"With essays on audiences in ancient Greece, early modern Germany, Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, Zimbabwe, contemporary Egypt, Bengali India, China, Taiwan, and immigrant diaspora in Belgium, each chapter examines the ways in which audiences are embedded in discourses of power, representation, and
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regulation in different yet overlapping ways according to specific socio-historical contexts." (Publisher description)
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"Gubrium and Harper describe how visual and digital methodologies can contribute to a participatory, public-engaged ethnography. These methods can change the traditional relationship between academic researchers and the community, building one that is more accessible, inclusive, and visually appeali
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ng, and one that encourages community members to reflect and engage in issues in their own communities. The authors describe how to use photovoice, film and video, digital storytelling, GIS, digital archives and exhibits in participatory contexts, and include numerous case studies demonstrating their utility around the world." (Publisher description)
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"Mottonyms are both inscriptions, based on people’s experiences, on Ghanaian commercial vehicles and ‘names’ by which drivers of such vehicles are called. Prior research on mottonyms implicitly affirms how these inscriptions are embedded in human interpersonal relationships and on careful refl
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ection, in personal social experience. Guided by a phenomenological perspective, I explore, through interviews with vehicle owners, the specific life experiences that spurred them to coin these mottonyms. Overall, I analyze two major themes about drivers’ incentives for their inscriptions: innuendo mottonyms and philosophical mottonyms. Through this research, I respond to recent calls for a phenomenological approach to investigate media uses in everyday life (Moores 2009). This approach provides a grounded understanding into “embodied sets of activities that humans perform with varying degrees of regularity, competence and flair” (Postill 2010: 1). Thus, it helps us understand how cultural forms are not just “mental, meaningful circulation of ideas” (Zito 2008: 71) but concrete mediated practices. Furthermore, the paper responds to scholars’ advocacy for a broader understanding of ‘media’ that transcend narrowly defined traditional mass media formats (Downing 1996), and novel ways of examining such formats (Moores, 2009; Meyer, 2009)." (Abstract)
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"This pioneering study examines television’s impact on an Amazonian river town from the first broadcasts in Gurupá, in 1983, to the present." (Publisher website)
"Although Islam is not new to West Africa, new patterns of domestic economies, the promise of political liberalization, and the proliferation of new media have led to increased scrutiny of Islam in the public sphere. Dorothea E. Schulz shows how new media have created religious communities that are
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far more publicly engaged than they were in the past. Muslims and New Media in West Africa expands ideas about religious life in West Africa, women's roles in religion, religion and popular culture, the meaning of religious experience in a charged environment, and how those who consume both religion and new media view their public and private selves." (Publisher description)
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"In ihrem Beitrag analysiert Barbara Keifenheim das Themenspektrum rezenter ethnographischer Filmfestivals und skizziert rückläufige und zunehmende Tendenzen bei der Wahl von Filmthemen. Gleichzeitig kommt sie zu dem Schluss, dass der Ethnofilm immer noch von wissenschaftstheoretischen Konzepten g
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eprägt ist, die längst von der allgemeinen Ethnologie in Frage gestellt werden. Im Verharren auf überholten Grundannahmen sieht sie einen Grund für die inhaltliche wie auch gestalterische Stagnation des gegenwärtigen Ethnofilms." (Kurzzusammenfassung S. 2)
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"Although conflict is a normal aspect of human life, mass media technologies are changing the dynamics of conflict and shaping strategies for deploying rituals. Rituals can provoke or escalate conflict; they can also mediate it. Media representations have long been instrumental in establishing, main
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taining, and challenging political and economic power, as well as in determining the nature of religious practice. This collection of chapters emerged from a two-year project based on collaboration between the Faculty of Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and the Ritual Dynamics Collaborative Research Center at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Here, chapters locate, describe, and explore cases in which media-driven rituals or ritually saturated media instigate, disseminate, or escalate conflict. Each chapter, built around global and local examples of ritualized, mediatized conflict, is multiauthored. The book’s central question is: when ritual and media interact (either by the mediatizing of ritual or by the ritualizing of media), how do the patterns of conflict change?" (Publisher description)
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"The translation of films from languages such as English, Hindi/Urdu or Chinese into Swahili is a phenomenon that has quickly grown into a successful business in Tanzania in the last couple of years. The films are mainly products of the USA, of India and China, but also of countries such as Thailand
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, Malaysia or Nigeria. The pirate copies that reach Tanzania, however, seem to be primarily imported from China (Interview with DJ Mark, 2009). In Tanzania, the films are subject to a series of transformations that help to increase the appeal of these films to their predominantly youthful Tanzanian audience. This essay focuses on these transformation processes and aims to show how films are shaped by the work of the translators (“watafsiri”), but also by the people who work in the video parlours (“vibanda vya video”), the places where these films are usually consumed. It is based on research that was carried out in Masasi (Mtwara region) and Nachingwea (Lindi region) in February 2009 and in Dar es Salaam, Morogoro (Morogoro region) and Bagamoyo (Tanga region) in September 2009." (Pages 138-139)
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"Although practice theory has been a mainstay of social theory for nearly three decades, so far it has had very limited impact on media studies. This book draws on the work of practice theorists such as Wittgenstein, Foucault, Bourdieu, Barth and Schatzki and rethinks the study of media from the per
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spective of practice theory. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from places such as Zambia, India, Hong Kong, the United States, Britain, Norway and Denmark, the contributors address a number of important themes: media as practice; the interlinkage between media, culture and practice; the contextual study of media practices; and new practices of digital production. Collectively, these chapters make a strong case for the importance of theorising the relationship between media and practice and thereby adding practice theory as a new strand to the study of anthropology of media." (Publisher description)
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"The Anthropology of News and Journalism is the first book to explore the role of news and journalism in contemporary culture from an anthropological perspective—as a form of cultural meaning-making in its creation, content, and dissemination. Anthropology's global, comparative perspective and eth
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nographic methods provide powerful insights for analyzing case studies from around the world. Essays by leading scholars explore communities of professional and nonprofessional journalists. They describe news-making processes ranging from the local to the global digital environment, as well as how news is disseminated and received in a variety of cultural settings." (Publisher description)
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"This book is about the many ways in which mobile phones are being appropriated by Africans and how they are transforming and are being transformed by society in Africa. A case study from Karthoum (Sudan) shows, how mobile phones are reshaping relationships in a Muslim society, where they enable wom
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en to organize their lives more independently. In Cameroon, the mobile allows traditional healers to assist sick people who are originally from their area but are now far away, sometimes even in Europe or the USA. Another study from Burkina Faso highlights the growing importance of text messaging - as contrary to the overstated orality both of African societies and of the mobile phone. The nine chapters in this volume all show aspects of an emerging mobile culture, be it the linkage between the rural and the urban in Burkina Faso, the youth in Ghana or traders in Tanzania. In all of these, the authors observe a reshaping of social and economic hierarchies in society. Based on the illustrative case studies and its multi-dimensional approach this book is highly recommended reading." (CAMECO Update 3-2009)
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"News stories provide an essential confirmation of our ideas about who we are, what we have to fear, and what to do about it: a marketplace of ideas, shopped by rational citizen decision makers but also a shared resource for grounding our contested narratives of identity in objective reality. News a
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s a fundamental social process comes into being not when an event takes place or when a report of the event is created but when that report becomes news to someone. As it moves off the page into the community, news discovers - through its interpretations - its reality in the lives of the consumers. This book explores the path of news as it moves through the tangled labyrinth of social identities and asserted interests that lie beyond the page or screen. The language and communication-oriented study of news promises a salient area of investigation, pointing the way to an expansion, if not a redefinition of basic anthropological ideas and practices of ethnography, participant observation, and “the field” in the future of anthropological research." (Publisher description)
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"In this groundbreaking work, Brian Larkin provides a history and ethnography of media in Nigeria, asking what media theory looks like when Nigeria rather than a European nation or the United States is taken as the starting point. Concentrating on the Muslim city of Kano in the north of Nigeria, Lar
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kin charts how the material qualities of technologies and the cultural ambitions they represent feed into the everyday experiences of urban Nigeria. Media technologies were introduced to Nigeria by colonial regimes as part of an attempt to shape political subjects and create modern, urban Africans. Larkin considers the introduction of media along with electric plants and railroads as part of the wider infrastructural project of colonial and postcolonial urbanism. Focusing on radio networks, mobile cinema units, and the building of cinema theaters, he argues that what media come to be in Kano is the outcome of technology's encounter with the social formations of northern Nigeria and with norms shaped by colonialism, postcolonial nationalism, and Islam. Larkin examines how media technologies produce the modes of leisure and cultural forms of urban Africa by analyzing the circulation of Hindi films to Muslim Nigeria, the leisure practices of Hausa cinemagoers in Kano, and the dynamic emergence of Nigerian video films. His analysis highlights the diverse, unexpected media forms and practices that thrive in urban Africa." (Publisher description)
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"This book offers a view of the cultural, family, and interpersonal consequences of mobile communication across the globe. Scholars analyze the effect of mobile communication on all parts of life, from the relationship between literacy and the textual features of mobile phones to the use of ringtone
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s as a form of social exchange, from the “aspirational consumption” of middle-class families in India to the belief in parts of Africa and Asia that mobile phones can communicate with the dead. The contributors explore the ways mobile communication profoundly affects the tempo, structure, and process of daily life around the world. The book discusses the impact of mobile communication on social networks, other communication strategies, traditional forms of social organization, and political activities. It considers how quickly miraculous technologies come to seem ordinary and even necessary; and how ordinary technology comes to seem mysterious and even miraculous. The chapters cut across social issues and geographical regions; they highlight use by the elite and the masses, utilitarian and expressive functions, and political and operational consequences. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate how mobile communication has affected the quality of life in both exotic and humdrum settings, and how it increasingly occupies center stage in people’s lives around the world." (Publisher description)
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"Ängste und Hoffnungen verbinden sich mit den jungen Menschen, die in der arabischen Welt zwei Drittel der Bevölkerung ausmachen. Wie reagieren die Jugendlichen auf die Herausforderungen einer globalisierten Welt? Anhand der Internetnutzung marokkanischer Jugendlicher und den damit verbundenen Ane
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ignungspraktiken lässt diese Studie die Ambivalenz von Globalisierungsprozessen in der arabischen Welt sichtbar werden. In der kommunikativen Entgrenzung wird die eigene strukturelle Begrenzung deutlich: Geographische, soziale und kulturelle Grenzen werden hinterfragt, verschoben und überwunden – aber auch fixiert." (Verlagsbeschreibung)
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"While much has been written about the growing influence of television and the Internet on modern warfare, little is known about the relationship between media and nation building. This book explores, for the first time, this relationship by means of a paradigmatic case of successful nation building
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: Malaysia. Based on extended fieldwork and historical research, the author follows the diffusion, adoption, and social uses of media among the Iban of Sarawak, in Malaysian Borneo and demonstrates the wide-ranging process of nation building that has accompanied the Iban adoption of radio, clocks, print media, and television. In less than four decades, Iban longhouses ('villages under one roof') have become media organizations shaped by the official ideology of Malaysia, a country hastily formed in 1963 by conjoining four disparate territories." (Publisher description)
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"This is the first book to offer a systematic overview of the themes, topics and methodologies in the emerging dialogue between anthropologists studying mass communication and media analysts turning to ethnography and cultural analysis. Drawing on dozens of semiotic, ethnographic and cross-cultural
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studies of mass media, it offers new insights into the analysis of media texts, offers models for the ethnographic study of media production and consumption, and suggests approaches for understanding media in the modern world system. Placing the anthropological study of mass media into historical and interdisciplinary perspectives, this book examines how work in cultural studies, sociology, mass communication and other disciplines has helped shape the re-emerging interest in media by anthropologists." (Publisher description)
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"This thesis provides, firstly, an analysis of the interplay of transnational media corporations, particularly Rupert Murdoch's Star TV, in their pursuit of creating profitable national consumer markets, preferably in a democracy like India, with the anti-minority politics, modes of popular/populist
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mobilisation and discursive strategies of Hindu nationalism. It looks at the economic, technological, medial, political, social, visual/iconographic and legal aspects of this interplay and delineates their concrete manifestations in news as well as in entertainment programming of everyday television (particularly in very popular shows and channels at the time). These aspects are set into the larger framework of globalisation, privatisation, commercialisation and neo-liberal policies, the related thrusts of social upward mobility (especially in the new middle classes), ‘good governance’ (instead of socio-economic justice) and shifting class-, caste-, majority-minority and national-regional relations in the context of a re-formulation of nation and state that defines and legitimises new logics of inclusion and exclusion. Secondly, this work is a study of "Indianisation" and lingual/representational politics in the context of the growing precariousness of the liberal-secular discourse and of democratic, independent mass media in India. Especially English-language journalists, whose largely critical coverage of the anti-Muslim violence experienced an hitherto unknown rejection on the part of TV audiences (and consequently produced a slump in advertising revenues), turned with the Gujarat crisis out to epitomise the ambivalence of challenging the definitional power of a privileged postcolonial class: its rightful critique carries the danger of vindicating and naturalising anti-minority cultural nationalism. The study follows and examines, before the background of a normative construction of a Hindi-speaking, ‘authentic’ media consumer, the changing position of both English and Hindi-producing journalists and producers, their respective perceptions of alienation, speechlessness and empowerment, their unwanted role as activists in the context of shifting meanings of 'neutrality' and 'objectivity', their difficulties or agility in assessing their options and maintaining, changing or even developing their convictions, and the strategies they find or reject for adapting to the circumstances." (Abstract)
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