Faye Ginsburg. Handbook of Film Studies. Editor: James Donald & Michael Renov. Sage Publications. 2008.
In 1993, in a comprehensive review essay, Debra Spitulnik invoked the insights of Stuart Hall and other sociologically-grounded media scholars to call for more engagement by anthropologists with ‘mass media as vehicles of culture, as modes of imagining and imaging communities’ (1993: 295). Years later, a fertile domain of study—the anthropology of media—has emerged along with a general reconceptualization of anthropology that addresses our changing relationship with informants as our cultural worlds grow ever closer (Marcus, 1996). The social domains we need in order to track to understand contemporary lives are increasingly shaped by processes of late capitalism, requiring multi-sited research strategies (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997; Hannerz, 1996). Anthropologists studying media—from their political economy to their presence in everyday lives—are developing research that will help us understand the way these forms are affecting people around the globe, part of a larger effort to create an ‘anthropology of the present’ (Fox, 1991).
For many years mass media were seen as almost a taboo topic for anthropology, too redolent of Western modernity and cultural imperialism for a field identified with tradition, the non-Western and the vitality of the local. As media are becoming more ubiquitous even in remote locales, an increasing number of anthropologists have recognized not only the necessity of attending to their presence, but also their significance. As anthropologists attempt to account for the growing importance of the presence of film, television, video, and radio as part of the everyday life of people throughout the world, we have taken up with new interest the study of the production, circulation, and consumption of mass mediated forms (Abu-Lughod, 1993; 1997; Appadurai, 1991; Dickey, 1993; Dornfeld, 1998; Himpele, 1996; Mankekar, 1999; Marcus, 1996; Michaels, 1994; Pedelty, 1995; Rofel, 1994; Spitulnick, 2002) as well as visual culture, broadly conceived (Edwards, 2001; MacDougall, 1998; Marcus and Myers, 1995; Pinney, 1998; Ruby, 2000). People who are studying these forms as vehicles for the mediation and expression of social processes and cultural meanings, are working in field sites as diverse as BBC boardrooms (Born, 1998), to villages in upper Egypt (Abu-Lughod, 2002), to fan clubs in south India (Dickey, 1993), to radio stations in Zambia (Spitulnick, 2002), to popular talk shows in Bolivia (Himpele, 2002).
The anthropology of mass media is informed by several intertwined legacies of thought within anthropology and media studies. Studies of feature films and propaganda were carried out during and following World War Two, for example (Bateson, 1943; Mead and Metraux, 1953; Powdermaker, 1950) within the American culture and personality paradigm, and later as part of a developing field of studies in visual communication. Following that lineage, a number of scholars link their work on media to the field of visual anthropology (Banks and Morphy, 1997; Ginsburg, 1998; Hughes-Freeland, 1997; Pinney, 1998), often bringing a critical revision of that field through the lens of postcolonial scholarship, especially on ethnographic, documentary, and popular film practices, past and present (Rony, 1996; Shohat and Stam, 1994). Others focus on its empirical counterpart in the production of a variety of alternative (Downmunt, 1993; Juhasz, 1995; Riggins, 1992), diasporic (Gillespie, 1995; Cunningham and Sinclair, 2000; McLagan, 2002; Naficy, 1993) and small media practices (Haynes, 1997; Manuel, 1993; Sreberny- Mohammadi and Mohammadi, 1994), made by people who until recently were only objects and never producers in the enterprise of cross- cultural representation.
Another related strand of thought, closely identified with the journal Public Culture, emerges from those interested in how processes of modernity, postmodernity, and globalization actually work on the ground, tracking the cultural effects of transnational flows of people, ideas and objects—in some cases mediated by film, video, and television—that are instrumental in creating a sense of a social world that is rapidly ‘respatializing’ culture and power in ways that characterize fin-de-siecle cultural life (Marcus, 1997;
Larkin, 1997). This scholarship builds, in particular, on the work of two key scholars whose work addresses the mediation of the structures and processes of nationalism and consciousness: Benedict Anderson’s groundbreaking insights into the role of print (1991)—and now other—media in the creation of the ‘imagined communities’ of nation states, and the extension of Anderson’s Durkheimian frame to a broader notion of the social imaginary; and Jurgen Habermas’ articulation of the historical emergence of the public sphere (1989) (and the ensuing debates and critiques of that model articulated by Robbins [1993], Fraser [1993], Calhoun [1992], and others). The work of Arjun Appadurai (1996), has been particularly influenced by these thinkers, and in turn has been influential in synthesizing their frameworks with anthropological concerns and methods. In his model, media is a central part of public culture, particularly important to the articulation of national and transnational with local processes. His influential essay on ‘global ethnoscapes’ points to the significance of the spread of film, television, video, and photography throughout the world. Attending to the ways in which satellite and video technologies transcend nation-state boundaries that were sustained more easily through print and terrestrial television, he argues for the increasing significance of ‘the imagination’ in the production of culture and identity in the contemporary world as:
more persons in more parts of the world consider a wider set of ‘possible’ lives than they ever did before. One important source of this change is the mass media, which present a rich, ever-changing store of possible lives, some of which enter the lived imaginations of ordinary people more successfully than others. Important also are contact with, news of, and rumors about others in one’s social neighborhood who have become inhabitants of these faraway worlds. The importance of media is not so much as direct sources of new images and scenarios for life possibilities but as semiotic diacritics of great power, which also inflect social contact with the metropolitan world facilitated by other channels. (1991: 198)
In his 1996 edited volume Connected: Engagements with Media, George Marcus also focuses on electronic and visual media of various kinds and how they operate increasingly as ‘a direct and intimate complement to the self and self-capacity’ (1996: 10).
The significance of media as a hermeneutic for entering and comprehending the contemporary social world is especially clear in a number of recent groundbreaking projects that provide models for how programmatic claims about media can actually guide research. Lila Abu-Lughod’s work on the production, circulation and impact of Egyptian television melodrama serials is exemplary, tracking how these are intended to operate (if not always successfully) as social technologies through which modern citizens are produced and subjectivities are partially constituted (Abu-Lughod 2004). In one of her articles on the social life of these narrative forms as they move from producers to audiences, she demonstrates how, by staging interiorities through heightened emotional display, they encourage the embrace of individuality over kinship, a key transformation in the making of modern subjects (1998).
Finally, Pierre Bourdieu’s framing of the field of cultural production (1993)—the system of relations (and struggles for power) among agents or institutions engaged in generating the value of works of art, while creating cultural capital for themselves—has been especially influential for those whose emphasis is on the institutional sites for the production of media work. For example, in his innovative ethnography, Barry Dornfeld draws on Bourdieu’s model to understand the production of a public television series as a ‘cultural field’ in which producers are also always prefiguring audiences in their work. This position, he argues, calls more generally for ‘rethinking and bridging the theoretical dichotomy between production and consumption, between producers’ intentional meanings and audience members’ interpreted meanings and between production studies and reception studies’ (1998: 12-13).
One might think of these linked processes of the cultural production of media, media circulation as a social technology, and the relationship of mediated worlds to self-fabrication as existing on a continuum. At one end is the more self-conscious cultural activism in which cultural material is used and strategically deployed as part of a broader project of political empowerment, providing a ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1989) for indigenous and minoritized groups as well as what some have called ‘Third Cinema’ (Pines and Willemen, 1989), often created in circumstances in which choices are heavily constrained and political mobilization is incipient (Downmunt, 1993; Juhasz, 1995; McLagan, 1996; Riggins, 1992). In the middle range are reflexive but less strategic processes in which the imaginative encounter with cinematic or televisual images and narratives may be expressive and/or constitutive of a variety of social worlds such as the transnational links that video, television shows, films, and computer networks provide for diasporic communities (Gillespie, 1995; McLagan, 1996; Schein, 2002). At the other end of the continuum are the more classic formations of mass media which require institutional framings and imply some dimension of social segregation between producers and audiences. Anthropological research on these mediations focuses on the complex and divergent ways in which national cinemas (Bikales, 1997; Faraday, 2000; Ganti, 1998 and 2002) and television in Third World settings operate, tracking the often unstable relationship between intention and effect as these media are put to the service of constituting modern citizens, through a variety of forms, notably in popular soap operas, telenovelas, melodramatic serials (Abu-Lughod, 2002; Mankekar, 2002; Miller, 1992; Rofel, 1994; Salamandra, 1998; Yang, 2002), cultural programming (Hobart, 2002; Hughes-Freeland, 1997), talk shows (Gordon, 1998; Himpele, 2002), and how these are intended and understood in relation to larger conjunctures and in a variety of settings from production to distribution to consumption.
Because anthropologists so frequently locate themselves in non-Western and ‘out of the way’ places, the research offers not only a thick, vertically integrated, and multisited sense of the social life of media, but also engages with how this occurs outside the circuits of first world settings which have provided an ethnocentric frame for much academic discussion of media until quite recently. Ironically, even those arguing about and against cultural imperialism (Schiller, 1991) or researching the exporting of American culture through the circulation of popular film and television programs (Ang, 1985; Liebes and Katz, 1990; Silj, 1988), nonetheless presume the centrality of American media. In an effort to correct that, ethnographers and scholars in media studies are attending increasingly to the circulation of media in settings not dependent on Western hegemonic practices, such as the export of Hindi cinema (Pendakur and Subramanyam, 1996) or of Mexican telenovelas (Sinclair, 1996).
At the same time, anthropological research on mass media reiterates the insufficiency of bounded concepts of culture as a way of understanding contemporary lives in our own or other societies. As Abu-Lughod argued in considering the impact of Egyptian serials in the life of Zaynab, an older peasant woman living in a peasant village in Upper Egypt:
Television isan extraordinary technology for breaching boundaries and intensifying and multiplying encounters among life worlds, sensibilities, and ideas … It brings into Zaynab’s home, her conversations and her imagination a range of visions and experiences that originated outside her community . hardly unusual produced elsewhere and consumed in a variety of localities. Even if it ultimately helps create something of a ‘national habitus’ or hints of a transnational habitus, television is most interesting because of the way it provides material which is then inserted into, interpreted with, and mixed up with local but themselves socially differentiated knowledges, discourses and meaning systems . Television, in short, renders more and more problematic a concept of cultures as localized communities of people suspended in shared webs of meaning. (1997: 122)
Scholars developing ethnographies of media usually begin with an interest in understanding questions generated by the phenomenon itself, often motivated by a desire to comprehend the popularity, power, and/or passion attached to certain kinds of media production and viewing (for example, why is Indian cinema so popular among Hausa men in northern Nigeria?). It quickly becomes apparent in almost every case that answering these questions leads to an appreciation of the complexity of how people interact with media in a variety of social spaces and the resulting shifts in the sense of the local as its relationship to broader social worlds becomes almost a routine part of everyday life. Understanding the social relations of media production, circulation, and reception in this way entails a grounded focus on the everyday practices and consciousness of social actors as producers and consumers of different forms of media. Their interests and responses shape and are shaped by a variety of possible subject positions: cultural, generational, gendered, local, national, regional and transnational communities of identity requiring an increasingly complex and plural notion of audience. Indeed, these multiple identities may be part of a single social subject’s repertoire of cultural resources, as is clear in this hypothetical example:
An Egyptian immigrant in Britain, for example, might think of herself as a Glaswegian when she watches her local Scottish channel, a British resident when she switches over to the BBC, an Islamic Arab expatriate in Europe when she tunes in to the satellite service from the Middle East and a world citizen when she channel surfs on CNN. (Sinclair et al., 1996: 25)
While our work is distinguished by an effort to track qualitatively and with the kind of cultural knowledge that enables what Clifford Geertz calls ‘thick description’, the practices, consciousness and distinctions that emerge for people out of their quotidian encounters with media are also always situated within the context of a broader social universe. To comprehend that reality, studies are increasingly multi-sited, tracking the various social players engaged when one follows the object—a television serial or film as it moves from elite directors to consumers (Dickey, 1993; Mankekar, 1999), or the object itself such as a cassette recorder (Manuel, 1993), radio (Spitulnick, 2002), or even radio sound (Tacchi, 1998 and 2002) as it circulates through a variety of milieux.
Whether in our own societies (Dornfeld, 2002; McLagan, 2002) or elsewhere, ethnographers look at media as cultural artefacts enmeshed in daily lives, to see how they are imperfectly articulated with (and sometimes created as a counter to) larger hegemonic processes of modernity, assimilation, nation-building, commercialization, and globalization, but in terms that draw attention to how those processes are being localized.
Perhaps because of the intensity and selfconsciousness of the concern with media’s possible deleterious effects as well its utopian possibilities, most of us carrying out research on media with indigenous or other subaltern groups have an activist engagement with this work as well (Philipsen and Markussen, 1995), as supporters and even catalyzers of activity, bringing cameras to communities and assisting in the logistics of projects (Asch, 1991; Carelli, 1988; Gallois and Carelli, 1993/4; Ginsburg, 2002; Michaels, 1994; Prins, 1997 and 2002; Turner, 2002) or helping to develop visibility, funding, and circulation systems for the work (Berger, 1995; Fleming, 1991; Ginsburg, 2003; Meadows and Molnar, 2001; Wortham, 2000). In a less direct but equally engaged concern, Abu-Lughod points out that studying popular television ‘is particularly useful for writing against the grain [of global inequalities] because it forces us to represent people in distant villages as part of the same cultural worlds we inhabit—worlds of mass media, consumption, and dispersed communities of the imagination’ (1997: 128). Some have argued that these projects go beyond advocacy as authorial relations are reversed and ‘the anthropologist’s voice supplements that of indigenous people’ (Marcus, quoted in Palattella, 1998: 50-7), underscoring the ways in which we are increasingly ‘complicit’ with our subjects when engaged with such material (Marcus, 1997), as we find ourselves jointly engaged in the project of objectifying and representing culture. This relationship grows even more complex as anthropologists (and fellow travellers) are beginning to study cyberspace (see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1996; Lotfalian, 1996; McLagan, 1996; Miller and Slater, 2000; Pound, 1996), a site of sociality in which the research takes place (in part) through the medium of study itself.
One can see a trajectory in the theorizing of the relationship between culture and media over the last half-century as the objectification of the category of culture becomes evermore widespread and the observer becomes increasingly implicated as a participant. In the early work on mass media, culture operated as a kind of unconscious Durkheimian indicator of the national which was interpreted in metaphors of personality types in the work of Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, John Weakland, Martha Wolfenstein, and others in the 1950s. When, in the 1990s, anthropologists began to turn their attention to film and television once again, they looked at media, not so much as a reductive mirror, but rather as a social force in which culture is a resource in struggles for political and/or economic hegemony over the representation of society in mass media, from efforts to shore up state control over television to the development of the Third Cinema movement that was part of a global anti-colonial project. Most recently, scholars are developing research that will help us rethink abstract notions such as globalization, to see how new technologies and economies of late modernity are being framed both by ‘the new international division of cultural labor’ (Miller, 1995) as well as practices on the ground (or rooftops as satellite dishes proliferate!) as people at every end of the social spectrum—from Rupert Murdoch’s STAR TV to the videographers in Hmong communities dispersed across the globe—are engaging with mediascapes that increasingly escape the control of national political structures and economies, rearranging the ways in which cultural formations are spatialized and imagined in the process. For many social theorists interested in media as a site for either social possibilities or cultural decay, the question is still open as to whether even alternative media practices inevitably ‘eat their young’ because of the impossibility of escaping the discursive and institutional structures that even small media require. While the lack of resolution is undoubtedly healthy for intellectual debate, an unanticipated dimension of continued research during an era of ever-widening penetration and availability of media is the way in which we are increasingly implicated in the representational practices of those we study, a social fact that brings absolute and welcome closure to the allochronic tendencies of the field that Fabian warned against.
Anthropologists are at last coming to terms with the inescapable presence of media as a contemporary cultural force engaged with the mediation of hegemonic forms and resistance to them; the growth and transnational circulation of public culture; the creation of national and activist social imaginaries with the development of media as new arenas for political expression and the production of identity. Such research offers a salutary effect on anthropology as well as media studies, opening up new questions regarding the production and circulation of film and electronic media throughout the world, in non-Western as well as Western societies, potentially resituating the ‘looking relations’ that take place between and among cultures and across boundaries of inequality (Gaines, 1988).