Media Worlds

This groundbreaking volume showcases the exciting work emerging from the ethnography of media, a burgeoning new area in anthropology that expands both social theory and ethnographic fieldwork to examine the way media—film, television, video—are used in societies around the globe, often in places that have been off the map of conventional media studies. The contributors, key figures in this new field, cover topics ranging from indigenous media projects around the world to the unexpected effects of state control of media to the local impact of film and television as they travel transnationally. Their essays, mostly new work produced for this volume, bring provocative new theoretical perspectives grounded in cross-cultural ethnographic realities to the study of media.

This groundbreaking volume showcases the exciting work emerging from the ethnography of media, a burgeoning new area in anthropology that expands both social theory and ethnographic fieldwork to examine the way media—film, television, video—are used in societies around the globe, often in places that have been off the map of conventional media studies. The contributors, key figures in this new field, cover topics ranging from indigenous media projects around the world to the unexpected effects of state control of media to the local impact of film and television as they travel transnationally. Their essays, mostly new work produced for this volume, bring provocative new theoretical perspectives grounded in cross-cultural ethnographic realities to the study of media.

List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction

I. Cultural Activism and Minority Claims
1. Screen Memories: Resignifying the Traditional in Indigenous Media
Faye Ginsburg
2. Visual Media and the Primitivist Perplex: Colonial Fantasies, Indigenous Imagination, and Advocacy in North America
Harald E.L. Prins
3. Representation, Politics, and Cultural Imagination in Indigenous Video: General Points and Kayapo Examples
Terence Turner
4. Spectacles of Difference: Cultural Activism and the Mass Mediation of Tibet
Meg McLagan

II. The Cultural Politics of Nation-States
5. Egyptian Melodrama—Technology of the Modern Subject?
Lila Abu-Lughod
6. Epic Contests: Television and Religious Identity in India
Purnima Mankekar
7. The National Picture: Thai Media and Cultural Identity
Annette Hamilton
8. Television, Time, and the National Imaginary in Belize
Richard R. Wilk

III. Transnational Circuits
9. Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai: Notes on (Re)Cosmopolitanism in a Chinese Metropolis
Mayfair Mei-hui Yang
10. A Marshall Plan of the Mind: The Political Economy of a Kazakh Soap Opera
Ruth Mandel
11. Mapping Hmong Media in Diasporic Space
Louisa Schein

IV. The Social Sites of Production
12. Putting American Public Television Documentary in Its Places
Barry Dornfeld
13. Culture in the Ad World: Producing the Latin Look
Arlene Dávila
14. "And Yet My Heart Is Still Indian": The Bombay Film Industry and the (H)Indianization of Hollywood
Tejaswini Ganti
15. Arrival Scenes: Complicity and Media Ethnography in the Bolivian Public Sphere
Jeff D. Himpele

V. The Social Life of Technology
16. The Materiality of Cinema Theaters in Northern Nigeria
Brian Larkin
17. Mobile Machines and Fluid Audiences: Rethinking Reception through Zambian Radio Culture
Debra Spitulnik
18. The Indian Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction; Or, What Happens When Peasants "Get Hold" of Images
Christopher Pinney
19. Live or Dead? Televising Theater in Bali
Mark Hobart
20. A Room with a Voice: Mediation and Mediumship in Thailand’s Information Age
Rosalind C. Morris

Contributors
Index