Some Thoughts on Culture/Media Faye Ginsburg When I was asked to develop a program in documentation. Until very recently, with the exception ethnographic film in 1986,1 was determined to develop of some interest in the development of media use by a curriculum or, more ambitiously, expand the paradigm indigenous peoples since the 1980s (Ginsburg 1991, in a way that would not reproduce the reified dualisms 1993; Michaels 1986,1991a, 1991b; Ruby 1991; Turner of gemienschafiJgesellschaft that have had a striking 1991, 1992a, 1992b), there has been little systematic and depressing resilience in the field of ethnographic ethnographic engagement with what is rapidly becoming film, visual anthropology, and communications research. the most widespread means of cultural production and Despite the early and important work of people such as mediation on the globe. As Debra Spitulnick notes in Jean Rouch that broke down these barriers, notions of her recent review of "Anthropology and the Mass "us" as high-tech and post-industrial and "them" as pre- Media," tech and underdeveloped still persist. Myriad versions could be summarized and parodied along the following ...an inquiry into just why and how anthropologists lines: have managed to neglect the centrality of mass media in twentieth century life would not only be of we have cameras/ they have exotic rituals historical interest, but also of potential use in we have mass media/ they have "authentic" art illuminating certain conceptual gaps in we have alienation/ they have face to face contemporary anthropological theory (1993: 1) communities we have post-modernism/ they have ecologically- In the field of communications, much contemporary integrated world views theory still views mass media as inexorably hegemonic and homogenizing in the interest of dominant social For anthropologists, mass media have mostly been groups, wiping out the cultural integrity, authenticity, viewed as disruptive if not corrupting of the small-scale and diversity of the people at the receiving end. non-western societies once (and probably still) identified Alternatively, most empirical communication research as our bailiwick. Other than Hortense Powdermaker's models depend so heavily on quantitative methods that study of Hollywood (1950), some brief attempts by it is almost impossible to account for cultural difference. Gregory Bateson (1943), Margaret Mead and Rhoda In the last few years, a new generation of scholars Metraux (1953) and others to use films for the analysis - trained in both communications and anthropology - of other cultures at a distance during World War II, and has emerged whose interests in the relationship between prescient attention to new media technologies from media and culture are generating a fertile new area that 1 filmmaker and communications scholar Sol Worth might be called "culture/media." This dialogue between (1966,1969), film and video in anthropology have been disciplines became audible at sessions organized at the seen primarily as a transparent medium for American Anthropological Association meetings in 136 Volume 10 Number 1 Spring 1994 Visual Anthropology Review 1991 and 1992,2 which in turn engendered this special of cultural difference within and across societies. By issue of the Visual Anthropology Review, "Culture/ looking at the broad range of social processes that shape Media," guest edited by Victor Caldarola.1 media production, distribution, and reception in The essays collected for the "Culture/Media" issue particular settings, they offer cogent challenges to the of the VAR make a powerful case for the value of an ethnocentric assumptions of the inevitability of western anthropological approach to the study of culture and media hegemony. By exploring the intersection of media. The research and ideas they offer are an local cultures, regional histories of cinema and television, impressive demonstration of the possibility and necessity and the political economies and ideological agendas of of grounded ethnographic inquiries into the creation nation states, these papers suggest a sequel to Benedict and consumption of film and television in diverse Anderson' s Imagined Communities that would broaden cultural and national contexts. In anthropology's best his analyses of the role of print media in nation building tradition, they throw into question the taken for granted to include the cinematic and the televisual.4 nature of the way media is created and consumed in our The authors have worked in a remarkable array of own society. locations which include Belize, China, Japan, Tonga, What distinguishes an anthropological approach to the U.S., and the Alsace region of France. Their mass media as opposed to studies in communication or methods range from analyses of institutions and events, semiotics? I would argue (as do most of the authors to studies of the cultural impact of national here) that our work is marked by the centrality of people communication policies, to explorations of interpretive - as opposed to media texts or technology - to the practices, life histories and the space-time effects of empirical and theoretical questions being posed in the new technologies on social hierarchies. The authors' analysis of media as a social form, whether we focus on theoretical stances encompass debates on the its production, modes of representation, or reception. "technologies of power" through which states establish In certain ways, this parallels what critic Bill Nichols hegemonic power and the dynamics of the "public has characterized as the central problematic of sphere" through which independent criticism can ethnographic documentary: "What to do with people" develop; they address questions regarding the tensions (1981). In other words, if there is some original between ideology and culture and the semiotics of contribution to be made by an ethnographic approach, national and neocolonial regimes; and they provide it is to break up the "massness" of the media, and to provocative insights into the unstable relations between intervene in its supposed reality effect by recognizing intention, text, and effect by studying how producers the complex ways in which people are engaged in make decisions and audiences interpret works in processes of making and interpreting works in relation unpredictable and destabilizing ways. to their cultural and historical circumstances. The essays divide roughly into two groups that fall Focusing on people's activities with media, along the illusory but heuristically useful divide between however, is only the first step. The next intellectual production and reception (Dornfeld 1992): the first move, implicit in all the essays, is still only begrudgingly focuses on the consumption of popular cinema; the acknowledged in anthropology or communications: second on the production and impact of television. In that social bodies - from nation states to provincial the first group, the work of Yang, Hahn, and Caughey communities to individuals - increasingly mediate and are exemplary, in different ways, of possibilities for comprehend their identities and placement in the world carrying out what Yang calls ethnographic studies of in relation to televisual and cinematic structures and media reception of both foreign and indigenously experiences. From that premise, the authors represented produced cinema. The authors do not limit reception to here have moved along research paths that offer the moment of contact between media event and increasingly sophisticated approaches to understanding audience, but situate their questions about the reception the ways that film and television are contributing to the of cinema in relation to histories of cinema viewing mediation of national identities and to the construction (Hahn, Yang), prior interpretive practices (Hahn), and FAYE GINSBURG IS THE DIRECTOR OF THE PROGRAM IN CULTURE AND MEDIA, DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY. Visual Anthropology Review Volume 10 Number 1 Spring 1994 137 problematic social relations that catalyze relations with life historical conditions that shape her attachment. imaginary characters (Caughey), all of which structure More broadly he argues that anthropologists need to the "codes of perception" through which interpretations take such relationships with popular culture figures as of media become forms of cultural production (de seriously as they do the ties people have with ancestors, Certeau 1984). Yang, in her study of film discussion spirit beings and other non-corporeal inhabitants of groups (qunzhong yingping) that emerged along with social landscapes more commonly associated with economic reforms in the People s Republic of China in serious anthropological research. the 1980s, offers an illuminating perspective on Western In the second group of essays, Painter, Wilk, and understandings of the public sphere as an arena of social Zinn address the production and reception of mass criticism autonomous from state or market domination media - especially television - in a range of locations, (Habermas 1989). While these forms of film criticism focusing in particular on questions of ideology, were initiated and/or structured by the state, her hegemony, and culture. They focus on the actual interviews with and readings of the reviews written by processes through which cultural and ideological members of these groups of non-professional film agendas are encoded which legitimate or destabilize enthusiasts suggest that they provide one of the few (perhaps unwittingly) national