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Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain
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.
410 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 6, 2013
Like many edited volumes, some of the contributions to "Media Worlds" are better than others. My favorites were, in order of appearance:
1. Lila Abu-Lughod's “Egyptian Melodrama—Technology of the Modern Subject?” 115-133.
2. Purnima Mankekar's "Epic Contests: Television and Religious Identity in India.” 134-151.
3. Richard Wilk's “Television, Time, and the National Imaginary in Belize.” 171-188.
4. Debra Spitulnik's “Mobile Machines and Fluid Audiences: Rethinking Reception through Zambian Radio Culture.”337-354.
I feel Abu-Lughod's article and Purnima Mankekar's article are especially well paired together. Both discuss the impact of television in portraying expectations in gender roles to a wide audience. To illustrate I have provided to excerpts from these arguments below.
For Egyptian melodramas, gender appears as:
In her analysis of the link between daytime television and women’s work, she [Modleski (1982)] argues that the narrative structures and close-up shots so favored by soap operas exercise women viewers’ ability to read how intimates are feeling. Their viewing experiences thus replicate their primary emotional work in the family—anticipating the needs and desires of others (p. 117). What is interesting about Modleski’s argument that television soap opera helps to train women for interpersonal work is the assumptions it makes about selves and emotion. It presumes women who live in modern bourgeois families and have a vocabulary of sentiment that is attached to gesture and expressive of the inner feelings and personal truths of others. This set of assumptions about emotion and personhood must be recognized as historically and culturally specific. As Cvetkovich notes, nineteenth-century mass and popular culture placed and important role in constructing the discourse of affect crucial to establishing the middle-class hegemony of a ‘gendered division between public and private spheres and the assignment of women to the affective tasks of the household.’ (p. 118).
This resonates with the examples of gendered identity in India found in Mankekar's article:
In both serials, they provide the turning point of the narrative: wars are fought over the honor of women, which in turn is conflated with and subsumed by the honor of the patriarchal clan. The humiliation of women is avenged by men who interpret it as an assault on their masculinity.
This is clearest in its depiction of women’s sexuality as a site for contests between self and other.
The political significance of representations of demonized others who steal or dishonor ‘our’ women becomes clearer when we place them in the context of communal discourses on sexuality, according to which women must be protected from the other because their sexual purity is metonymic of the honor of communities. Therefore, ‘true men’ must protect their woman and avenge any assaults on them. As pointed out by several observers, communalists constantly raise the specter of the ‘violation of our sisters and mothers’ and exhort men to ‘take revenge’ and prove their manhood as a means of policing the boundaries of the community.” (p. 139).
I also find that Wilk's contribution is strongly paired with Spitulnik work. Together these four articles cover what this text has to offer.
1. Lila Abu-Lughod's “Egyptian Melodrama—Technology of the Modern Subject?” 115-133.
2. Purnima Mankekar's "Epic Contests: Television and Religious Identity in India.” 134-151.
3. Richard Wilk's “Television, Time, and the National Imaginary in Belize.” 171-188.
4. Debra Spitulnik's “Mobile Machines and Fluid Audiences: Rethinking Reception through Zambian Radio Culture.”337-354.
I feel Abu-Lughod's article and Purnima Mankekar's article are especially well paired together. Both discuss the impact of television in portraying expectations in gender roles to a wide audience. To illustrate I have provided to excerpts from these arguments below.
For Egyptian melodramas, gender appears as:
In her analysis of the link between daytime television and women’s work, she [Modleski (1982)] argues that the narrative structures and close-up shots so favored by soap operas exercise women viewers’ ability to read how intimates are feeling. Their viewing experiences thus replicate their primary emotional work in the family—anticipating the needs and desires of others (p. 117). What is interesting about Modleski’s argument that television soap opera helps to train women for interpersonal work is the assumptions it makes about selves and emotion. It presumes women who live in modern bourgeois families and have a vocabulary of sentiment that is attached to gesture and expressive of the inner feelings and personal truths of others. This set of assumptions about emotion and personhood must be recognized as historically and culturally specific. As Cvetkovich notes, nineteenth-century mass and popular culture placed and important role in constructing the discourse of affect crucial to establishing the middle-class hegemony of a ‘gendered division between public and private spheres and the assignment of women to the affective tasks of the household.’ (p. 118).
This resonates with the examples of gendered identity in India found in Mankekar's article:
In both serials, they provide the turning point of the narrative: wars are fought over the honor of women, which in turn is conflated with and subsumed by the honor of the patriarchal clan. The humiliation of women is avenged by men who interpret it as an assault on their masculinity.
This is clearest in its depiction of women’s sexuality as a site for contests between self and other.
The political significance of representations of demonized others who steal or dishonor ‘our’ women becomes clearer when we place them in the context of communal discourses on sexuality, according to which women must be protected from the other because their sexual purity is metonymic of the honor of communities. Therefore, ‘true men’ must protect their woman and avenge any assaults on them. As pointed out by several observers, communalists constantly raise the specter of the ‘violation of our sisters and mothers’ and exhort men to ‘take revenge’ and prove their manhood as a means of policing the boundaries of the community.” (p. 139).
I also find that Wilk's contribution is strongly paired with Spitulnik work. Together these four articles cover what this text has to offer.
May 13, 2021
Oh, it's published in 2002! Very nice collection.
February 27, 2015
Slightly outdated but very insightful Media Worlds is an interesting glance at anthropology outside its classical comfort zone. Dealing with a host of case studies and research project from across the world, mostly from the late 90s, Media Worlds attempts to show how people interact and define themselves through their consumption or creation of television, radio and film. The book does have one severe limitation, its lack of tackling new media in any way, something that makes it quite obsolete in today's new media landscape. It is nonetheless a good read.
January 29, 2015
Unfortunately this collection is now too old. Social media was not even on the horizon of these articles.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews