"Osama" als Marke: Kommunikation und Handel durch Bilder von Bin Laden in Nigeria. Schon bald nach dem 11. September überschwemmten Bin-Laden-Waren die Straßen und Märkte des überwiegend muslimischen Nordnigeria. Später brachten Sänger und Filmemacher Lieder und Filme heraus, die die Kriege in
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Afghanistan und im Irak kommentierten. Während das Aufkommen solcher Produkte durch die kommerzielle Logik der "Politsploitation" (Armbrust) erklärt werden kann, bleiben die Bedeutung, die Bin Laden zugeschrieben wird, und die kommunikative Nutzung seines Bildes durch eine solche Erklärung weitgehend im Dunkeln. Um über das Konzept der "Politicsploitation" hinauszugehen, wird in diesem Essay eine Reihe von Bin Laden-inspirierten Produkten (Poster, Filme, Aufkleber) näher betrachtet und ihre Bedeutung in Bezug auf den breiteren nigerianischen Kontext interpretiert, in dem sie entstanden sind - zwischen 2001 und 2003, einer Zeit, die durch intensive politische und religiöse Debatten gekennzeichnet war. Ich behaupte, dass die lokalen Bedeutungen und die kommunikative Funktion der Bin-Laden-Bilder auf der Übertragung globaler Konfliktlinien - vereinfacht und reduziert auf "USA gegen Bin Laden" oder "Christen gegen Muslime" - auf lokale nigerianische Konflikte beruhen, die seit 1999 aufgrund der Wiedereinführung der Scharia in zwölf der nördlichen Bundesstaaten zwischen Muslimen und Christen ausgetragen werden. Für eine Reihe nigerianischer Muslime ist Bin Laden eine Ikone einer neuen und radikalen Form des Islam und eine Art "Ersatzprophet" geworden. In gewisser Weise hat Bin Ladens Bild, insbesondere sein Gesicht, eine Lücke in den neuen visuellen öffentlichen Räumen gefüllt, die in den nigerianischen Städten während des letzten Jahrzehnts entstanden sind und die von der Werbung für politische Ideologien und religiöse Überzeugungen dominiert werden. Wie anderswo auch, greift diese Art der visuellen Kommunikation auf die anthropologische Logik der Werbung für Ideen und Produkte durch die Gesichter bekannter religiöser oder politischer Persönlichkeiten zurück. Innerhalb dieser Logik entwickelte sich Bin Ladens Gesicht zu einem Markenzeichen des radikalen Islam und zu einer Ikone der gerechten und selbstlosen islamischen Führung und wurde als solches von Mitgliedern der muslimischen Massen genutzt, um eine neue radikale Identität sowohl gegenüber ihren christlichen Landsleuten als auch gegenüber ihren eigenen politischen und wirtschaftlichen Eliten zu vermitteln.° (Zusammenfassung)
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"In Tanzania pirated video copies of foreign films are subject to a profound practice of remediation. Video narrators who either perform live simultaneous translations and commentaries on such films in video parlours, or mediatise their interpretations as VHS cassettes and DVDs with Kiswahili voice-
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over, are in great demand and have established themselves as mediators between American, Chinese, Indian, and Nigerian films and their local audiences. In this essay I will introduce two such video narrators, Lufufu and King Rich, and part of their work, such as sequences from a version of the Nigerian Pentecostal classic Karishika (Christian Onu, 1998) by King Rich, and of Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) and Super Love (Andy Amenechi, 2003) by Lufufu." (Introduction)
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"Diese Masterarbeit ist eine umfassend dokumentierte Studie über die Rolle der britischen multinationalen Verlage in Afrika und ihrer Niederlassungen und Tochtergesellschaften auf dem Kontinent. Zunächst werden die Hintergründe der Aktivitäten britischer multinationaler Verlage in Afrika in der
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Zeit vor der Unabhängigkeit und ihre anhaltende Dominanz in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren dargelegt sowie Aspekte der staatlichen Kontrolle des afrikanischen Verlagswesens zu dieser Zeit untersucht. Dann wird die Zeit der 1980er und 1990er Jahre beschrieben, als einheimische afrikanische Verlage zunehmend in den Vordergrund traten. Ein weiteres Kapitel befasst sich mit dem heutigen Stand des Verlagswesens und der Buchentwicklung in Afrika und geht der Frage nach, ob der Vorwurf der Dominanz oder Ausbeutung durch die multinationalen Unternehmen heute noch gerechtfertigt ist. Kritisch hinterfragt wird auch die Rolle der Weltbank bei der Bereitstellung von Büchern für Afrika und die abnehmende Rolle der Geberorganisationen bei der Unterstützung autonomer afrikanischer Verlage und des Buchsektors im Allgemeinen." (Hans M. Zell, Publishing, Books & Reading in Sub-Saharan Africa, nr. 2577, online at: http://www.hanszell.co.uk/pbrssa/index.shtml)
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"What emerges from the discussion of the Southern African media councils is a picture of relatively new institutions, struggling to find their place in a changing, difficult media and political terrain. They share many common challenges, as they contend with hostile governments, poor journalistic pr
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actices and a lack of resources. And yet there are significant differences between them. The strongest councils are undoubtedly those of Tanzania and South Africa. The Media Council of Tanzania (MCT) is far and away the biggest, with a large number of staff involved in a wide range of projects. Besides adjudicating complaints against the media, it is actively involved in lobbying on media freedom issues, even having drafted alternative laws to put to government. It has a substantial publication programme, has developed regional Press Clubs and offered training. Its ethics committee seems to be well established and generally respected, as indicated by the fact that several very prominent people have used it. Respect among the media is high: although there have been some cases of rulings being ignored, these are exceptions. The media provide the council’s core funding, while an extensive additional programme of activities is funded by donors. In general, the MCT is an excellent example of how a body of this kind can work. The South African council is by far the busiest, even though it has a much smaller staff. It has chose to concentrate almost entirely on the adjudication function. Only recently has it added the defence of media freedoms to its aims, but it is still developing a sense of what this might mean in concrete terms. One of the factors restraining the council from leaping too quickly into this arena is the fact that South Africa has several other media groups, which are already active in the area. Sensibly, there is little appetite on the council for duplicating work that the SA National Editors Forum (Sanef), the Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI), Misa and others are already doing." (Conclusion)
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"While in some respects – particularly through their radios – Africans are very connected to the outside world, our findings suggests that the majority continue to be local rather than world citizens. However, this initial work on cosmopolitanism suggests that as their world becomes larger throu
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gh both traditional and new forms of media and telecommunications, we can expect greater levels of political debate, increased willingness to accept political opposition, and growing and realism about the outside world." (Conclusion)
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"This book examines how the media in different parts of Africa plays an important role in the continent's political and social processes of change. The perspective of the book is comparative. It contains overviews of the role of communication, as well as case studies, of the situation in individual
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countries and societies: Ethiopia, Mozambique, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. The book analyzes the printed press and broadcasting, as well as the function of new digital media, such as the Internet and cell phone technology. The chapters discuss both the more political and democratic implications of the media, as well as issues around communication for development." (Publisher description)
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"What happens to people and the societies in which they live after genocide? How are the devastating events remembered on the individual and collective levels, and how do these memories intersect and diverge as the rulers of postgenocidal states attempt to produce a monolithic "truth" about the past
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? In this important volume, leading anthropologists consider such questions about the relationship of genocide, truth, memory, and representation in the Balkans, East Timor, Germany, Guatemala, Indonesia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sudan, and other locales. Specialists on the societies about which they write, these anthropologists draw on ethnographic research to provide on-the-ground analyses of communities in the wake of mass brutality. They investigate how mass violence is described or remembered, and how those representations are altered by the attempts of others, from NGOs to governments, to assert "the truth" about outbreaks of violence. One contributor questions the neutrality of an international group monitoring violence in Sudan and the assumption that such groups are, at worst, benign. Another examines the consequences of how events, victims, and perpetrators are portrayed by the Rwandan government during the annual commemoration of that country's genocide in 1994. Still another explores the silence around the deaths of between eighty and one hundred thousand people on Bali during Indonesia's state-sponsored anticommunist violence of 1965-1966, a genocidal period that until recently was rarely referenced in tourist guidebooks, anthropological studies on Bali, or even among the Balinese themselves. Other contributors consider issues of political identity and legitimacy, coping, the media, and "ethnic cleansing." (Publisher description)
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"Church-based development organisations are distinct from secular NGOs. They have particular organisational features. These are the source of their potential value added, but also their major challenges. Good organisation development (OD) needs to be tailored to these specific contextual characteris
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tics. But faith-based OD goes even further. It integrates the faith of the client and in some cases the consultant to promote change." (Page 2)
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"While there exists a wide range of material covering violence against women, very little scholarly attention has been paid to international media treatments of gendered violence. This volume addresses the gap by providing a broad overview of contemporary representations of gendered violence, enabli
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ng comparison and contrast in forms of violence and constructions of gender across a wide range of political and geographic contexts. From nonfictional accounts of the mass rapes during the Rwandan genocide to the sexual objectification of women in Serbian media and depictions of prostitute murders in the Chinese media, this book provides an overview of media representations of gendered violence around the globe. In addition to documenting specific challenges and shortcomings of mainstream representations, chapters present insight into the various forms of resistance and hope that exist in each particular area, and analytical essays open up new lines of inquiry by offering an assessment of the uneven changes that feminist activism has enabled around the world." (Publisher description)
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This report documents the scant attention that agriculture and women agriculturalists have received from news media.
"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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