushes forward the theoretical insights and methodological sophistication of our owndiscipline as well as neighboring fields with which we engage.Ethnography of media expands “what counts” in a variety of ways. Anthropologists, forexample, track the social players involved when one “follows the thing” (Marcus 1995)—afilm or television serial as it moves from elite directors to consumers (Abu-Lughod 1995,1997; Dickey 1993; Mankekar 1993a, 1993b; Skuse 1999) or an object like a cassette recorder(Manuel 1993), a radio (Spitulnik, this volume), or even radio sound itself (Tacchi 1998) as itcirculates through various milieux. Such strategies help us see not only how media areMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
embedded in people’s quotidian lives but also how consumers and producers are themselvesimbricated in discursive universes, political situations, economic circumstances, nationalsettings, historical moments, and transnational flows, to name only a few relevant contexts.As anthropologists, we take for granted a “global” perspective on media. Cross-culturalwork is fundamental to our project; indeed, some have expanded on the textual traditions offilm studies to show how one might look at “a film’s anthropology” (Caton 1999; Fischer1995). The kind of alternative circuits that we routinely encounter in our work—the spread ofillegal cable networks or the widespread presence of pirate videos as a means of mediaexhibition outside the West—are rarely counted in the statistics about the U.S. or global mediaindustries on which many accounts of transnational media are based. Indeed it is one of ourarguments that the construction of media theory in the West, with rare exceptions (e.g., Sinclair,Jacka, and Cunningham 1996; Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi 1994), has established acultural grid of media theory with the effect of bringing into visibility only certain types ofmedia technologies and practices. These lacunae are now being addressed from both withinand outside media and cinema studies, and the work in this volume is aimed at remapping thediversity of media worldwide.While anthropologists are always firmly grounded in the local, we recognize that certainsweeping technological and institutional changes have had irreversible consequences over thepast decades. The strong historical link between broadcast television and twentieth-centurynation-building, for example, relied on a capital-intensive terrestrial technology that could becontrolled and tied to state interests with relative ease. Satellites and Internet technologies,however, have opened up other kinds of spaces that cross cultural and geopolitical bordersmore easily, have increased privatization of media ownership, and have created new markets.They have also facilitated new social configurations. This occurs through access determinedby class distinctions or diasporic connections. New technologies have also exacerbated whatToby Miller has termed “the new international division of cultural labor”—exporting medialabor to the Third World—that has accompanied “the shift from the spatial sensitivities ofelectrics to the spatial insensitivities of electronics” (1998: 377). These technologies havefacilitated the creation of privatized media empires (Schiller 1969, 1991), and at the sametime, research on video culture and other forms of decentralized “small media” suggests theemergence of a “new media era” that is more fragmented and diverse in its economic andsocial organization (Larkin 2000), more characteristic of the expansion of informal marketsunder neoliberalism and the fluidity of late capitalism than the older forms of mass media.Situating media as a social practice within these shifting political and cultural frames enablesus to speak to the larger concerns we share with many of our colleagues in media studies: howmedia enable or challenge the workings of power and the potential of activism; theenforcement of inequality and the sources of imagination; and the impact of technologies on theproduction of individual and collective identities.ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND MEDIAFor many years mass media were seen as almost a taboo topic for anthropology, too redolentMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
of Western modernity for a field identified with tradition, the non-Western, and the vitality ofthe local. As a result, anthropologists came to the study of media a little later than colleaguesin some other fields. Despite some singular efforts to study feature and propaganda films ascultural documents in the 1940s (Mead and Metraux 1953; Bateson 1943), the social relationsof the film world of Hollywood in the 1950s and the impact of mass media in Africa(Powdermaker 1950, 1967), and Navajo filmmaking in the 1960s (Worth, Adair, and Chalfen[1972] 1997)—what Sol Worth called “the anthropology of visual communication” (1980)—itwas not until the late 1980s that anthropologists began to turn systematic attention to media as asocial practice.The anthropology of media emerged from a particular historical and theoreticalconjuncture: the ruptures in anthropological theory and methodology of the 1980s and 1990s,and the development of an “anthropology of the present” (Fox 1991) that engages and analyzesthe transformations of the past half-century in which media play an increasingly prominent part.Alongside a growing acceptance of work in North America and Europe came more attention tothe economic, political, and cultural traffic between urban and rural and “First” and “Third”Worlds. This relocation of geographic and theoretical focus meant that anthropologists wereboth working in societies where media were more central and confronting the fact that forms ofelectronic media were penetrating societies once seen as beyond their reach.These shifts, in turn, catalyzed a critical rethinking of one of our most productive notions—culture—and the parameters of our key methodology: in-depth, intensive, and long-termethnographic fieldwork (Abu-Lughod 1997; Gupta and Ferguson 1997a, 1997b; Marcus andFischer 1986; Ortner 1999). Increasingly, our theory and practice are unbounded, multisited,traveling, or “itinerant” (as Schein proposes in this volume), a transformation that isparticularly evident for those studying media.Anthropologists doing research on and writing ethnographies of media have come to thiswork in different ways. The chapters in this book reflect diverse and often overlappingintellectual legacies from within the discipline and drawing from related fields. For many ofus, our interest was first piqued by unexpected encounters with the popularity, power, orpassion of media in particular locales (e.g., Fischer 1990; Kottak 1990; A. Lyons 1990; H.Lyons 1990). A number of the contributors to this volume (Ginsburg, Turner, and Prins) linktheir work to the rethinking of visual anthropology over the past couple of decades (see, e.g.,Banks and Morphy 1997; Ginsburg 1994, 1998; MacDougall 1998; Ruby 2000; Taylor 1994).This critical revision of the field has been catalyzed by the increasing accessibility of media topeople who traditionally had been in front of the lens, as well as by an intellectual shift thathas expanded questions about the politics and poetics of documentary representation—howanthropological filmmakers represent others (e.g., Prins 1997; Ruby 1991, 1995)—toencompass issues of how media are being taken up and made meaningful in different societiesand popularized in our own. This revisionist work in visual anthropology also draws onpostcolonial studies (as well as film practices) addressing the complexities of cross-culturalrepresentation (Marks 2000; Rony 1996; Russell 1999; Shohat and Stam 1994), as well asminority (Juhasz 1995; Downmunt 1993; Riggins 1992), diasporic (Cunningham and SinclairMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
2000; Gillespie 1995; Kolar-Panov 1997; McLagan 1996; Schein, this volume; Naficy 1993),and small media practices (Manuel 1993; Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi 1994). Forthose whose emphasis is on the institutional sites for the production of media work, PierreBourdieu’s (1993) framing of the field of cultural production—the system of relations (andstruggles for power) among agents or institutions engaged in generating the value of works ofart, while creating cultural capital for themselves—has been especially influential.Others were influenced by the contemporaneous turn toward ethnography in culturalstudies, which opened up a common intellectual and methodological space, especially forthose interested in media (Gurevitch et al. 1982). British cultural studies explored massmedia’s centrality to contemporary projects of cultural hegemony, focusing on mediaconsumption as one of a wide range of active forms of social engagement through which it isreproduced but also altered and resisted (Fiske 1987; Hall 1980, 1997). This work, in turn,laid the groundwork for a range of groundbreaking reception studies, such as Radway’sinfluential study of women’s interpretations of romance novels (1984), research on theresponses of culturally diverse viewers of American exported television shows (Liebes andKatz 1990; Ang 1985), and ethnographies revealing the creativity of an appropriative andirreverent fan culture for television shows such as Star Trek (Bacon-Smith 1992; Penley 1997;Jenkins 1992). Equally influential were those who looked more broadly at the place oftelevision in the construction of “the nation” (and other abstractions) in everyday life (Morley1986, 1992; Silverstone 1994; Silverstone and Hirsch 1992), and the construction of the notionof audience on the part of media industries (Ang 1996), to mention only a few key works.1Many anthropologists found media a rich site for research on cultural practices andcirculation that took seriously the multiple levels of identification— regional, national, andtransnational—within which societies and cultures produce subjects. The work of BenedictAnderson (1991) and Jürgen Habermas (1989) have been central to those concerned withstudying and theorizing the cultural effects of flows of people, ideas, and objects, flowscrucially mediated by communication technologies. Both Anderson and Habermas have had aconsiderable influence in anthropology because their supple concepts—“imaginedcommunities” and “the public sphere” respectively— offered means of theorizing the formationof collectivities that cross ruptures of space and are outside formal definitions of “culture.” Inthe case of Habermas, the well-known criticisms of his work (Calhoun 1992; Fraser 1993;Robbins 1993) have forced attention to the formation of alternative or counterpublic spheres(see Himpele, this volume; Baker 1994; Diawara 1994; Eickelman and Anderson 1999). Anumber of writers—in anthropology, cultural studies, and other fields—have also used theseideas to extend Lacan’s psycholanalytic notion of the imaginary (1967) as a way tocomprehend the construction of “national imaginaries,” when media are harnessed by state andcommercial interests as technologies of personhood.2Appadurai’s work on public culture and global cultural flows draws on Anderson and onHabermas, synthesizing these frameworks with contemporary anthropological concerns andmethods as well as newer media forms. His influence for this volume is most felt in hisinsistence on the centrality of these media to the articulation of national and transnational withMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
local processes and to the significance of “the imagination” in the production of culture andidentity in the contemporary world (Appadurai 1991). Along with other recent work thatrethinks material culture and exchange theory (Marcus and Myers 1995; Miller 1995; Thomas1991), Appadurai’s work draws on anthropology’s longstanding theoretical interest in thecomplex subtleties of exchange—of objects, narratives, and technologies—and theimplications of these processes for culture-making and personhood (Mauss 1967; A. Weiner1992). Objects shift in meaning as they move through regimes and circuits of exchange. Thisargument, like that of active audience theorists, challenges the ontology of the text, arguinginstead that the meaning of texts or objects is enacted through practices of reception. Theusefulness of exchange theory to media studies can be seen clearly in the work of DanielMiller (1992), whose study of American soap operas in Trinidad, part of a wider project onconsumption under capitalism, reveals an active process of societal self-production throughwhich people incorporate objects into their own social value systems.3The anthropological studies of media presented in this book challenge stereotypes of mediaethnography as narrowly empiricist versions of market research—querying television watchersin their living rooms about what they really think of certain programs, without placing them inwider structures or recognizing their complexity. The contributors, drawing on a range ofscholarly traditions, take for granted the necessity of linking media production, circulation, andreception in broad and intersecting social and cultural fields: local, regional, national,transnational. They examine a range of phenomena in order to understand the social impact andcultural meaning of media in the everyday lives of those we study. Through grounded analysesof the practices, cultural worlds, and even fantasies of social actors as they interact with mediain a variety of social spaces, we have begun to unbundle assumptions regarding the politicaleconomy and social relations shaping media production, circulation, and reception, and theimpacts of media technologies themselves.THE SOCIAL FIELDS OF MEDIAAlthough the essays in this book reflect diverse intellectual legacies, they all bring to the studyof media anthropology’s capacious methodology. Many ethnographies of media strategicallyinclude both producers and audiences in the query, as well as intertextual sources throughwhich meaning is constituted, as Sara Dickey did in her groundbreaking study of thesignificance for the urban poor of Tamil popular cinema, an industry that has a remarkableinfluence in the creation of political celebrity in South India, part of a “vast system of popularliterature, greeting cards and posters, clothing, fashions, gossip, legends, memories, andactivities supporting the stars” (1993: 41). Others have underscored the importance of theneglected area of distribution. Power and status are signified through spatial and temporaldimensions of exhibition, a central process through which media help constitute and reflectsocial and religious difference in nation-states (Himpele 1996; Rajagopal 2001). Others alsopoint to the significance of exhibition sites—from the architecture of movie theaters as adiacritic of social class and modernity (or its lack), to the social space of cinema as an arenaof social experimentation (Armbrust 1998; Hughes 2000; Larkin, this volume). Film festivalsMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
are analyzed as loci for the consolidation of new cultural formations (Bikales 1997),professional subcultures (Lutkehaus 1995; Nichols 1994), and regional and national claims(Ganti 1998).Although the authors all situate their work in particular historical moments and politicaleconomies, producing what Purnima Mankekar aptly calls “conjunctural ethnography” (1999:49), the different kinds of media practices represented in this volume can be placed on asociopolitical continuum reflected in the different sections of the book. On one end are themore classic formations of mass media produced through large governmental and commercialinstitutions intent on constituting modern citizens and consumers. Anthropological research onthese kinds of mediations, which include popular soap operas, telenovelas, and melodramaticserials focuses on the complex ways in which national cinemas, television, advertising, anddevelopment media operate from production to distribution to consumption (see Abu-Lughod,Dávila, Ganti, Hamilton, Mandel, Mankekar, Wilk, and Yang, all this volume; Hamburger1999). This work assumes some social segregation between producers and audiences andtracks the often unstable relation between intention and effects.In the middle range are more reflexive processes in which practical and imaginativeencounters with cinematic or televisual images and narratives may express and/or constitute avariety of subaltern social and cosmological worlds. Such work is typical of diasporic andminoritized communities as they are reframed under different regimes of power and in diversecultural contexts through video, television shows, films, and even popular graphics (seeHobart, Morris, Pinney, Schein, and Yang, this volume).On the other end of the continuum are more self-conscious practices, often linked to socialmovements, in which cultural material is used and strategically deployed as part of a broaderproject of political empowerment by indigenous and other disenfranchised groups (Ginsburg,Himpele, Prins, Turner, and McLagan, this volume). Such work can provide a “third space”(Bhabha 1989) for the representation of their concerns. However, the negotiation of massmedia forms for counterhegemonic purposes is not without compromises. While the authors inthis section tend to stress the activism of the people with whom they work, they also point outhow media can facilitate the penetration of state power as well as consumer capital in localsocieties. In the remainder of this introductory essay, we introduce and discuss key theoreticalissues raised in the various sections of the collection.CULTURAL ACTIVISM AND THE ACTIVIST IMAGINARYSince the early 1980s, indigenous and minority peoples have begun to take up a range of mediain order to “talk back” to structures of power that have erased or distorted their interests andrealities. Faye Ginsburg has called this kind of work “cultural activism,” to underscore thesense of both political agency and cultural intervention that people bring to these efforts, partof a spectrum of practices of self-conscious mediation and mobilization of culture that tookparticular shape beginning in the late twentieth century (1993, 1997). Similarly, GeorgeMarcus has coined the term “the activist imaginary” to describe how subaltern groups turn tofilm, video, and other media not only to “pursue traditional goals of broad-based social changeMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
through a politics of identity and representation” but also out of a utopian desire for“emancipatory projects … raising fresh issues about citizenship and the shape of publicspheres within the frame and terms of traditional discourse on polity and civil society” (1996:6). The section focuses mainly on indigenous media as a key arena where these processes arebeing enacted but includes other processes of cultural objectification for strategic politicalpurposes, as in McLagan’s essay on Tibetan Buddhist activists and their supporters.Indigenous media incorporate a distinctive form of cultural activism that has attractedscholarly attention (Asch 1991; Aufderheide 1995; Berger 1995; Carelli 1988; Fleming 1991;Ginsburg 1991; Leuthold 1998; Meadows and Molnar, 2001; Philipsen and Markussen 1995;Prins 1989; Roth 2002; Turner 1991a, 1991b, 1992, 1995; Vail 1997; Weatherford 1990;Wortham 2000).4 It developed in response to the entry of mass media into the lives of FirstNations people, primarily through the imposition of satellites and commercial television. Inalmost every instance they have struggled to turn that circumstance to their advantage, a pointeffectively made by activist researcher Eric Michaels in the Central Desert of Australia where,in the 1980s, he worked with Warlpiri people to develop their own low-power television asan alternative to the onslaught of commercial television.5 Such formations seem particularlywell suited for anthropological inquiry: small in scale and sustaining an alternative to the massmedia industries that dominate late capitalist societies, they occupy a comfortable position ofdifference from dominant cultural assumptions about media aesthetics and practices. Inaddition, indigenous media projects have often been a site for activist participation on the partof anthropologists; they and native peoples alike have been quick to see the political promiseand cultural possibilities of indigenously controlled media-making. In this volume, thoseworking with Native Americans (Prins), Aboriginal Australians (Ginsburg), and AmazonianKayapo (Turner) have helped to produce and/or promote as well as analyze the making of filmand video as part of indigenous cultural projects of cultural revival, whether through recordingtraditional rituals or through the use of video, film, and media events as a persuasive tool forclaims to political sovereignty.Most indigenous media are produced and consumed primarily by people living in remotesettlements, although the work circulates to other native communities as well as tononaboriginal audiences via film festivals, human rights forums, court hearings, andbroadcasts. The range of the work is wide, moving from small-scale community-based videos,to broadcast quality television, to major independent art films. Indigenous people who live inor closer to metropoles, such as the urban Australian Aboriginal filmmakers discussed byGinsburg, participate in a wider world of media imagery production and circulation (e.g.,national film and television industries), and feel their claim to an indigenous identity within amore cosmopolitan framework is sometimes regarded as inauthentic. Debates about such workreflect the changing status of “culture,” which is increasingly objectified and mediated as itbecomes a source of claims for political and human rights both nationally and on the worldstage. As Terry Turner has shown regarding the work of Kayapo media-makers, cultural claims“can be converted into political assets, both internally as bases of group solidarity andmobilization, and externally as claims on the support of other social groups, governments andMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
public opinion all over the globe” (1993: 424).This activist objectification of culture encompasses not only indigenous work but alsomedia being produced by other colonized and minority subjects who have become involved increating their own representations as a counter to dominant systems, a framework that includeswork being done by people with AIDS (Juhasz 1995); Palestinians in Israel’s occupiedterritories (Kuttab 1993); the transnational Hmong refugee community (Schein, this volume),and African American musicians (Mahon 2000a). Appadurai suggests the word “culturalism”to denote the mobilization of identities in which mass media and the imagination play anincreasingly significant role (1996).Part of the attraction of media for these groups is the publicity they generate, a criticalcomponent of political and cultural activism in late modernity. Meg McLagan shows thetensions inherent in the Tibet Movement’s efforts to publicize their positions in the UnitedStates by analyzing celebrity benefits, Buddhist spectacles, and cultural performances. Heranalysis of the use of public relations specialists by Tibet activists reveals the contradictionsinvolved in objectifying culture as a strategy for gaining access to media venues and projectinga political movement into national and international visibility (McLagan 1997; also thisvolume).The broader question this raises—whether minority or dominated subjects can assimilatemedia to their own cultural and political concerns or are inevitably compromised by itspresence—still haunts much of the research and debate on the topic of the cross-cultural spreadof media. In the context of indigenous peoples, some anthropologists have expressed alarm atthese developments (Faris 1992); they see these new practices as destructive of culturaldifference and the study of such work as “ersatz anthropology” (J. Weiner 1997), echoing theconcerns over the destructive effects of mass culture first articulated by intellectuals of theFrankfurt school.6 Other scholars actively support indigenous media production whilerecognizing the dilemmas that it presents. Lorna Roth, for example, queries whether a state-supported Aboriginal People’s Television Network in Canada is a breakthrough or a “mediareservation” (Roth 2002). Ginsburg suggests that indigenous media present a kind of Faustiancontract with the technologies of modernity, enabling some degree of agency to controlrepresentation under less-than-ideal conditions (1991). However, the capacity to narratestories and retell histories from an indigenous point of view—what she calls “screenmemories”—through media forms that can circulate beyond the local has been an importantforce for constituting claims for land and cultural rights, and for developing alliances withother communities (this volume). Harald Prins (this volume), who has catalyzed indigenousfilmmaking for Native American claims to land and cultural rights, nonetheless points out “theparadox of primitivism” in which traditional imagery of indigenous people in documentariesabout native rights, though effective (perhaps even essential) as a form of political agency, maydistort the cultural processes that indigenous peoples are committed to preserving. ChrisPinney, in contrast, makes a compelling argument that despite the colonial origins ofphotography it is now so firmly inserted into everyday religious and secular practice that it isbest seen at the confluence of overlapping visual regimes rather than as the province of oneMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
(1997: 112).Meanwhile, as anthropologists and media scholars debate the impact that mediatechnologies might have on the communities with which they work, indigenous media-makersare busy using the technologies for their own purposes. Activists are documenting traditionalactivities with elders; creating works to teach young people literacy in their own languages;engaging with dominant circuits of mass media and projecting political struggles throughmainstream as well as alternative arenas; communicating among dispersed kin andcommunities on a range of issues; using video as legal documents in negotiations with states;presenting videos on state television to assert their presence televisually within nationalimaginaries; and creating award-winning feature films.Rather than casting aspersions on these efforts to use media as forms of expressive cultureand political engagement, a number of us see in the growing use of film and other mass mediaan increasing awareness and strategic objectification of culture. As Daniel Miller has arguedregarding the growing use of media more generally:These new technologies of objectification [such as film, video, and television] … create new possibilities ofunderstanding at the same moment that they pose new threats of alienation and rupture. Yet our first concern is not toresolve these contradictions in theory but to observe how people sometimes resolve or more commonly live out thesecontradictions in local practice. (D. Miller 1995: 18)Whatever the contradictions, as new technologies have been embraced as powerful forms ofcollective self-production, they have enabled cultural activists to assert their presence in thepolities that encompass them and to more easily enter into much larger movements for socialtransformation for the recognition and redress of human and cultural rights, processes in whichmedia play an increasingly important role (Castells 1997).CULTURAL POLITICS OF NATION-STATESAlthough many people consider themselves to belong to subnational or transnationalcommunities, the nation is the primary context for the everyday lives and imaginations of mostof the people who produce media and constitute its audiences. Even if nations are always inrelations with other nations and transnational entities or ideas (and may be losing sovereigntyand power, as Appadurai [1993] and Hannerz [1992] among others have argued), the nation isstill a potent frame of reference, especially in the many countries where the state has been theprime actor in the creation and regulation of media networks.If we accept Anderson’s (1991) insight that nations are “imagined communities,” we mustrecognize that media, from the novels and newspapers Anderson discussed to the televisionbroadcasts and video cultures analyzed in this book, play crucial roles in producing nationsand shaping national imaginaries. One can analyze, for example, the ways that radio helpedcreate the postcolonial nation in Zambia by formalizing language hierarchies in a multilingualstate, influencing speech styles, signifying modernity itself, and even embodying the state(Spitulnik 2001). Or one can, as Mankekar does in this volume, ask how certain populartelevision serials in India, in this case the televised Ramayan, “might have participated inreconfigurations of nation, culture, and community that overlapped with and reinforced HinduMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
nationalism” in the early 1990s (see also Mankekar 1999). As she argues, the serial was partof a sociohistorical conjuncture in which the discourse of Hindu nationalism was increasinglyvoluble, even though it was not the intent of the producers to foster communal violence, tocreate the exclusions felt by some viewers, or to conflate Indian with Hindu culture. Finally,the sense of belonging created in nationalist structures of feeling can also be commodified orproduced for specific commercial imperatives, as Arlene Dávila’s examination of theconstruction of “Latinidad” by the U.S. Hispanic advertising industry shows (Dávila, thisvolume).Perhaps the most complex theoretical issues arise when we begin to consider theimplications of the political uses of media by national or state apparatuses. Most radio andtelevision has been state-controlled or in the hands of culture industry professionals who, asStuart Hall (1980) has argued, tend to share the “dominant codes” of the nation-state.Censorship and anticipatory self-censorship are the norms. Whether to create loyalty, shapepolitical understandings, foster national development, “modernize,” promote family planning,teach privatization and the capitalist ethos, make good socialists, or innocuously entertain,media have been viewed as powerful tools for hegemony or social transformation.The connections between media and politics can be quite direct, as when state media iscontrolled, as it is in Egypt, not by the minister of culture but by the minister of information. Bycontrast, media are often counterhegemonic to certain state interests, as when a Boliviantelevision host uses the Aymara audience for his program to create a new political party whichhe heads (see Himpele, this volume); or when Tibetans in exile seeking freedom from controlby the Chinese state hire public relations consultants to manage their media campaign in theUnited States (McLagan, this volume); or when clerics used “small media” like audio cassettesin Iran to mobilize people for a religious revolution (Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi1994); or when Palestinians use faxes and cell phones in the intifada to coordinate theirresistance to Israeli rule.Three key intellectual issues emerge from these links between media and national politics.First, what is the relationship between media professionals in the “culture industry” and thestate? These producers are critical mediators, articulating and translating larger projects.However, it is important to remember that these producers of media are creative individuals,working with their own professional codes, their own career interests, and their own visions,sometimes oppositional because of training under earlier and different conditions or becausethey represent a new generation with other influences. They also work within organizations—such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (Born 1998), the U.S. Public Broadcast Service(Dornfeld 1998; and this volume), or the training program for would-be soap opera writers setup by the British Know How Fund in Kazakhstan (Mandel, this volume) that establishdynamics of knowledge and power that intersect with state projects in complicated ways.Early studies of cultural imperialism rightly stressed that cultural domination was exportedthrough models of professionalism and professional standards instituted through Westerntraining of non-Western media producers. What Mandel, Born, and other ethnographers ofproduction show, however, is that frequently there is slippage between the standards insistedMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
on by professionals and the way those standards are adopted and transformed in local settings.Second, one must ask what happens to media when state interests are complex andcontradictory. This is especially obvious in many of the countries in which anthropologistswork today, places where neoliberalism or structural adjustment policies have been adopted orwhere socialism is being replaced by “reform” or “transition to the market.” Ruth Mandel (thisvolume) tracks the complex crosscurrents at work, and the conflicts that arose, in makingCrossroads, the first Kazakhstani soap opera. Initiated by the British Know How Fund to“teach capitalism to the communists,” it brought BBC professionals trained in the genre ofBritish realist drama to Kazakhstan to train writers, many of whom had worked in the traditionof Soviet socialist realism, to develop the program. The emerging nation-state tried hard tocontrol the product while the commercial interests it welcomed and its citizen-audiences,newly enamored of American soap opera imports, made other demands. As Mayfair Yang (thisvolume) notes for post-Mao reform China, a reemergent pan-Chinese nation or alternativecommunity that eludes the state has been encouraged by the introduction of new media formsand the access to films, popular music, and television from beyond the mainland, mostly fromTaiwan and Hong Kong. Although eager to keep control over media, the state’s cautiousembrace of capitalism and encouragement of links (for investment) to overseas Chinese haveled to the development of transnational subjectivities and desires that threaten to shake itsauthority.Third, one must ask how effective state media products—or any media products, for thatmatter—are in achieving their goals of influencing audiences. The thorniest questions in mediastudies are those about reception; the history of attempts to assess the impact of media isdiscouraging. What anthropology is able to bring to these questions is an exploration of themultiple levels at which failures and successes occur by studying the social fields that structurethese engagements and the actual ways that audiences engage with media. Anthropologists haverevealed ironies such as the way commercial broadcasts uncontrolled by the state or not linkeddirectly to state interests can have the unintended consequence of bolstering national identity orpride. This seems to have been the case with a popular television show in Puerto Rico thatwas a vehicle to promote Budweiser beer (Dávila 1999) or with the hookup to satellite thatbrought U.S. television directly to Belize (Wilk, this volume). But they have also examined theway programs have backfired. State-sponsored television soap operas intended to bolsternational sympathies instead foster debate and dissent. In Syria, the debate focused on who hasthe right to control public representations of Syrian history (Sala-mandra 1998), while inChina the dissent revolved around state repression of intellectuals’ challenges to state power(Rofel 1994). Annette Hamilton (this volume) analyzes how the state used mass media tocreate a sense of the nation in Thailand via a distinctive set of programs aired on nationaltelevision, alongside intense mass-mediated public spectacles of the royal family, while othermedia technologies, such as cable and videocassette recorders, were embraced to serve localsocial concerns.The challenge is to trace both how and why media messages go awry and yet also how theyshape lives, treating audiences neither as resistant heroes to be celebrated nor as dupedMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
victims to be pitied. In Thailand, Hamilton argues, the disjunction people perceived betweenthe way national television represented the news and their knowledge of what was going on inthe streets may have led them to join in democracy protests. In Egypt, Lila Abu-Lughod (thisvolume) traces how television melodramas produced by professionals with middle-classassumptions about modernity and the kinds of individuals appropriate to it help stage, and thusfoster, the kinds of selves that make good citizens. But she also notes that even those viewersmost involved with television participate in other social institutions and engage in otherpractices, most notably of contemporary religious groups, that powerfully reorient subjectivity.If the messages of state television “go wrong,” they do so in patterned ways linked to the largersocial fields that offer audiences other interpretive frameworks.TRANSNATIONAL CIRCUITSThe capacity of mass media to circulate beyond national boundaries implicates it in mosttransnational processes, whether the borrowing by Australian Aboriginal activists of Americansongs like “We Shall Overcome” during the heyday of the U.S. civil rights movement(Ginsburg, this volume); or the more contemporary use of Western media for therepresentations of cultural differences meant to mobilize support for a political cause inanother part of the world, as in the case of the Tibetans (McLagan, this volume). Unfortunately,the dominant frameworks for thinking about media’s transnational reach have been eitherglobalization or cultural imperialism, which tend to privilege media originating from ordominant in the West, with less attention to other circuits (but see Sinclair, Jacka, andCunningham 1996).One of our central concerns, then, is to develop a media theory that is genuinelytransnational and helps remap the presence and circulation of specific media forms. From ourperspective, media studies deploy a culturally specific cartography whereby only particularmedia forms and flows have been made visible and are considered sociologically significant.The category “Third World cinema,” for instance, has had a somewhat ambiguous relationshipto some popular forms.7 Hindi cinema remains perhaps the most striking example of a non-Western media form with a deep history and wide global reach that has remained largelyabsent from debates on cultural imperialism and global media in the Western academy. Inparticular, the popularity of Indian films with Indian and non-Indian audiences in places asdiverse as Egypt, Kenya (Fugelsang 1994), Japan, and Nigeria (Larkin 1997) underscores thesignificance of alternative circuits of media flows that operate outside the West.A more recent example of media that are “off the map” are video films in Nigeria andGhana.8 These video films are commercial and rarely circulate on film festival circuits wherethe concept of “African cinema” is produced and maintained. Unlike many African films, theycirculate locally and are extremely popular. In 1999 the Ghanaian film industry produced overfifty of these narrative dramas, which were shot on video, released at the cinema (throughvideo projection), and sold in markets. This output is perhaps larger than the entire repertoireof Ghanaian feature films, but it pales in comparison with the over 500 films that wereproduced and released in Nigeria in 1999 alone (Ukah 2000). This staggering growth of anMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
industry that was virtually nonexistent in 1990 is redrawing the media map of West Africa.Ghanaian directors have been overwhelmed by the success of these more violent Nigerianfilms and feel forced to conform to their narrative styles. The negative influence of Nigerianvideos is much more pressing locally than the influence of films from the United States or HongKong.9 Nigerian video films, the regional dominance of Egyptian media in the Arab world, thepopularity of Hindi cinema, Aboriginal television productions, and Latin American telenovelasare all examples of alternative productions and circulations of media that are being broughtinto focus by an emergent transnational perspective in media studies.Anthropological studies of media in “other” places can reveal the existence and power ofcircuits that do not include the West. Mayfair Yang and others are critical of the culturalimperialism framework that assumes Western hegemony. Yang’s work on mass media andtransnational subjectivity in Shanghai tracks a new phenomenon, what she calls a Chinese“traveling culture.” Over the past century, media have played a part in transformations of theChinese state, first in the development of a new national community, then in the creation of apowerful state subjectivity and its effects on the modernist project of the nation-state. In thecase of post-Mao China, it is not Western domination but regional/ethnic Chinese capitalistmodes of power that are contesting the power of the Chinese state. The result is a“transnational Chinese global media public,” a subjectivity detached from the state and linkedup, across imaginary space, with other far away Chinese subjectivities, created through theinteraction of mainland people with popular culture from Hong Kong and Taiwan. All this isfacilitated by satellite dishes, the introduction of new music and programs from other Chinesesites, and the availability of films and television shows that explore what it might mean to beChinese abroad.“Transnational subjectification” occurs, with the help of small media, in a different way fora diasporic group living within a nation but with links to distant homelands. Louisa Scheindescribes how the Hmong, who came to the United States after the end of the Vietnam War,have developed both a pop music world of their own and a thriving video industry. Throughthese media, Hmong not only create a community and shape its memories and desires, but markit as transnational, beginning with efforts to show the crucial role played by Hmong who wererecruited by the CIA during the Vietnam War. Among the most popular videos aredocumentaries about “homelands,” particularly China, and feature films that involve storiesabout Hmong who go to these other places where Hmong are supposed to have originated.Some are nostalgic and picturesque representations of Asian homelands and brethren; othersare about the relationships being forged between Miao (the Chinese counterparts of theHmong) and U.S.-based Hmong, relationships that are fraught because of the inequalitiesapparent in the imbalance of camcorder ownership.Because anthropologists often site themselves outside the West, even when they examinemedia circuits originating in the United States or Europe, they find that the local consequencesof media flows are not so predictable. Mandel’s work on the exportation of British “know-how” about media and capitalism to Kazakhstan shows both that cultural imperialism, built ona particular political and economic scaffolding, is alive and well and that imported formulas,Media Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
ideas, expertise, and codes of professionalism enter into a local field whose historicallyspecific dynamics of state power, class, ethnicity, consumption patterns, and access to othermedia products subvert and derail intentions. Richard Wilk, in contrast, shows that, ironically,the introduction in Belize of direct access to U.S. television through satellite hookup actuallyproduced a new sense of coevalness that allowed people in Belize to stop seeing themselvesas backward or lagging behind the metropole. Instead, they could come to understandthemselves in terms of cultural difference, a process that reinforced a sense of nationhood.Mankekar (1999: 346) has analyzed the introduction of satellite television to India, noting howcommercial success for transnational television channels like Star required “Indianization” oftheir programming and thus a “reterritorialization.”And finally, a key set of issues that anthropologists working with new media maps are wellpositioned to consider concerns the role of media in the emergence of alternative modernities(Martin-Barbero 1988; Gaonkar 1999; Morley and Robbins 1995; Sreberny-Mohammadi1996). In his study of media in northern Nigeria, for example, Brian Larkin uses the trope of“parallel modernities” to describe the worlds of those who are not mobile but whononetheless, through media, “participate in the imagined realities of other cultures as part oftheir daily lives” through media. Hausa youth can choose between “Hausa or Yoruba videos,Indian, Hong Kong or American films, or videos of Qur’anic tafsir (exegesis) by localpreachers” (Larkin 1997: 409). He argues that the spectacle and plot of Indian films and theirindigenization in a local genre of soyyaya books (love stories) as well as in locally producedvideos (Larkin 2000; Haynes 2000) offer Hausa youth a medium through which to consider“what it means to be modern and what may be the place of Hausa society within thatmodernity” (Larkin 1997: 434). Similarly, in his study of youth in Kathmandu, Nepal, MarkLeichty argues that Bombay and Hollywood films, “teen” magazines, pirated cassettes, andinteractive radio shows—the cultural economy of a transnational public sphere—provide theexperience of modernity as a space of imagined possibilities contained within a commodifiedlogic (1994: 194).Clearly, any analysis of the subjective and imaginative must be linked to the economic andsocial. The transnational circuits of media that enable the circulation of ideas and imagescannot be understood apart from the political economies that underwrite this circulation, not tomention the technologies. States everywhere attempt to control the mediation of their ownrepresentations, and that of others, through regulation, censorship, and control over the meansof distribution. Yet as media are implicated in constructions of alternative modernities andlocal appropriations, they can also uncover the ways in which transnational media flows candecenter nations and produce transnational subjectivities, whether in geolinguistic regions oracross long distances.THE SOCIAL SITES OF PRODUCTIONIf mass media presented a kind of forbidden object to anthropologists in non-Western settings,the final boundary (breached only by Powdermaker’s prescient study of Hollywood in the1950s) was fieldwork in the social worlds of media institutions where “dominant ideologies”Media Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
are produced, in our own as well as other societies. Anthropologists are bringing new methodsand insights to the territory already established by a small but significant body of work bysociologists of media who focused in particular on the production of “news” (Gitlin 1983;Pedelty 1995; Silverstone 1985) (a tradition that Bourdieu joined in his lectures andsubsequent 1998 book on television).The more recent work is bifocal, attending to both the institutional structures and theagency and circumstances of cultural producers (Faraday 2000; Mahon 2000b; Marcus 1997).The essays in this volume that focus on media producers cast a wide net, from Americaneducational television, to the Hispanic advertising industry, to decision-making in Bombay’sBollywood, to a popular political talk show in Bolivia. In every case, they make clear theimpossibility of separating ideas of the audience from the process of production. Some, such asBarry Dornfeld (1998), call for a radical rethinking of the very divide between production andreception. In his research on the production unit that created a seven-hour educationaldocumentary series on childhood for American public television, he shows the complexnegotiations through which a piece gets made. He demonstrates Ang’s argument (1991, 1996)that in mass media, audiences not only are empirically “out there” but also are prefigured innearly every dimension of the production process, as public television workers bring certainassumptions about the particular class fraction of “the American public” that they imagine (andhope) will watch their work.Given the close institutional and ideological association between television programmingand commercial capitalism, it is not surprising that stereotypical notions of audiencesundergird operations in TV and in the advertising industry. But what happens when bothadvertisers and their markets are from the same minority ethnic group, as Dávila (this volume)asks in her study of advertisers, “creatives,” and producers in charge of the commercialimagining and representation of “Hispanics” in the U.S. Latino advertising and marketingindustry? Their mission is not only to sell products and help sustain a niche for this ethnicallybased market but also to challenge stereotypes and educate corporate clients about Hispaniclanguages and cultures. In the end, Dávila suggests, it is difficult for advertisers to untangletheir imagery from U.S. racial and ethnic hierarchies, despite claims to be a “politicallycorrect” alternative to mainstream advertising.Like the work of Dávila and Dornfeld, Tejaswini Ganti’s work on film production in theBombay film industry shows how decisions are predicated upon an act of imaginedconsumption (Ganti 1999; and this volume). Her analysis, which joins a small but growingbody of ethnographic studies of non-Western cinema industries (Sullivan 1993; Armbrust 1996,2000), provides a critique of prevailing ideas about how media producers imagine audiences,as well as an incisive look at the actual routines whereby processes of cultural imperialismbecome internalized, enacted, and transformed. Ganti examines the remaking of Hollywoodfilms by Hindi filmmakers, focusing on the decision-making processes whereby the “copy” istransformed to conform to conventions of Indian film narratives. This process makes theHollywood original seem less like a hegemonic text than a resource to be strategically raidedand incorporated into the bold intertexuality of Hindi cinema as a strategy for trying to manageMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
the vagaries of box-office outcome.Very different notions of a national audience—what Jeff Himpele calls the televisualpublic sphere—shape the production of The Open Tribunal, a popular television talk show inBolivia that he studied as part of a broader research project on the circulation of media inBolivia. The show, which features indigenous urban poor who describe their social problemsand request (and sometimes receive) aid, also became the basis for a major political party ledby the program’s charismatic host. Himpele, along with the other authors in this section as wellas other anthropologists who found themselves unwittingly cast on popular television (Gordon1998), demonstrates how ethnographies of cultural production open up the “massness” ofmedia to interrogation. They reveal how structures of power and notions of audience shape theactions of professionals as they traffic in the representations of culture.THE SOCIAL LIFE OF TECHNOLOGYThe “ethnography of media,” as a category of media studies, involved decentering the textualcontent of media technologies in favor of analyzing the social context of their reception.Refiguring the ethnography of media necessitates a further expansion by taking intoconsideration the physical and sensory properties of the technologies themselves andexamining the materiality of communication across cultures. This scholarship draws on twomain traditions. First, media technologies are not neutral. Each new medium imposes onsociety new relations to the body and to perception, time, and space, as theorists fromMcLuhan (1964) to Goody (1977), Ong (1991), Baudrillard (1984), and Kittler (1999) haveargued. Those who highlight the materiality of communication insist on understanding thisphysicality of media and the form of its mediation, rather than any particular information beingcarried. The limiting of ethnography to content or its reception plays down the means by whichtechnologies, through their very form, impose new social relations. The role of the subject inthis tradition is submerged to the circuit of information, and focus is placed on the method ofrecording, storing, and transmitting data—what Poster has called the “mode of information”(Poster 1990; see also Kittler 1999). In this poststructuralist mode the subject of media has noautonomous existence outside of its enunciation as an address of the discursive operation ofmedia flows.Mapping the physical operations of media, as several essays in this volume do, avoids themistake of presuming, rather than examining, the diverse ways that media technologies aremanifest across different social spaces. The dropouts on pirate video images, the temperatureof cinema halls, and the multiple shadows that appear on poor television reception allconstitute what Russian formalists referred to as the “semiotics of interference,” the processwhereby the physical qualities of media create noise that threatens to overwhelm the messageitself (see Tsivian 1994). These tactile physical qualities suggest a need to focus on media astechnology.Larkin’s chapter on the introduction of cinema theaters in northern Nigeria, for instance,examines the ways in which cinema halls were part of the construction of public space undercolonial rule. These new spaces—libraries, parks, theaters, and cinema halls—created newMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
modes of racial, social, and sexual interaction that raised anxieties about social hierarchiesand spatial segregation in Nigeria. What the cinema was allowed to be—who could attend,how it was built, where it was to be located—was the outcome of a specific project ofcolonial modernity. This subject is also taken up by Spitulnik in her examination of a few daysin the social life of a radio set. By tracking the placing, possession, and circulation of radiosets in Zambia, she provides a clear example of the precise ways in which the materialenvironment of technology determines its use and presence as an icon of status and modernity.In an earlier paper on the introduction of radio sets as consumer items in Zambia, Spitulnik(1999a) unpacks the complex of meanings associated with the “radio listener.” In herexamination of advertisements for radio sets, Spitulnik describes how “listening to the radio”was constructed as a social act involving specific modes of dress, consumption, education, andfamily organization—in short, the production of the ideal colonial subject. This connectionbetween the materiality of media technology (in this case as a consumer item) and colonialismis also brought out by Rudolf Mràzek in his examination of the rise of radio in the colonialNetherlands East Indies. He argues that as well as being a site for communication flows, theradio was also seen as a “shiny little furniture thing” and possession of it “became a tool todefine a modern colonial space” and a significant organizing principle for the arrangement ofthe modern colonial home (Mràzek 1997: 10, 9). Mràzek and Spitulnik both point toward thedouble signification of media technologies, the fact that viewers and listeners are addressed bythe content of media and at the same time interpellated by the technology itself, which oftencarries with it the larger ambitions of the colonial and postcolonial state. Electronic media inthe colonial period, for instance, were part of the introduction of other forms of technologysuch as cars, electricity, factories, and railroads and thus part of the much larger discursivecomplex of science, rationality, time, personhood, and colonial rule. As technologies, mediaoften carry the burden, prestige, and controversy of being made to speak for specificideological projects. Zambians who circulate radio sets as icons of status and modernity(Spitulnik); Muslim Nigerians who oppose the construction of cinema halls as a “kafir,” or un-Islamic activity (Larkin); and Thai spirits who refuse embodiment and media representation(Morris) all suggest ways in which technology mediates larger ideologies of modernity andpostmodernity.Several essays in this section examine the consequences of technological mediation forreligious performance. In analyzing the production of Balinese plays in theater and ontelevision, Mark Hobart insists on interrogating the precise circumstances and discursivetraditions that create distinct acts of mediation. Hobart analyzes the difference between livetheater performances and their televisual mediation, not to lament the replacement of an“authentic” cultural production with its televised other, but to see how both consist of dialogicproductions, albeit rooted in different discursive regimes. In this, his concerns are shared byboth Chris Pinney and Rosalind Morris. Pinney, for instance, critiques Benjamin’s argumentthat mass reproduction destroys ritual and magical qualities of images. He argues instead foran understanding of the magical and spiritual power involved in mass images and interrogatesthis by looking at the “zone of mutuality” whereby filmic and chromolithographic images actMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
upon viewers and vice versa. Icons of Hindi religious figures, for instance, demand a mode ofviewing based on Hindu concepts of darshan, the conferring of spiritual benefit through the actand presence of looking. According to Pinney, this direct spiritual benefit insists on themateriality of representations, especially their surface levels, and results in the sensation of theimage acting upon its viewer in the moment that the viewer acts upon it (through looking). Thistactile, embodied, engaged form of looking creates, for Pinney, a form of visuality that isradically different from the paradigm of the disinterested, exterior, and objectified gaze thatmarks the dominant mode of Western visuality, what Heidegger (1977) referred to as “theworld as picture.”10The process of mediation is explored most provocatively by Morris through anexamination of the absence, or refusal, of mediation. Thai spirits manifest themselves throughembodiment in a spirit medium, the convulsing body, vomiting and jerky movements providingthe outward signification of internal and invisible possession. Morris focuses on the story of aspirit who refused to become manifest and claimed to communicate without the need tomaterialize. Morris ties this event to the political economy of a modernist Thai state that hascommodified spirit possession, repackaging it through its electronic mediation on video andtelevision as an object of desire and longing. It was at the point when possession became anicon of alterity, of history and authenticity, that stories appeared of a spirit that refusedmediation. Taken together these chapters invite us expand our concept of the ethnography ofmedia to take into account the phenomenological experience of diverse forms of mediatechnologies.COMPLICITY AND ENGAGEMENT IN THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF MEDIAStudying media is, for anthropologists, particularly useful in attempts to write against the grainof global inequalities because, as Abu-Lughod has argued, “it forces us to represent people indistant villages as part of the same cultural worlds we inhabit—worlds of mass media,consumption, and dispersed communities of the imagination” (1997: 128). Yet the social andgeographic positioning of anthropologists working on media places them in complex relationsto their objects of study: usually engaged, sometimes complicit, rarely neutral. More important,perhaps, for the kinds of political engagements our work on media entails, is the fact thatanthropologists, like many of our informants, are mobile, moving back and forth from NativeAmerican reservations to U.S. law courts (Prins), from Amazonian communities in Brazil toprotests at the national capital (Turner), or from Aboriginal out-stations to international videofestivals (Ginsburg). We circulate both geographically, as we move between “home” and“field,” and socially, as we move up and down social hierarchies in our association withpeople often quite different from ourselves. This mobility gives us privileged knowledge of,and sometimes ability to intervene in, situations involving media, but it also can createdilemmas. Intervening in complex political arenas where the consequences for the local groupscannot be foreseen is tricky. As some have been quick to point out, participating in theprocesses of cultural objectification that media facilitates and the internal social and politicaljockeying that new media production inevitably occasions can place anthropologists in theMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
position of potentially transforming, rather than observing, societies other than their own. Whatare the consequences? Finally, advocacy of subaltern groups makes criticism, public orotherwise, of any aspects of these groups’ projects awkward.Anthropologists’ mobility across social hierarchies is just as crucial as geographicmobility for the kinds of engagements that mark their work on media. Often doing fieldworkamong and thus sympathizing with dominated groups, anthropologists feel a responsibility tosupport projects by non-Western or postcolonial groups who are resisting the impositions ofWestern or global capitalist media; and to support media use by subaltern groups (e.g., women,peasants) or minorities within nation-states. The flip side of the coin is the sense ofresponsibility to critically analyze the instrumental use of media by the powerful, whether thestate or transnational capitalist enterprises, or some combination. Thus Mankekar unveils thelinks between televised religious epics and the growth of religious nationalism and communalviolence, while Abu-Lughod shows how Egyptian television melodramas and the projects ofdevelopment and “modernization” both implicitly devalue the uneducated and carefully skirtthe representation of Islam (1993b, 1997, 1998).Yet the dilemmas entailed by a critical stance regarding the links between media andhegemonic projects are no less complex than those created by working actively withindigenous media-makers. Anthropologists’ social mobility, for example, allows us access toboth sides—the reception by subalterns and the production by the powerful, even in foreigncountries. But our stance as intellectuals is what enables us to articulate and make public ourcritical analyses. When we do research in and write about countries other than our own, wemay appeal to or consider ourselves to be joining with critics and intellectuals on the nationalscene. But it can be awkward for those living and working “outside,” in the more powerfulWest, to criticize national projects and the professional elites who participate in them.Most relevant is the fact that we are professionals and intellectuals like those who produceand analyze media anywhere. Media professionals are not only our peers; they are also oftensimilarly engaged in processes of cross-cultural translation, as Pedelty’s (1995) study of U.S.foreign correspondents and McLagan’s analysis of a public relations strategist make clear.When we actually begin to study what they do, whether in our own backyards or on PBS(Dornfeld) or in the Hispanic advertising industry in the United States (Dávila), or elsewhere,such as Bollywood (Ganti), we find our positions unclear, and our ability to assert a privilegedclaim for cultural representation is sharply limited. Given our access to their work processes,we may find it difficult to see producers simply as tools of the state or commercial interests.We come to know the conflicts and compromises involved. How different are these from theconflicts raised by our own work as academics and professional representers of cultures,communities, and social issues?In fact, the parallels between what we are doing as anthropologists studying media oranalyzing and representing social and cultural life in general and what media professionals aredoing are unsettling, as Himpele’s analysis of his research on a Bolivian television programbrings out clearly. He suggests that being suddenly invited to appear on the show andquestioned in ways that served the host’s intentions reversed the usual authority ofMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
anthropologist and subject. More problematic was what he called, following Taussig (1993),the “mimetic vertigo” he experienced when drawn into a rival, and parallel, arena of culturalproduction. What are the differences between himself as an anthropologist and Palenque, theshow’s host, in the elicitation and cutting off of participants’ voices, in the appeal to livedexperience to validate one’s account, in advocacy for the marginalized, in the deployment oftestimonials of suffering to mobilize popular sentiment, and in the construction of largerpolitical analyses to frame individual accounts? Anthropologists now recognize that we areimplicated in the representational practices of those we study; and we are engaged orcomplicit, as the case may be, in complex ways, with all those communities for whom mediaare important.CONCLUSION: REMAPPING MEDIAThis book explores the dynamics of all these social processes of media consumption,production, circulation, and theorizing while making a strong case for the new kinds ofknowledge to be gained from ethnographic work that studies practices in “out-of-the-wayplaces” (Tsing 1994). Our work also underscores that oppositional logics are insufficient forgrasping media practices; rather, our models must allow for the simultaneity of hegemonic andantihegemonic effects as we examine how “technologies of power” are created and contestedwithin intimate institutional cultures, shaped by ideologies ranging from public service, toaudience appeal, to aesthetics, to political empowerment.TV Head at ChuckBurger restaurant, San Leandro, California, 1988. (Photo: Jules Backus,courtesy estate of Jules Backus)While the media we study may be “off the map” of dominant media cartographies, they areno less crucial to the transformations of the twenty-first century and must be studied.Anthropologists seek to grasp the ways media are integrated into communities that are parts ofnations and states, as well as transnational networks and circuits produced in the worlds ofMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
late capitalism and postcolonial cultural politics. We recognize the need for multisitedresearch strategies to track the relevant social domains of contemporary life (Hannerz 1992;Gupta and Ferguson 1997a, 1997b; Marcus 1995). Our relations with those we study arechanging as our cultural worlds grow closer in ways that push anthropology in salutarydirections; it is difficult to exoticize others or to maintain fictions of bounded or untouchedcommunities of difference when one includes media in one’s purview. Our work crossesdisciplinary boundaries as it intersects, overlaps, and sometimes displaces work not only inother social science disciplines such as sociology, with which we share ancestors, but also incultural studies, history, literary studies, and cinema and communication studies. Ethnographicstudies of media offer an interesting and important perspective on the arguments of Giddens(and others) that one of the distinguishing characteristics of modernity is “the lifting out ofsocial relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across infinite spansof time-space” (Giddens 1990: 21; see also Tomlinson 1999). Because anthropologistsgenerally work “close to the ground” and at the “margins,” we can intervene in specific waysin academic and wider debates about media and cultural imperialism or the dangers of culturalhomogenization represented by globalization. Our documentation of local uses and meanings ofmedia and of comparative political economies of media production and consumption(including the constraints posed by the unreliability of electricity and the vicissitudes ofpoverty) suggests the persistence of difference and the importance of locality whilehighlighting the forms of inequality that continue to structure our world. Media practices areclearly central to these processes but not necessarily in the ways we might have expected. It isthis unpredictability and often vitality of responses that anthropology helps us to understand,allowing us to better grasp how these “restructurings” are taking place.NOTESThis essay draws on Faye Ginsburg’s article “Shooting Back: From Ethnographic Film to the Ethnography of Media” (1999).Other comprehensive reviews of the current literature in the anthropology of media include Dickey 1998 and Spitulnik 1993.1. For an overview of the influence of cultural studies on work in the anthropology of media, see Spitulnik 1993 and Traube1992. The vitality of this tradition of media research influenced by cultural studies continues in two new journals, Television andNew Media, launched in 2000 and edited by Toby Miller, and the International Journal of Cultural Studies, which beganpublication in 1997.2. The use of the term “imaginary” as a dimension of national identity construction in which media play a central rolebecame widespread in the 1990s. It appropriates Lacan’s psychoanalytic use of the term as the mirror phase in humandevelopment when the child sees its own reflection as “other” (1967), and resignifies it through the work of Benedict Anderson(1991), Edward Said (1978), and others who have been central to our contemporary understanding of how nations areconstituted as cultural collectives. Annette Hamilton, for example, in her seminal article on Aboriginals, Asians, and the nationalimaginary in Australia, writes: “Imaginary relations at the social, collective level can thus be seen as ourselves looking atourselves while we think we are seeing others,” citing such icons of Australian national culture as the film Crocodile Dundee(1990: 17). For a useful discussion of the concept of the imaginary, see Lilley 1993.3. See, for example, the work of the Material Culture Group at University College London and the elaboration of thisrevisionist approach to this topic in the Journal of Material Culture.4. Although indigenous can index a social formation “native” to a particular area (e.g., I Love Lucy is “indigenous” toAmerica), we use it here in the strict sense of the term, as interchangeable with the neologism “First Peoples” to indicate theoriginal inhabitants of areas later colonized by settler states (Australia, the United States, New Zealand, Canada, most of LatinAmerica). These people, an estimated 5 percent of the world’s population, are struggling to sustain their own identities andclaims to culture and land, surviving as internal colonies within encompassing nation-states.Media Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
5. Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons, a posthumous collection of Eric Michaels’swritings based on his activist research in Australia, was published in 1994.6. For this debate in the context of indigenous media, see the Spring 1997 issue of Current Anthropology (e.g., J. Weiner1997) and the Spring 1998 issue of Lingua Franca (Palatella 1998).7. For example, Solanas and Gettino in their famous 1971 essay “Towards a Third Cinema,” explicitly condemned bothHollywood (first) cinema and auteurist (second) cinema, favoring a militant documentary genre. Others called for a politicizedauteurism that could incorporate popular culture (Rocha 1987). Thanks to Bob Stam and Ella Shohat for their comments on this.8. For Nigeria see Haynes 2000; Ukah 2000. Knowledge of Ghanaian video production is based on Meyer 1999a, 1999b,and personal communication.9. See Meyer 1999a; personal communication between Brian Larkin and the directors Willy Akuffo and Seth Ashong-Katai(thanks to Birgit Meyer for facilitating this conversation).10. Drawing on Heidegger, J. Weiner (1997), for instance, makes the argument that visual technologies such as cameras arepredicated on a culturally specific mode of vision—“the world as picture”—which is inherently Western and based on Westernideas of perspective, objectification, and surveillance. The cultural construction of the technology itself, Weiner thus argues,denies the possibility of appropriation by indigenous, subaltern, or even non-Western groups for whom use of the technologyrepresents subjection to Western modes of visuality and subjectivity. Heidegger’s concept of the modern roots of Westernvisuality remains intriguing, though many of the essays in this book make a powerful argument for media’s often successfultranslation into other cultural fields.REFERENCESAbu-Lughod, Lila. 1993a. Editorial Comment: On Screening Politics in a World of Nations.Public Culture 5 (3): 465–69.———. 1993b. Finding a Place for Islam: Egyptian Television Serials and the NationalInterest. Public Culture 5 (3): 493–514.———. 1995. The Objects of Soap Opera: Egyptian Television and the Cultural Politics ofModernity. In Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local, edited by DanielMiller, pp. 190–210. London: Routledge.———. 1997. The Interpretation of Culture(s) after Television. Representations 59: 109–33.———. 1998. Television and the Virtues of Education. In Directions of Change in RuralEgypt, edited by Nicholas Hopkins and Kirsten Westergaard, pp. 147–65. Cairo: AmericanUniversity in Cairo Press.Allen, R. C., ed. 1995. To Be Continue … Soap Operas around the World. London:Routledge.Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread ofNationalism. London: Verso.Ang, Ien. 1985. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. London:Methuen.———. 1991. Desperately Seeking the Audience. London: Routledge.———. 1996. Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World.London: Routledge.Appadurai, Arjun. 1991. Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a TransnationalAnthropology. In Recapturing Anthropology, edited by Richard Fox, pp. 191–210. SantaFe: School of American Research Press.Media Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
———. 1993. Patriotism and Its Futures. Public Culture 5 (3): 411–30.———. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press.Armbrust, Walter. 1996. Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt. New York: CambridgeUniversity Press.———. 1998. When the Lights Go Down in Cairo: Cinema as Secular Ritual. VisualAnthropology, special issue, The Seen and the Unseeable: Visual Culture in the MiddleEast, 10 (2–4): 413–41.———, ed. 2000. Mass Mediations. Berkeley: University of California Press.Asch, Timothy. 1991. The Story We Now Want to Hear Is Not Ours to Tell— RelinquishingControl over Representation: Toward Sharing Visual Communication Skills with theYanomamo. Visual Anthropology Review 7 (2): 102–6.Aufderheide, Patricia. 1995. The Video in the Villages Project: Videomaking with and byBrazilian Indians. Visual Anthropology Review 11 (2): 83–93.Bacon-Smith, Camille. 1992. Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation ofPopular Myth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Baker Jr., Houston A. 1994. Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere. Public Culture,special issue on the Black Public Sphere, 7 (1): 3–34.Banks, Marcus, and Howard Morphy, eds. 1997. Rethinking Visual Anthropology. NewHaven, Conn.: Yale University Press.Bateson, Gregory. 1943. Cultural and Thematic Analysis of Fictional Films. In Transactionsof the New York Academy of Sciences, pp. 72–78. New York: Academy of Sciences.Baudrillard, Jean. 1984. The Precession of the Simulacra. In Art after Modernism:Rethinking Representation, edited by Brian Wallis, pp. 253–81. New York: New Museumof Contemporary Art.Berger, Sally. 1995. Move Over Nanook. In Wide Angle, special issue on The Flaherty, 17 (1–4): 177–92.Bhabha, Homi. 1989. The Commitment to Theory. In Questions of Third Cinema, edited by J.Pines and Paul Willemen, pp. 111–32. London: British Film Institute.Bikales, Tom. 1997. From “Culture” to “Commercialization”: The Production and Packagingof an African Cinema in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso. Ph.D. diss., Department ofAnthropology, New York University.Born, Georgina. 1998. Between Aesthetics, Ethics and Audit: Reflexivities and Disciplines inthe BBC. Paper presented to Department of Anthropology, New York University, April.Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia UniversityPress.———. 1998. On Television. London: New Press.Media Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Calhoun, Craig, ed. 1992. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Carelli, Vincent. 1988. Video in the Villages. Commission on Visual Anthropology Bulletin,May, pp. 10–15.Castells, Manuel. 1997. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell.Caton, Steven. 1999. Lawrence of Arabia: A Film’s Anthropology. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press.Cunningham, Stuart, and John Sinclair, eds. 2000. Floating Lives: The Media and AsianDiasporas. St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press.Dávila, Arlene. 1999. El Kiosko Budweiser. American Ethnologist 25 (3): 452–70.Diawara, Manthia. 1994. Malcolm X and the Black Public Sphere: Conversionists vs.Culturalists. Public Culture, special issue on the Black Public Sphere, 7 (1): 35–48.Dickey, Sara. 1993. Cinema and the Urban Poor in South India. Cambridge, England:Cambridge University Press.———. 1998. Anthropology and Its Contributions to Studies of Mass Media. InternationalSocial Science Journal 153: 413–27.Dornfeld, Barry. 1998. Producing Public Television. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Downmunt, Tony, ed. 1993. Channels of Resistance: Global Television and LocalEmpowerment. London: British Film Institute.Eickelman, Dale F., and Jon Anderson, eds. 1999. New Media in the Muslim World: TheEmerging Public Sphere. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Faraday, George. 2000. Revolt of the Filmmakers: The Struggle for Artistic Autonomy andthe Fall of the Soviet Film Industry. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press.Faris, James. 1992. Anthropological Transparency, Film, Representation and Politics. In Filmas Ethnography, edited by P. Crawford and D. Turton, pp. 171–82. Manchester, England:University of Manchester Press.Fienup-Riordan, Ann. 1990. Robert Redford, Apanuugpak, and the Invention of Tradition. InEskimo Essays: Yup’ik Lives and How We See Them. New Brunswick, N.J.: RutgersUniversity Press.Fischer, Michael. 1990. Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity andTradition. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.———. 1995. Film as Ethnography and as Cultural Critique in the Late Twentieth Century. InShared Differences: Multicultural Media and Practical Pedagogy, edited by DianeCarson and Lester Friedman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Fiske, John. 1987. Television Culture. London: Methuen.Fleming, Kathleen. 1991. Zacharias Kunuk: Videomaker and Inuit Historian. Inuit ArtQuarterly (Summer): 24–28.Fox, Richard, ed. 1991. Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe: SchoolMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
of American Research Press.Fraser, Nancy. 1993. Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of ActuallyExisting Democracy. In The Phantom Public Sphere, edited by B. Robbins, pp. 1–32.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Fugelsang, Miniu. 1994. Veils and Videos: Female Youth Culture on the Kenyan Coast.Stockholm: Studies in Social Anthropology.Ganti, Tejaswini. 1999. Centenary Commemorations or Centenary Contestations? Celebratinga Hundred Years of Cinema in Bombay. Visual Anthropology, special issue on IndianCinema, 11 (4): 399–419.Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar. 1999. On Alternative Modernities. Public Culture, specialissue on Alter/Native Modernities, 11 (1): 1–18.Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, Calif.: StanfordUniversity Press.Gillespie, Marie. 1995. Television, Ethnicity, and Cultural Change. London: Routledge.Ginsburg, Faye. 1991. Indigenous Media: Faustian Contract or Global Village? CulturalAnthropology 6 (1): 92–112.———. 1993. Aboriginal Media and the Australian Imaginary. Public Culture 5 (3): 557–78.———. 1994. Embedded Aesthetics: Creating a Discursive Space for Indigenous Media.Cultural Anthropology 9 (2): 365–82.———. 1997. “From Little Things, Big Things Grow”: Indigenous Media and CulturalActivism. In Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest,edited by R. Fox and O. Starn, pp. 118–44. London: Routledge.———. 1998. Institutionalizing the Unruly: Charting a Future for Visual Anthroplogy. Ethnos63 (2): 173–201.———1999. Shooting Back: From Ethnographic Film to the Ethnography of Media. In ACompanion to Film Theory, edited by Toby Miller and Robert Stam, pp. 295–322.London: Blackwell.Gitlin, Todd. 1983. Inside Prime Time. New York: Pantheon.Goody, Jack. 1977. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge, England: CambridgeUniversity Press.Gordon, Joel. 1998. Becoming the Image: Words of Gold, Talk Television, and RamadanNights on the Little Screen. Visual Anthropology, special issue on Visual Culture in theMiddle East, 10 (2–4): 247–64.Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson, eds. 1997a. Culture, Power, Place; Explorations inCritical Anthropology. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.———. 1997b. Discipline and Practice: “The Field” as Site, Method, and Location inAnthropology. In Anthropological Locations, edited by A. Gupta and J. Ferguson, pp. 1–46. Berkeley: University of California Press.Media Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Gurevitch, Michael, Tony Bennett, James Curran, and Janet Woollacott, eds. 1982. Culture,Society, and the Media. London: Routledge.Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Translated byThomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Hall, Stuart. 1980. Encoding/Decoding. In Culture, Media, Language, edited by Stuart Hall,Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis, pp. 128–38. London: Hutchinson.———. 1992. Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies. In Cultural Studies, edited by L.Grossberg et al., pp. 277–94. New York: Routledge.———. 1997. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London:Sage.Hamburger, Esther. 1999. Politics and Intimacy in Brazilian Telenovelas. Ph.D. diss.,University of Chicago.Hamilton, Annette. 1990. Fear and Desire: Aborigines, Asians, and the National Imaginary.Australian Cultural History 9: 14–35.———. 1993. Video Crackdown, or the Sacrificial Pirate: Censorship and CulturalConsequences in Thailand. Public Culture 5 (3): 515–32.Hannerz, Ulf. 1992. Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning.New York: Columbia University Press.———. 1996. Transnational Connections. New York: Routledge.Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell.Haynes, Jonathan, ed. 2000. Nigerian Video Film. Revised and expanded. Athens, Ohio: TheOhio University Center for International Studies.Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. NewYork: Harper Torchbooks.Himpele, Jeff. 1996. Film Distribution as Media: Mapping Difference in the BolivianCinemascape. Visual Anthropology Review 12 (1): 47–66.Hughes, Stephen P. 2000. Policing Silent Film Exhibition in South India. In Making Meaningin Indian Cinema, edited by Ravi Vasudevan. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. NewYork: Routledge.Juhasz, Alexandra. 1995. Aids TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video. Durham,N.C.: Duke University Press.Katz, Elihu. 1977. Can Authentic Cultures Survive New Media? Journal of Communication(Spring): 113–21.Kittler, Friedrich A. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated and with introductionby Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wurtz. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UniversityPress.Media Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
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Public Sphere? Visual Anthropology Review 10 (1): 47–60.Media Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 07:42:10.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
3Representation, Politics, and Cultural Imagination in IndigenousVideoGeneral Points and Kayapo ExamplesTerence TurnerRight! All over the world people are looking at these videos we are making of ourselves. So I am glad to havecome today to this place where videos are made. This had not yet appeared when I was a youth. Now that we arebecoming more like the whites, however, we are going to need to watch these videos we are making of ourselves.It is not whites who are doing this work, but I, a Kayapo, who am doing it, as all of you can see.These videos will be seen in all countries. Tell your children and grandchildren, don’t be deaf to my words,this [work] is to support our future generations, all our people. This is what I want to say to you today.I am a Kayapo doing this work. All of you in all countries who see the pictures I make can thereby come toknow our culture, my culture of which I tell you today.MOKUKA, KAYAPO LEADER AND VIDEOMAKER, explaining the significance of his work in a video he madeat the Centro de Trabalho Indigenista, São Paulo, August 1991 (translated from Kayapo by TerenceTurner)INTRODUCTION: KAYAPO VIDEO IN THE CONTEXT OF “INDIGENOUS MEDIA”The global expansion of telecommunications, coupled with the availability of new and cheapforms of audiovisual media, above all video recording, has given rise within the past twodecades to an unprecedented phenomenon: the appropriation and use of the new technologiesby indigenous peoples for their own ends. This essay discusses a series of general issuesrelated to the politics of representation, cultural “authenticity,” and the reimagination of socialidentity by indigenous peoples in contexts of interaction with state and global systems, withparticular attention to the role of indigenous uses of video. The peoples most involved in thisdevelopment have been among those most culturally and technologically distant from the West:Australian Aborigines, Canadian Inuit, and Amazonian Indians. Among the latter, the Kayapoof central Brazil provide one of the most striking and varied examples of the indigenous use ofvideo.The use of video and other visual media like television broadcasting by indigenouspeoples differs in a number of ways from the making of ethnographic films or videos byanthropologists and other nonindigenous persons. Only since the 1980s has it begun to receiveattention in its own right from anthropologists and media theorists, and there are as yet only afew ethnographic studies or descriptive accounts of specific cases of indigenous media use: ofthese, the work of Eric Michaels on Central Desert Aboriginal Television laid key theoreticalgroundwork (Michaels 1984, 1986, 1991a, 1991b; Prins, this volume; Ruby 1991). Michaels’sand the other existing studies deal almost entirely with the Australian and Canadian cases, inMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 08:15:23.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
which state-subsidized indigenous TV broadcasting via communications satellite is theprincipal medium in question. These cases present special problems of their own (e.g., thesometimes insidious effects of dependence on government subsidies, or the fact that thesatellite-TV connection also serves as a conduit for Western TV programming, which is thendirectly received by Aboriginal, Inuit, and Indian viewers) (Kuptana 1988; Murin 1988;Ginsburg 1991). These factors are absent in the Amazonian cases, where video recorders andgenerator- or solar panel–powered VCR decks and monitors comprise the limits ofcommunications technology and there is no question of government financial subsidy. The stateagency for indigenous affairs, FUNAI (Fundação Nacional do Indio), neither supports nortakes any interest in video-making by members of the communities over which it presides. Tothe limited extent that indigenous-made videos circulate among communities, it is the result ofindividual acts, either by nonindigenous video-makers or anthropologists or indigenous leadersor video-makers who happen to travel from village to village or meet one another in aBrazilian town. Moreover, although many Kayapo communities possess monitors and evensatellite antennas, most still lack VCRs. Most viewing of videos by Kayapo takes place inBrazilian towns like Tucuman or Redencao, where chiefs or leaders may maintain town houseswith video viewing equipment and show videos to visiting Kayapo from other communities.The relatively small world of indigenous media thus nevertheless contains importantdifferences: hence the need for more empirical studies of different cases and greatertheoretical attention to the significance of the differences. This account of the Kayapo caserepresents an effort in this direction.Faye Ginsburg has noted that the appropriation of visual media by indigenous peoplestypically occurs in the context of movements for selfdetermination and resistance, and that theiruse of video cameras tends to be “both assertive and conservative of identity,” focusing bothon the documentation of conflicts with or claims against the national society and the recordingof traditional culture (1991, 1995a, 1996). She makes the important point that indigenouscultural self-documentation tends to focus not on the retrieval of an idealized vision ofprecontact culture, but on “processes of identity construction” in the cultural present (1995a,1995b). Her essential point is that cultural media form part of social projects ofcommunication of cultural knowledge for political and social ends. This implies shifting thefocus of the term “media” from the denotation of technologies of representation, or therepresentations themselves, to the social processes of mediation in which they are used:In order to open a new “discursive space” for indigenous media that respects and understands it on its own terms, it isimportant to attend to the processes of production and reception. Analysis needs to focus less on the formal qualities offilm/video as text, and more on the cultural mediations that occur through film and video works. (Ginsburg 1995a: 259)Much indigenous video tends to focus on aspects of the life of contemporary indigenouscommunities that are most directly continuous with the indigenous cultural past. It is oftenundertaken by indigenous video-makers for the purpose of documenting that past to preserve itfor future generations of their own peoples. A mere emphasis on the continuity of indigenousculture or “tradition,” however, runs the risk of slipping into uncritical cultural essentialism. ItMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 08:15:23.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
tends to ignore or obscure the extent to which the production of representations is both anindividually creative and a socially contested process, involving the conjunction of differingvoices, perspectives, and values of different groups and individuals within indigenouscommunities. The production of social and political reality, as well as the representationsthrough which it is mediated by and to its producers, is a multivocal process in which theparticipants draw in different ways upon their common cultural stock of ideas, symbols, tropes,and values. In the process, they may alter to varying degrees the form and content of their stockof representations. Even when indigenous actors employ a reified, homogeneous representationof their own “culture” to present a common ideological front against assimilative pressuresfrom nonindigenous social or political-economic agents, close examination of the socialprocess of creating and asserting such representations of common “culture” may reveal thecomplexity and conflict among the structural perspectives, views, and objectives of the actorsinvolved. This point has been cogently made by Wright in a recent comment on Kayapopolitical use of representations of their own “culture” (Wright 1998).SOCIAL EFFECTS OF INDIGENOUS MEDIA IN INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIESThe emphasis on processes of production and reception and on media as “mediation” providesa useful point of departure for my discussion of Kayapo video. “Mediation,” however, is aProtean notion that can subsume many specific meanings. As most though not allanthropologists working with indigenous media have recognized, there are fundamentaldifferences between the sorts of mediation going on in indigenous media and those involved inethnographic film and video or in the circulation of mass-culture images and ideas bytelevision (see, e.g., Ginsburg 1997; Hamilton 1997; Turner 1995, 1997; cf. Wiener 1997).One major difference concerns the act of video-making itself. As video takes on politicaland social importance in an indigenous community, which member of the community assumesthe role of video cameraperson and who makes the prestigious journey to the alien city wherethe editing facilities may be located become issues fraught with social and politicalsignificance, and consequently, social and political conflicts. These may seem petty issues withno connection to the grander issues of theory and politics normally addressed in theanthropological and media literature; but they are often the channels through which anindigenous community translates the wider political, cultural, and aesthetic meanings of mediasuch as video into its own local personal and social terms. They can have cumulativelyimportant effects on the internal politics of a community and the careers of individuals. It isespecially important for nonindigenous people working in the field to attend to the specificeffects their projects or support may have in the communities where they work.An outsider attempting to facilitate the use of video by a community, for either political orresearch purposes, by donating a camera or arranging access to editing facilities, in otherwords, does not escape the invidious implications and responsibilities of “intervention”simply through handing over the camera to “them.” To whom it is handed can become a verytouchy issue, and may involve consequences for which the researcher bears inescapableresponsibility. On several occasions when I brought video cameras to villages and attemptedMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 08:15:23.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
to arrive at understandings with the members of the community that would guarantee openaccess to their use while enabling experienced camerapersons to use and maintain them, Istumbled into longstanding rivalries and personal animosities that I was unable to reconcile ormediate to the satisfaction of all parties. In one case the jealousy that I inadvertently stirred upled to the temporary exile of a cameraman who had been my closest collaborator from hiscommunity (I describe this and other personally fraught cases in detail in Turner 1991).Returning, then, to the theme of “mediation,” the act of video-making itself, when done byan indigenous person or member of a local community, begins to “mediate” a variety of socialand political relationships within the indigenous community in a way that has no exact parallelwhen the video maker is an outsider, as is the usual case in documentary and anthropologicalfilm and video-making. Among the Kayapo, for example, becoming a video cameraperson, andeven more important, a video editor, has meant combining a prestigious role within thecommunity with a culturally and politically important form of mediation of relations withWestern society, two of the prerequisites for political leadership in contemporary Kayapocommunities. Several of the younger chiefs acted as video camerapersons during their rise tochieftainship, and a number of the more ambitious younger men have taken up video at least inpart in the hope of following in their footsteps.KAYAPO CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE USES OF VIDEO: CULTURAL FACILITATION, CREATION, ORDISTORTION?The idea of editing a video—cutting, selecting, and recombining sections of raw video(rushes) so as to construct a condensed and reordered representation of the activities andevents covered in the raw original—was originally introduced to the first group of Kayapovideo camerapersons trained by the three Brazilian media specialists who brought the Kayapotheir first video camera in 1985 (their collaborative project was called MenKaron Opoi Djoi).The first Kayapo-edited video was produced in that year by a Kayapo cameraman whom onemember of the project brought to Rio to take a course in video-making at the Museum ofModern Art (about which, he has assured me, he understood very little beyond elementarytechniques of camera work and editing).The MenKaron Opoi Djoi project ran out of funds in the same year, without being able toprovide more video cameras or editing facilities accessible to the Kayapo villages. Thevideotapes shot by Kayapo camerapersons rapidly deteriorated in the villages because theKayapo had no way of copying or storing them in a safe place. In 1990, to supply these needs, Istarted the Kayapo Video Project with a grant from the Spencer Foundation. In this I had fromthe beginning the cooperation of the Centro de Trabalho Indigenista (CTI) of São Paulo. TheCTI’s “Video in the Villages” project, directed by Vincent Carelli, made available its well-equipped editing studio and technicians to train Kayapo in editing, and its video storage spacefor a Kayapo video archive for original videos and edited masters.In the Kayapo Video Project, CTI personnel and I have sought to limit training both incamera work and in editing to the essential minimum, to allow the maximum room for Kayapocamerapersons to develop their own culturally and individually specific styles. Some criticsMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 08:15:23.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
have suggested that introducing Kayapo camerapersons to elementary techniques of camera useand editing is tantamount to indoctrinating them in Western cultural conventions, thus abortingtheir potential ability to develop spontaneous, culturally specific, and “authentic” modes ofvisual organization (Ruby, personal communication; Faris 1992; Wiener 1997; cf. Turner1997). This surprisingly widespread view seems to me to be rooted in an inability to creditindigenous persons with a capacity for creativity and aesthetic judgment on a par with theirWestern counterparts, and an analogous denial to indigenous cultures of the ability to make useof borrowed elements and techniques without becoming “lost” or inauthentic upon the slightestpollution by Western techniques and ideas. Thus even the simplest directions for using a videocamera or editing a videotape are viewed as the cultural equivalent of a poison pill, too muchfor “their” culture to withstand, while “we” remain robustly impervious (and indifferent) to allforms of cultural contact with “them.” This appears to me to be an unselfconsciously ironicvariant of the ethnocentric conviction of the evolutionistic superiority of Western cultureassociated with the ideology of Western imperialism.This view is manifestly contradicted by the record of indigenous appropriations of video,not to mention the historical and ethnographic record of intercultural exchanges in general.Indigenous societies that have learned to use video and other electronic media ofrepresentation have not collapsed or suffered the eclipse of their own categories of space-time,agency, or power. On the contrary, many have been able to employ video representations, andspecifically the processes of producing them, to strengthen their sense of cultural identity andthe continuity of cultural traditions. The Kayapo discussed in this essay are a case in point. Theexperience of the Kayapo Video Project has shown that indigenous video makers, drawingupon their own social and cultural categories, have developed culturally idiosyncratic forms ofrepresentation once they have mastered a basic vocabulary of elementary techniques. From theearly work of Worth and Adair with the Navajo, through the Australian Aboriginal workdiscussed by Michaels, Hamilton, and Ginsburg, to the Kayapo Video Project, the consistentlesson of indigenous video production has been that indigenous film and video makers tend todraw upon deeply embedded cultural categories and social schemas organizing forms for thecomplex visual representations they create and produce. The real issues are not thepreservation of “culture,” non-Western or Western, but the empowerment of social actors,whatever their degree of cultural “purity” as defined by whatever standard, to produce theirown cultural mediations. In the process, cultural forms, together with the capacity andmotivation of social actors to produce them, are reinforced, rearticulated, and transformed invarious ways through the use of new techniques of representation and new social forms ofutilizing and circulating them.The fundamental ethical and political issue involved in such processes is the empowermentof social subjects to use and transform their stock of social and cultural forms in ways thatempower them to produce social relations, values, and identities for themselves under existingand future conditions. New techniques of representation, such as, in the case in question,videotaping and editing, may potentially be among such empowering tools. Mokuka, a Kayapoleader and video maker, expressed similar ideas in a speech, delivered in Kayapo to hisMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 08:15:23.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
intended audience of fellow Kayapo but also directed toward a wider, nonindigenousaudience, which he incorporated into a video he was editing at the CTI studio in São Paulo in1991. The speech is intended as an explanation of why his video work is important to theKayapo people as a whole (the first part of the speech is printed as the epigraph to this essay).I am a Kayapo doing this work. All of you in all countries who see the pictures I make can thereby come to know ourculture, my culture of which I tell you today. Look at these videos, stored here in this place where I work—it’s not justmy workplace, any one of you [Kayapo] can come for the asking, it’s all of ours, for any one of us with enoughunderstanding to come here to look at these videos of ourselves.Look, everybody, at all these videotapes of us here. See! They’re all about us. This row of tapes are all pictures ofus Kayapo. These in the next section are of other indigenous people, our relatives. These tapes aren’t just left here idly.From here our videos of ourselves are sent far away to the lands of the whites, so our [white] relatives can see how wetruly are. This is what I want to explain to you today, what this editing studio and these videotapes are all about, so youwill understand.Do whites alone have the understanding to be able to operate this equipment? Not at all! We Kayapo, all of us, havethe intelligence. We all have the hands, the eyes, the heads that it takes to do this work. I am not doing this work for myown selfish advantage. I have learned this skill to work for our common good. That’s what I am doing here. This is whatI am doing and telling you about.This is a picture from another group of our people, from Catete [holds up photograph]. This picture here. Is theresomeone somewhere who has learned something about them too from having looked at this? Our young people canlearn about our kindred peoples from different places by looking at pictures like this. We should do the same forourselves by making pictures of ourselves with which to teach and learn about ourselves.With this, my speech to you is ended.CULTURAL SCHEMAS AND THE PRODUCTION OF THE IMAGEAn indigenous video maker operates with the same set of cultural categories, notions ofrepresentation, principles of mimesis, aesthetic values, and notions of what is socially andpolitically important as those whose actions he or she is recording. Worth and Adair, in theirearly project on Navajo filmmaking, were of course the first to realize the potentialsignificance of indigenous filmmaking in this respect. As schemas guiding the making of thevideo, cultural categories serve as forms of activity rather than as static textual structures ortropes. What Calderola (1988) has called “the imaging process” can therefore be a rich objectof ethnographic inquiry.Most Kayapo videos thus far have been of cultural performances such as rituals or politicalmeetings that form natural narrative units, with selfdefined boundaries and sequential order. Insuch cases, the social and cultural forms of the events tend to become the schemas used by thecamerapersons and editors to guide their construction of the video image. Fundamental socialattitudes and values also assert themselves as formative components of the imaging process.Both in camera work and editing, Kayapo have spontaneously tended to use technically simplelong shots, slow cuts, and alternating panoramics and middle-range close-ups of collectiveactivities such as ceremonial performances and political meetings, while avoiding extremeclose-ups of individual faces.The indigenous video maker draws upon his or her own cultural categories and forms toguide the camera work and editing process. For the indigenous video maker, in other words,the process of video production itself mediates the indigenous categories and cultural formsthat simultaneously inform and constitute its subject matter. The indigenous product, and aboveMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 08:15:23.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
all its process of production, thus has an ethnographic and theoretical value lacking innonindigenous work. Keeping the shot record for Kayapo editors, which has been my mainpractical role in the work of the Video Project, affords an excellent vantage point for studyingthis process, while allowing me to make myself useful in a relatively unintrusive way. It alsoenables the systematic compilation of ethnographically significant details in the visual record,which can be discussed with informants to elucidate their cultural meanings.These methods can provide a unique perspective for observing the construction ofrepresentations and analyzing the interaction of received cultural categories and newexperiential content and representational techniques, as I illustrate with the followingexamples.VIDEOS OF CEREMONIESThe Kayapo have used their video cameras primarily to record their own ceremonies (in itselfan ethnographic datum of cultural significance). Consider the example of a video of a men’snaming ceremony, the Mebiok, performed in the village of Kubenkakre. The cameraman andeditor was Tamok, then aged about 17, a native of the village where the ceremony wasperformed. The ceremony has the form of successive performances of the same suite of dancesteps, each with its own song. The video shows the three successive performances thatconstitute the framework of the sequential order of the ceremony.The initial performance, which marks the beginning of the ceremony, is held at a spot in theforest far from the village. Everyone is doing the same step, singing the same song. The video,using pan shots of the line of dancers, shows the uniformity of movement; the audio track relaysthe singing in unison. The second performance marks the temporal halfway point of theceremony. The performers have also come halfway in their spatial trajectory from forest tocentral village plaza, where the final performance will be held. Although the song, gestures,and steps are the same, the dancers now wear decorations, and women—the paternal aunts orgrandmothers of the little boys who will be named—have joined the dancing line, somecarrying the boys. The spectacular final performance takes place in the central village plaza,with everyone performing the same songs and steps, but now wearing complete ritual regalia,including the gorgeous feather capes that are the most valued items of Kayapo ceremonialfinery. Through successive replications the performance has become simultaneously complete(all its parts being present in the proper order) and fully socialized (moved into the center ofthe village), or in other words, fully reproduced as a social form.In Kayapo thought, replication of originally “natural” forms (such as ceremonial songs anddances themselves, thought to be originally taught to shamans by birds, animals, or fish)through concerted social action is the essence of the production of human society. It is whatspecifically human behavior (“culture”) consists of. The perfection of such socialized formsthrough repeated performance embodies the supreme Kayapo value, at once social, moral, andaesthetic, of “beauty.” “Beauty,” in this sense, comprises a principle of sequentialorganization: successive repetitions of the same pattern, with each performance increasing insocial value as it integrates additional elements and achieves more stylistic finesse, thusMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 08:15:23.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
approaching more closely the ideal of completeness-and-perfection that defines “beauty.”This is what Tamok’s video of the ceremony also does. He faithfully shows everyrepetition of every performance, each with its successive increments of regalia andparticipants. His video replicates, in its own structure, the replicative structure of theceremony itself, and thus itself creates “beauty” in the Kayapo sense. The master categories ofsocial production and cultural value, replication and beauty, thus become the master schemasguiding Tamok’s editing: his construction of his representation of the ceremony.The same principle applies to his editing and to his camera technique. For example, in hisvideo of the women’s version of the same naming ceremony, he has a long pan shot at semi-close-up so that it frames only the feather capes of the dancers moving by. The capes thusappear as a succession of identical objects, replications of the same cultural form, inabstraction from their human wearers. Tamok thus creates a frame that embodies thequintessence of the cultural value of replication as beauty.THE KAYAPO REPRESENTATION OF REPRESENTATION: RITUAL DRAMA AS PERFORMATIVE MIMESISKayapo notions of mimesis and representation are evident in dramatic skits performed asintegral parts of rituals dealing with their social and political interaction with Western society.They are faithfully brought out in Kayapo video representations of these ritual dramas. In theceremony for war, performed before the departure of the raiding party, a skit is enacted inwhich Kayapo actors take the parts of the intended Brazilian victims of the forthcoming raid.At the end of the skit, they flee in feigned terror from the successful attack of other Kayapowarriors, playing themselves. Mokuka’s video of such a performance in his village, A’ukre,shows the actors representing Brazilians, mimetically evoking the essence of Braziliannessthrough the imitation of typical Brazilian ways of eating, dancing, playing music, and otherdaily activities. Their comedic exaggeration of imitated qualities has a quasiperformativefunction: the satirically diminished intended victims are easily defeated when Kayapowarriors, acting the role of themselves, attack the “Brazilians’” camp. Life is supposed toimitate art.This example helps to bring out the close relationships between Kayapo notions of mimesisor representation as imitation on the one hand and replication as the essential form of socialand cultural production on the other. The two notions are in fact continuous, drawing on thesame notions of imitative or replicated action as an effective mode of constructing reality, andthey are culturally elaborated through the same complex ritual forms. These same fundamentalcategories of Kayapo culture emerge as the master tropes of Kayapo video camera work andediting. Representation, far from being an exclusively Western project foisted on the Kayapothrough the influence of Western media, is as Kayapo as manioc meat pie.VIDEO, SELF-REPRESENTATION, AND GETTING REPRESENTED BY OTHERSAlthough the Kayapo are accomplished in their own cultural modes of representation, anextraordinary feat of creative mimesis has undoubtedly been their enactment of themselves inMedia Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 08:15:23.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
their self-presentations to Brazilians and other Westerners, from environmentalists to WorldBank executives. These self-representations have played a central role in their successfulpolitical actions over the past decade.The Kayapo quickly made the transition from seeing video simply as a means of recordingevents to understanding it as an event to be recorded in its own right. There has been acomplex feedback relationship between Kayapo self-dramatization in their political encounterswith Brazilians, many of which have taken on the aspect of guerrilla theater, and the Kayapouse of video media. On the one hand, Kayapo leaders have planned political actions like the1989 Altamira rally against a government project to build a huge hydroelectric dam that wouldhave flooded Indian land, partly with a view to how they would look on TV (or video). On theother hand, for the Kayapo the act of shooting with a video camera can become an even moreimportant mediator of their relations with the dominant Western culture than the videodocument itself. One of the most successful aspects of their dramatic and effective politicaldemonstrations against Brazilians and other representatives of the Western world system suchas the World Bank has been their ostentatious use of their own video cameras to record thesame events being filmed by representatives of the national and international media. This hashad the effect of making their camerapersons a major subject of filming by the other crews, asis attested by the number of pictures of Kayapo pointing video cameras that have appeared ininternational print and electronic media.Kayapo activists and Granada Television crew document a 1989 demonstration in Altamira,Brazil, against World Bank funding of dams that threatened to flood indigenous lands. (Photo:Alex King, courtesy Terence Turner)Media Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 08:15:23.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
In sum, the reflexive objectification of Kayapo consciousness of their own culture in thecontemporary interethnic context has not been merely the effect of Western media or culturalinfluences; it has drawn upon powerful native cultural traditions of representation and mimeticobjectification and has at the same time extended and strengthened those traditional forms.KAYAPO USES OF VIDEO AS A SOCIAL AND POLITICAL DOCUMENTFrom the moment they acquired video cameras of their own, the Kayapo have made a point ofmaking video records of their major political confrontations with the national society, as wellas of more exotic encounters such as tours to Quebec to support the Cree Indians in theirresistance to a giant hydroelectric dam scheme that would have flooded aboriginal lands inCanada. They have also employed video to document internal political events such as meetingsof leaders from different communities to settle disputes or the foundation of new communities.In these efforts, the Kayapo have not been purists, demanding that only their owncamerapersons represent them. On some occasions, they have asked for the collaboration oftrusted nonindigenous video makers, making clear the general outlines of what they wanted thevideo to show but leaving the detailed shooting and editing decisions to the collaborators.An example of the latter strategy may illustrate the general point. In December 1991, ayoung leader from the large village of Gorotire, who was about to lead some sixty followers tofound a new village at one of the frontier posts the Kayapo have established along theboundaries of their reserves, telephoned me in Chicago from a Brazilian town near Gorotire toask me to come down and video the group’s establishment of the new village. “Hurry, we’releaving Saturday,” he said (it was then Tuesday). There were no Kayapo video cameras orcamerapersons available, and the leader of the group was intent on having a videodocumentary made of the foundation of the new community under his leadership. He wanted thepublic record of his first major chiefly act of leadership and authority to help him establish hisclaim to chiefly status. He also hoped that the video document would help to lend socialfacticity to the new community itself, which as it turned out needed all the reality reinforcementit could get.Although I was unable to go myself on such short notice, I was able to arrange for aBrazilian videomaker who had previously worked with the Kayapo and two colleagues to goto the new village and videotape the first month of its existence. The Brazilian video crewarrived at the new site a few days after the Kayapo settlers. The Kayapo, however, insisted onhaving a video document that would record the whole story of the establishment of the newvillage, including their initial arrival at the site. Calling upon their mimetic traditions, theytherefore reenacted their original journey and arrival, to serve as the beginning of the videodocumentary of the founding of their new community. They continued to enact for the cameraall the aspects of village life they considered essential to a good community, from ceremoniesto home-building to soccer games. By creating a representation of themselves as a fullyestablished, normal community, they were helping to create the social reality they wererepresenting. Here, then, is an instance of spontaneous reflexive mimesis: the Kayapo actingthemselves, for themselves.Media Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 08:15:23.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
This case illustrates several points about the purposes served by Kayapo videos as socialdocuments. The Kayapo do not regard video documentation merely as a passive recording orreflection of existing facts, but rather as helping to establish the reality it records.Representation, in other words, has a performative function. The representation of transientevents in a medium such as video, with its capacity to fix the image of an event and to store itpermanently in a form that can circulate in the public domain, objectively accessible to all inexactly the same way, can seem to confer upon private and contingent acts the character ofestablished public facts. The properties of the medium itself may thus be felt to confer adifferent kind of social reality on events than they would otherwise possess. For the Kayapo, inother words, the medium mediates its own properties as a permanent, objective, publiclycirculating representation to the consciousness of social reality.Political acts and projects, such as a young leader’s claims to chiefly authority, that in thenormal run of Kayapo political life would remain relatively contingent and reversible, can berepresented by video in ways that help to establish them as objective public realities. This, ofcourse, does not by itself make them objective realities, as the leader in question found to hisdismay. I returned to Brazil seven months after the shooting of the video to edit the rushes andtake the edited video back to the new community and the leader who had commissioned it. Asit happened, I was too late. The new settlement had fallen apart as the result of internalsquabbles provoked by the young would-be chief’s wife when he was away at the 1992 UNConference on Environment and Development in Rio, only a month before my return with theedited videotape that was to confirm the establishment of his new settlement as an objectifiedsocial fact.The Kayapo penchant for using video to document not only historic encounters withBrazilian state power but internal political events as well, such as meetings of chiefs or thefounding of a new village, may thus be understood in part as an attempt to infuse these eventswith the more potent facticity and verisimilitude of audiovisual images. The notion of anobjectively determined social reality, permanently fixed by public documents, which manynonliterate societies first acquire through the medium of writing, has come to the Kayapo andsome other contemporary nonliterate peoples through the medium of film and video. To thisextent, it seems fair to say that video has contributed to a transformation of Kayapo socialconsciousness, both by promoting a more objectified notion of social reality and by heighteningtheir sense of control over the process of objectification itself, through the instrumentality ofthe video camera.NOTEThis paper is derived, with many deletions, additions, and other changes, from my Forman Lecture at the 1992 R.A.I. Festival ofEthnographic Film and Video in Manchester, England. The text of the lecture was published in Anthropology Today (Turner1992).REFERENCESCalderola, Victor J. 1988. Imaging Process as Ethnographic Inquiry. Visual Anthropology 1Media Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 08:15:23.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
(4): 433–51.Faris, James C. 1992. Anthropological Transparency: Film, Representation and Politics. InFilm as Ethnography, edited by Peter Ian Crawford and David Turton, pp. 171–82.Manchester, England: Manchester University Press.———. 1993. A Response to Terence Turner. Anthropology Today 9 (1): 12–13.Ginsburg, Faye. 1991. Indigenous Media: Faustian Contract or Global Village? CulturalAnthropology 6 (1): 92–112.———. 1995a. Mediating Culture: Indigenous Media, Ethnographic Film, and the Productionof Identity. In Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, andPhotography, edited by Leslie Devereaux and Roger Hillman. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press.———. 1995b. The Parallax Effect: The Impact of Aboriginal Media on Ethnographic Film.Visual Anthropology Review 11 (2): 64–76.———. 1996. “From Little Things, Big Things Grow”: Indigenous Media and CulturalActivism. In Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest,edited by Richard Fox and Orin Starn, pp. 118–44. New Brunswick, N.J.: RutgersUniversity Press.———. 1997. Comment on J. Weiner, “Televisualist Anthropology.” Current Anthropology38 (2): 213–16.Hall, Stuart. 1990. Cultural Identity and Diaspora. In Identity: Community, Culture,Difference, edited by J. Rutherford, pp. 222–37. London: Lawrence and Wishart.———. 1992. Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies. In Cultural Studies, edited by L.Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P. Treichler, pp. 277–94. New York: Routledge.Hamilton, Annette. 1997. Comment on J. Weiner, “Televisualist Anthropology.” CurrentAnthropology 38 (2): 216–19.Kuptana, Rosemarie. 1988. Inuit Broadcasting Corporation. Commission on VisualAnthropology Newsletter (May): 39–41.Michaels, Eric. 1984. The Social Organization of an Aboriginal Video Workplace. AustralianAboriginal Studies 1: 26–34.———. 1986. The Aboriginal Invention of Television: Central Australia 1982–1986.Canberra: Institute for Aboriginal Studies.———. 1991a. Aboriginal Content: Who’s Got It—Who Needs It? Visual Anthropology 4 (3–4): 277–300.———. 1991b. A Model of Teleported Texts (with Reference to Aboriginal Television).Visual Anthropology 4 (3–4): 301–24.Murin, Deborah Lee. 1988. Northern Native Broadcasting. Canada: Runge Press.Ruby, Jay. 1991. Eric Michaels: An Appreciation. Visual Anthropology 4 (3–4): 325–44.Media Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 08:15:23.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Turner, Terence. 1990. Visual Media, Cultural Politics and Anthropological Practice: SomeImplications of Recent Uses of Film and Video among the Kayapo of Brazil. CVA Review(Commission on Visual Anthropology, Montreal) (Spring): 8–13.———. 1991. The Social Dynamics and Personal Politics of Video Making in an IndigenousCommunity. Visual Anthropology Review 7 (2): 68–76.———. 1992. Defiant Images: The Kayapo Appropriation of Video. Anthropology Today 8(6): 5–16.———. 1995. Representation, Collaboration and Mediation in Contemporary Ethnographicand Indigenous Media. In Visual Anthropology Review 11 (2): 102–6.———. 1997. Comment on J. Weiner, “Televisualist Anthropology.” Current Anthropology38 (2): 226–32.Weiner, James F. 1997. Televisualist Anthropology: Representation, Aesthetics, Politics.Current Anthropology 38 (2): 197–211.Worth, Sol, and John Adair. 1972. Through Navajo Eyes. Bloomington: Indiana University.Wright, Susan. 1998. The Politicization of ‘Culture.’ Anthropology Today 14 (1): 7–15.Media Worlds : Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, et al., University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=224223.Created from upenn-ebooks on 2021-08-17 08:15:23.Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.