Media Worlds Media Worlds Anthropology on New Terrain EDITED BY Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2002 by the Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Media worlds : anthropology on new terrain / edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-520-22448-5 (Cloth : alk. paper)— isbn 0-520-23231-3 (Paper : alk. paper) 1. Mass media and culture. I. Ginsburg, Faye D. II. Abu-Lughod, Lila. III. Larkin, Brian. P94.6 .M426 2002 302.23—dc21 2002002312 Manufactured in the United States of America 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 10 987654 321 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum require- ments of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).8 For Annie, Sinéad, Adrian, Justine, and Samantha, whose media worlds will be even fuller than ours. It is often said that [media have] altered our world. In the same way, people often speak of a new world, a new society, a new phase of history, being created—“brought about”—by this or that new technology: the steam engine, the automobile, the atomic bomb. Most of us know what is generally implied when such things are said. But this may be the central difficulty: that we have got so used to statements of this general kind, in our most ordinary discussions, that we fail to realise their specific meanings. Yet all questions about cause and effect, as between technology and a society, are intensely practical. Until we have begun to answer them, we really do not know, in any particular sense, whether, for example, we are talking about a technology or about the uses of a technology; about necessary institutions or particu- lar and changeable institutions; about a content or about a form. And this is not only a matter of intellectual uncertainty; it is a matter of social practice. raymond williams Television: Technology and Cultural Form contents list of illustrations / xi preface / xiii introduction / 1 i. cultural activism and minority claims 1. Screen Memories: Resignifying the Traditional in Indigenous Media Faye D. Ginsburg / 39 2. Visual Media and the Primitivist Perplex: Colonial Fantasies, Indigenous Imagination, and Advocacy in North America Harald E. L. Prins / 58 3. Representation, Politics, and Cultural Imagination in Indigenous Video: General Points and Kayapo Examples Terence Turner / 75 4. Spectacles of Difference: Cultural Activism and the Mass Mediation of Tibet Meg McLagan / 90 ii. the cultural politics of nation-states 5. Egyptian Melodrama—Technology of the Modern Subject? Lila Abu-Lughod / 115 6. Epic Contests: Television and Religious Identity in India Purnima Mankekar / 134 7. The National Picture: Thai Media and Cultural Identity Annette Hamilton / 152 8. Television, Time, and the National Imaginary in Belize Richard R. Wilk / 171 iii. transnational circuits 9. Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai: Notes on (Re)Cosmopolitanism in a Chinese Metropolis Mayfair Mei-hui Yang / 189 10. A Marshall Plan of the Mind: The Political Economy of a Kazakh Soap Opera Ruth Mandel / 211 11. Mapping Hmong Media in Diasporic Space Louisa Schein / 229 iv. the social sites of production 12. Putting American Public Television Documentary in Its Places Barry Dornfeld / 247 13. Culture in the Ad World: Producing the Latin Look Arlene Dávila / 264 14. “And Yet My Heart Is Still Indian”: The Bombay Film Industry and the (H)Indianization of Hollywood Tejaswini Ganti / 281 15. Arrival Scenes: Complicity and Media Ethnography in the Bolivian Public Sphere Jeff D. Himpele / 301 v. the social life of technology 16. The Materiality of Cinema Theaters in Northern Nigeria Brian Larkin / 319 17. Mobile Machines and Fluid Audiences: Rethinking Reception through Zambian Radio Culture Debra Spitulnik / 337 18. The Indian Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Or, What Happens When Peasants “Get Hold” of Images Christopher Pinney / 355 19. Live or Dead? Televising Theater in Bali Mark Hobart / 370 20. A Room with a Voice: Mediation and Mediumship in Thailand’s Information Age Rosalind C. Morris / 383 contributors / 399 index / 403 illustrations “The Consumers,” by Michael Leunig / xvii TV Head at ChuckBurger restaurant, San Leandro, California / 24 Beastie Boys at Tibetan Freedom Concert / 37 Allakariallak with gramophone at Port Harrison Post / 40 Igloolik Isuma Productions Executive Committee, Baffin Island / 43 Micmac leader Donald Sanipass at work on Our Lives in Our Hands / 66 Kayapo activists and Granada Television crew document a 1989 demonstration in Altamira, Brazil / 85 Richard Gere speaking at the March for Tibet rally / 104 Hand-painted signs by Sakti Arts banner company, Tamilnadu, India / 113 Family watching television in an Upper Egyptian village / 126 Video store in Mahboonkrong Mall in Bangkok / 160 Photomontage with Indian film star, by Omar Said Bakor / 187 Map of familial relationships for the TV series Crossroads, Kazakhstan / 212 Steve Thao interviews a traditionally dressed Hmong woman / 232 Juliana Lopez, a Tzeltzal woman, views herself making pottery on a video / 245 xi xii illustrations Shooting of the “Budding Babies” sequence for TV series Childhood in a New York studio / 250 “Erase Stereotypes” ad by Zubi Advertising / 275 A song sequence rehearsal in Bombay’s Mehboob Studios / 290 Anthropologist Jeff Himpele interviewed by Carlos Palenque, host of the Bolivian TV talk show The Open Tribunal / 302 Kenyan photomontage, by Omar Said Bakor / 317 Crowds outside the Marhaba Cinema, Kano, Nigeria, in watercolor by Abdulhamid Yusuf Jigawa / 325 Sidney Kambowe tunes the radio outside his home in Zambia / 344 Bihari, a Bhatisuda resident, holds a mirrored version of a chromo- lithograph depicting Ramdevji / 366 preface This volume represents much of the exciting work being done in the emerg- ing field of the anthropology of media. Although we tried to be compre- hensive, we could not, of course, include all the fine work currently being done in this area, particularly by younger scholars and those working on re- lated topics such as the Internet and new media, photography, journalism, and music. We also do not include classic studies that laid the groundwork for our own efforts because it was our intention to highlight current research, although we discuss much of that scholarship in the introduction. Any omis- sions are simply due to the constraints of space. And we look forward in the future to seeing the work of others join ours in print, knowing that the field is developing quickly. As the volume editors, our major debts are, first, to the contributors to this volume for their innovative ideas and research, and second, to each other because this has been such a wonderfully collaborative enterprise. Although our initial paths to this work were varied (as we elaborate below), this vol- ume came out of a larger project in which we all participated while at New York University: the Graduate Program in Culture and Media, a joint train- ing program for students in Anthropology and Cinema Studies and the in- terdisciplinary Center for Media, Culture, and History. This institutional fo- cus at NYU has enriched us with graduate students and colleagues (some of whose work is represented in this volume) who have stimulated us, shaped our thinking, and convinced us that this is indeed an important topic with the potential to transform anthropology and media studies. Lila Abu-Lughod’s interest in media developed in the 1980s while doing fieldwork in Egypt with the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin, where she observed that lo- cal popular song culture was being commercialized and that generational conflicts were emerging in national media forms such as radio soap operas. xiii xiv preface These phenomena fueled her discomfort with her own earlier tendencies, within the conventions of anthropology, to represent other societies as not part of “modernity” and to treat culture and cultures as bounded. Her de- sire to think more about forms of national culture that traversed communi- ties found encouragement in the project Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breck- enridge were then initiating on transnational cultural studies—what became the journal Public Culture. Her focus on the cultural politics of the nation- state developed especially in relation to the project “Questions of Moder- nity” that she and Tim Mitchell pursued throughout the 1990s, which brought together scholars of the Middle East and South Asia and gave her an education in postcolonial studies. But her understanding of media the- ory and issues came directly from the rich intellectual stimulation provided by the faculty and students in the Anthropology Department at NYU, and especially those in the Culture and Media Program. Her debts to Faye Gins- burg, who profoundly shaped her thinking about media and other aspects of our social and political worlds, are deep. The interest in media at NYU is extensive, reaching many other parts of the university. Most relevant for Abu- Lughod were the film festivals organized through the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, with help from Ella Shohat, Shiva Balaghi, Viola Shafik, Walter Armbrust, and others, and the students and faculty interested in South Asia, including Teja Ganti and Anupama Rao. Finally, as any teacher does, she learned from the remarkable graduate students at NYU as they wrote re- search proposals and dissertations and discussed books and ideas in courses ranging from “Culture and the Nation” to “Theories of Modernity.” Her thanks go to all of them, especially Teja Ganti, Sherine Hamdy, Ayse Parla, Elizabeth Smith, and Jessica Winegar. Those who contributed more directly to her research on Egyptian television are legion and are thanked separately at the end of her chapter in this book and in other publications.