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Media Words: Anthropology on New Terrain

Posted on: Friday, 13 June 2003, 06:00 CDT

Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Paye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 414 pp. $24.95 pbk.

In the mid-1990s we did fieldwork among Maya in Southern Belize. Every Friday night we could pay a pittance and sit in a thatched- roof house with a mixed group of Maya, mostly old women and young boys, to watch the most violent shoot 'em up videos we could tolerate. What did all this mean? For one thing, it means media are no longer relegated to the First World. They are everywhere. For scholars of media, studying this new global phenomenon benefits greatly from a disciplinary marriage with anthropology. Anthropology presents a set of methodologies and perspectives that expands our understanding of media beyond their social context in the "Western world."

Media Worlds serves as the seminal text in the anthropological study of media. As such, it does exactly what it should. It brings together prominent scholars and takes the reader to diverse settings (India, Nigeria, Brazil, Bolivia, Thailand, Zambia, etc.). It also, by means of the text's organization, identifies five main areas of research: indigenous peoples' use of media, post-colonial nations' use of media to build national identity, the translation of media across cultural boundaries, the social construction of media, and the social life of technology.

The overall contribution of this text to the study of media is what anthropology has always offered: ethnographically based research of complex social systems in non-Western societies. In this case this translates into examinations of local and global meanings of the production, circulation, and reception of mass media in once faraway places. Each of the essays in this text complicates and expands the issues that other disciplines have dealt with and adds a few issues common in anthropology.

For example, the first section deals with the issue of expanded access to media technology. Indigenous peoples, from Brazil to Tibet, use media as tools to educate nonindigenous peoples about their struggle for land rights and sovereignty. The articles in this section discuss issues of cultural authenticity, the politics of access to the tools to make media within communities and the ethnographic value of understanding non-Western concepts of representation.

Likewise, the second set of essays examines post-colonial nations' deliberate attempts (sometimes yielding accidental consequences) to mold a national identity or national sense of modernity. The articles here provide specific examples that enrich our understanding of how content and genres of production might affect people's identity and sense of being. Yet, form and content are not alone in affecting national identity. Wilk's discussion of the ways American satellite television helps to build Belizean cultural pride raises our understanding of the role specific technologies can have in creating a nation's sense of identity and pride.

The third section contributes to media studies by complicating, re-establishing, and, at times, explaining the irrelevance of the models of cultural imperialism and celebratory globalization for understanding media across cultural and national boundaries. The fourth examines the social forces, both symbolic and material, that influence media production both in the United States and abroad. The final section examines the social life of media technology, reminding us that technologies, from movie houses to portable radios, are part of our material culture and therefore have social meanings. All of the essays in this volume contribute the "on the ground" kind of local analysis that anthropology's method of participant observation is known to produce.

As in any edited collection, the individual chapters vary in their strengths and weaknesses. A few of the authors burden the reader with the jargon of post-modern/post-structuralist theories. However, after plowing through their jargon-filled introductions, readers are rewarded with rich ethnographic data. Almost every essay leads to fertile ground for thinking about the complexity of media. There are no weak essays here.

Overall, this is a good, comprehensive, academically solid collection of essays suitable for mid-to upper-level undergraduates and beyond. Two of the editors are well-established scholars. Faye D. Ginsburg is the director of the Center for Media, Culture and History and the David Kriser Professor of Anthropology at NYU. She has been writing about media for many years and has authored two books, including Contested Lives. Lila Abu-Lughod is professor of anthropology and women's studies at Columbia University and is the author of three books including the prize-winning Veiled Sentiments. Brian Larkin is an assistant professor of anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University.

LAURA MCCLUSKY Wells College

MICHAEL I. NIMAN Buffalo State College

Copyright Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Spring 2003

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