Seeing Politics
| Autor | X. Andrade |
| Páginas | 101-137 |
Chapter ree
Seeing Politics
M characterized the eld of the anthropology of t he media
over the last three decades. Anth ropology has paid more attention to mass media
and consumer popular cultu re since the s. “Media worlds” became the main
object of study during this decade —to follow Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod,
and Brian Lark in’s conceptualiz ation of media ethnographies in dierent con-
texts as presented in their inuentia l compilation Anthropology on New Terrain
(). is book brought to light valuable knowledge on the relations between
dierent types of cultu ral industries, the congu ration of national and/or local
audiences, and the social eec ts created by the production, circulation, and
consumption of mass media.
ese authors provide an optimistic perspect ive on this eld a decade
aer Debra Spitulnik ’s essay “Anthropology and Mass Media” (1993) reected
upon a still emergent eld of studies in the early 1990s. Ten years later, Gins-
burg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin ack nowledged the existence of a burgeoning
discussion on the ethnography of mass media and advocated for further
explorations of: “how consumers and producers are themselves imbricated in
discursive universes, politica l situations, economic circumstances, national
settings, historica l moments, and transnational ows” (2002, 2). ey draw
upon case studies on the uses of visual media for the purposes of cultural
activism and indigenous rig hts, the inuence of television on creating shared
images about the nation, the transnational g lobalization of mass media, and
dierent forms of receiving, resisting, a nd constructing cultur al identities.
Written almost simultaneously as t heir publication, William Mazzarel la’s
“Culture, Globalization, Mediat ion” (2004), a panoramic article for the Annua l
Review of Anthropology, adopts a more critical perspective on these develop-
ments and provides a useful genealog y with a particular foc us on the debates
surrounding globali zation and mediation, which continues to be prominent
in the literature of this eld. Tellingly, ethnographic works on print media
are largely absent from all of these usef ul overviews, whi le the audiovisual
forms of media—such as cinema, television, video, and eth nographic docu-
mentary lm—are priv ileged as the most important technologies to be able
to understand “culture” and the socia l eects of mass media. However, as is
clearly pointed out in Mazzarella’s review, a series of problematic assumptions
regarding “mediation” characterizes most et hnography of the period, which
is at least in part due to anthropologists’ tech nological choices as legitimate
objects of study: “Electronic audiovisual med ia enjoys, as many scholars point
out, an overdetermined relationship with the discourse of cultural global-
ization. ey are at once its infrastr uctural means and its privileged signs”
(2004, 347-8). Mazzarella goes on to acknowledge anthropology’s limitations
to be able to understand questions on the politics of media:
Most discussions of culture and media include an obligatory nod to
the fact that media “produces and reproduce dominant ideas.” And
yet many of these analyses nevertheless continue to presuppose that
such ideas actually ontologically precede the media that supposedly
produce and reproduce them. is is particularly the case when these
ideas are taken to belong to a domain of social life that is understood
to be in some sense “deep,” such as culture. (op. cit, )
In this context, the a nthropology of journalism occupies a rather dierent
niche—especially g iven the booming expansion of digital pract ices—although
it is meanwhile part of what some analysts, such as Dominic Boyer in his
own overview of media anthropology “From Media Anthropology to the
Anthropology of Mediation” (2012) see as a broader theoretical move from
“the anthropology of media to the anthropology of mediation.” According
to Boyer, this move is characteristic of the studies developed since the rst
decade of this century a nd constitutes a shi from studies on communica-
tional media (its forms, institutions, technologies, practices) to the study
of the “processes of social mediation: i.e. social transaction in its broadest
sense of the movement of images, discourse, persons and thi ngs” (ibid., 383).
Bearing in mi nd the publications that are my object of study, both Boyer
and Mazzarella fa ll short in noting some of the consequences of the preferred
technological choices for discussions in the disc ipline at large, including the
relative marginaliz ation of print media as a relevant research subject.41 On
In fact, without the use of ethnography as a privileged method of inquiry, detailed attention
to print media and political cartoons continued to draw interest from communication and media
studies, and, most recently from the emerging eld of digital humanities.
the other hand, numerous authors have focused on “indigenous media” to
refer to the uses of audiovisual technologies to foster processes of resistance
to hegemonic discourses on cultura l identity and politics (Chanan 2007;
Ginsburg 2003, 1991; MacDougall 1998; Turner 1991; in Latin America, see
Flores 2007; Zamorano 2009). Of particular interest to my research is the
work undertaken by scholars who have privileged questions regardi ng cultural
producers’ responses to media messages and have paid attention to the ways
in which concrete audiences create alternative political meani ngs, regardless
of their original political agenda. For instance, Ar vjind Rajagopal’s Politics
Aer Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public
(2001) draws attention to the complex forms of public engagement with soap
operas and the ways in which dierent forms of mediation occur red among
the largest sections of the population to encourage a f undamentalist position
regarding cultura l identity and the nation-state project in India during the
1990s. Issues of religion, gender, and class divisions on television and indi-
vidual agency in negotiating domina nt media meanings in Egy pt are also
prominent in the work of Lila Abu-Lughod (2005).
Authors inspired by studies on material culture, such as anthropologists
Daniel Miller (2005; 1998) and Victor Buchli (2002), have drawn attention to
the degree to which the consumption process— “circulation, excha nge, imag-
ination and knowing” (Boyer 2012, 383)—itself becomes a form of cultural
production, particularly if one ta kes into consideration the art of both writing
and reading: aspects t hat are relevant to my case study. For instance, t he cre-
ation of interpretative communities, how they aect the ver y act of reading and
reactions to it—including appropriation and dissention–—as well as certain
aspects of mass-mediated messages are of key i mportance to my research.
Discussions concerning the anth ropology of journalism are crucial to
further pursue these lines of inquiry. As shown by Boyer and Ulf Hannerz
in their overview of th is subeld, the aptly titled “Worlds of Journalism”
(2006), an emphasis on the “lives and cras” is important to gain ethno-
graphic insight into “the settings, values, and practices” of journalists as
cultural producers. According to these authors, “media professionals and
mediation” are crucial to an anthropological agenda that could overcome
the bipolarity between “i nstrumental” (i.e. studies on communication tech-
nologies as forms of representation), and “medial” (i.e. studies on “human
representational and epistemic capacities as fundamentally conditioned by
social technologies and ecologies of media themselves”) frameworks (ibid.,
6-7). Boyer and Hannerz argue that:
Most ethnographers of media would agree that such theoretical polar-
ity actually undermines their empirical-experiential sense that both
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