Media Anthropology Network - Bibliographies

A

• Abu-Lughod, L. 2005. Dramas of nationhood: the politics of television in Egypt. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
  Lila Abu-Lughod presents the shifting and competing perspectives reflected in television serials in contemporary Egypt. She understands television as a 'key institution' for analyzing nation building because it combines the cultural with the sociopolitical, reflects the perspective of the public as well as the domestic sphere and, most importantly, brings female viewers into play. She calls the particular Egyptian form of television serials 'domestic dramas' that deal with the everyday-life of ordinary people. In her analysis, Abu-Lughod approaches the serials from different points of view by means of a multi-sited approach. First, she examines the interlocking networks of script writers, directors, producers, actors and critics, who design and produce the serials for the impoverished masses. Second, she watches TV and discusses its lessons and meanings with two different groups of marginalized women: women in the villages of a rural, underdeveloped region of Upper Egypt and women who work as domestic servants in Cairo.
  (Heike Drotbohm, Freiburg)
  
  Lila Abu-Lughod charts the movement of 'melodramatic serials' from encompassing, in Schudson's (1984) terms, a 'development realism' media aesthetic towards 'capitalist realism', following the reorganization of the Egyptian television industry. She questions capitalist realism's ability to draw people from divergent socioeconomic backgrounds into the ethos of the nation-state. Through an implicit practical application of Marcus' (1995) notion of multi-sited ethnography, Abu-Lughod examines how these television serials relate to reality for the production elite and post-production critics, and two groups of subaltern viewers. By establishing the production elite as members of the Egyptian intelligentsia, Abu-Lughod crystallizes their role in the generation of social hegemony, and illustrates the patronization sensed by her disadvantaged informants, as a result of misunderstandings about their lived experiences.
  (Mark Paul Highfield, Aberdeen)
  
  Published reviews:
  Drotbohm, H. 2005. Critique of Anthropology, 25, 437-438.
  Highfield, M.P. 2006. Social Anthropology, 14/2, 273-294.

• Allen, S. (ed.). 1994. Media anthropology. Informing global citizens. Westport, Bergin: Garvey.
  One of the first approaches to media anthropology, which divided it into the applied and theoretical branches. The majority of the contributors focus on the first branch. The applied media anthropology includes tools for anthropologists to better communicate with media and for journalists to understand the anthropologists universe.
  (Mihai Coman, Bucharest)

• Andreassen, R. 2005. The Mass Media's Construction of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Nationality. An Analysis of the Danish News Media's Communication about Visible Minorities from 1970 to 2004. Unpublished PhD thesis: Department of History, University of Toronto.
  Online: http://www.rikkeandreassen.dk/publikationer.html
  Based on the analyses of television primetime news clips and national newspaper articles from the 1970s to the 2000s, the dissertation throws light on how the news media have represented visible minorities (refugees, immigrants and their descendants) in Denmark. By drawing upon post-colonial theory, queer theory, feminism, media theory and theories of nationalism, the dissertation examines how this news coverage has participated in the construction of Danish nationality as well in the construction of gender, race, sexuality and whiteness.
  (Rikke Andreassen, Malmö)

• Ang, I. 1991. Desperately seeking the audience. London: Routledge.
  This is a work that looks into the issue of how media organisations construct their images of their audiences, through institutional research practices and management routines. It provides background for mainly production but also 'audience' ethnographies.
  (Daniel Taghioff, London)

• Ang, I. 1996. Living room wars. London: Routledge.
  This is a follow up work to Desperately seeking the audience. Whilst the former focussed more on production side constructions of the 'audience' this work is more focussed on audience research, and as the title suggests, with an emphasis on issues of difference. This includes considerations of gendered audiences, and critical accounts of notions of 'global culture'.
  (Daniel Taghioff, London)

• Ardevol, E. and J. Grau. 2005. AntropologÌa de los Media. Actas del Congreso de AntropologÌa. Seville: AA.EE.
  This is a collection of papers from a meeting of anthropologists held in Seville in September 2005. Most papers are in Spanish, but there are also one each in Catalan, Portuguese and English. Papers on the Internet predominate (on online dating, cyberfeminism, weblogs, identity formation, cultural epidemiology, diasporas, virtual communities). There are also pieces on biomedia, video activism, advertising, film, radio and TV. The anthropological emphasis is more cultural than social. The editors identify the relationship between media and cultural processes (or culture) as the thread running through the papers. They also suggest that contributors go beyond media instrumentalism to explore how media are engaged in re-presenting reality and re-elaborating subjective and sensorial experiences.
  (John Postill, Sheffield Hallam)

• Ardèvol, E. and N. Muntañola (eds.). 2004. Representación y cultura audiovisual en la sociedad contemporánea. Barcelona: UOC.
  This interdisciplinary volume provides a conceptual framework for the understanding of the role of images in our contemporary societies. It deals with classical and more recent theories about culture and ways of seeing, the social imaginary and its relation with invention and convention, the use of visual representations in conforming identity and alterity, the subject construction of current image technologies such as photography, cinema, television or virtual reality, and image consumption in popular culture. A basic toolkit for the critical analysis of image as social practice.
  (Elisenda Ardèvol, Barcelona)

• Asad, T. 1990. 'Ethnography, literature and politics: Some readings and uses of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses', Cultural Anthropology 5(3): 239-269.
  Asad is exceptionally good at demonstrating the extent to which most of the protests about Rushdie's portrayals of the prophet (which, intratextually, were part of a madman's drug-induced dreams and hence not really representations of the prophet at all) were very much about other issues for which the garbled accounts of Rushdie's work allowed people to coalesce and rally.
  (Mark Peterson, Miami)

• Askew, K. and R.R. Wilk (eds.). 2002. The anthropology of media. London: Blackwell.
  This reader contains a collection of important articles on the anthropological study of media, culture, and society. The book is divided into five thematic parts. Part one deals with media technologies and their relation to 'truth'. Part two and three look from different angles at the phenomenon of representation in the context of media: representing others and representing selves. The fourth part turns the focus to the active reception of mass media. Finally, the fifth part of the reader presents a melange of perspectives on national, post-colonial, and global projects and their influence on media usage.
  (Philipp Budka, Vienna)
  
  One of the most important collections of studies devoted to this field. The reader is focused more on the media as transmission channel and less on media content. The authors study both the production and the consumption of media by non-western groups and the role of mass media (especially as entertainment) in sustaining national or regional identities.
  (Mihai Coman, Bucharest)
  
  This is a self-declared attempt to institute anthropology of media as a subfield, by producing an introductory reader to the topic. It has some classic texts (McLuhan, Williams) and some interesting production and audience ethnographic pieces. It also tackles some of the debates on globalisation from a media anthropology type of perspective.
  (Daniel Taghioff, London)
  
  Published review:
  Durington, M. 2004. American Ethnologist 31 (1), February 2004.
  Online: http://www.aaanet.org/aes/bkreviews/result_details.cfm?bk_id=3038

• Aspers, P. 2001. Markets in fashion. A phenomenological approach. Stockholm: City University Press.
  This book provides a detailed account of the fashion photography market, making use of Harrison White's theories and distinguishing between 'aesthetic' and 'economic' markets.
  (Brian Moeran, Copenhagen)

• Auslander, Ph. 1999. Liveness. Performance in a mediatized culture. London: Routledge.
  The study starts with the description of the interrelations between live performances and mediatized presentations in contemporary forums for cultural consumption. Examples are taken from the theatre, TV, (rock) music and the court. Auslander analyses which concepts of liveness have developed in these arenas, how they have changed with the introduction and spread of new media technologies and which role they play in reception processes.
  (Ursula Rao, Halle)

B

• Bakker, F.L. 2005. 'The image of Muhammad in The Message, the first and only feature film about the Prophet of Islam', Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 7(1): 77-93.
  This paper covers the tremendous efforts the international crew underwent to get approval from Al-Azhar and the Sh'ite Council in Lebanon (also the two groups Abu-Laban says his group originally showed the binder of cartoons to), their efforts to stay within the fatwa, their ultimate failure (although this feature-length movie about the prophet does not at any point represent the Prophet), and the controversies that followed their decision to release it anyway.
  (Mark Peterson, Miami)

• Barber, K. 2000. The Generation of Plays. Yoruba Popular Life in Theater. Indiana University Press.
  Based upon archival research and participant observation as an actress, Karin Barber presents a detailed account of the transformations Yoruba popular theatre has gone through from the 1940s to the 1980s. This work is very rich in ethnographic material that she drew from her cooperation with one theatre company, Oyin AdjÈjobi Theater Company. The personalities of the actors, the creation of plays (from the germ of an idea to the stagings), the interaction with the audiences, and the need for a moral lesson have been examined in great detail. Of most interest for media anthropologists is the chapter 'Television, film and video'. It shows how the visual media alter ways of sociality for the actors, preparations of plays, contact with their audience, and even the slots of the performed stories.
  (Katrien Pype, Leuven)

• Bausinger, H. 1984. 'Media, technology and daily life', Media, Culture and Society 6: 343-351.
  An early theoretical call for the empirical study not of a single medium but of media as ensembles. The author suggests that media are seldom used completely or with full concentration, that they are shot through with non-media activities, and that even reading the newspaper is a collective activity. The argument is nicely illustrated with a day in the life of an imaginary West German family, the Meiers.
  (John Postill, Sheffield Hallam)

• Beck, R.M. and F. Wittmann (eds.). 2004. African Media Cultures. Transdisciplinary Perspectives / Cultures de Médias en Afrique. Perspectives Transdisciplinaires. Cologne: Ruediger Koeppe Verlag.
  The aim of this volume is to display the wide range of media cultures in African societies. All contributors agree on the importance of the cultural, social or historical contextualization of the material: press in The Gambia and Senegal, comics in Cameroon, wall paintings in Ethipia, speaking potlids from Angola, proverbs in Benin, local language writers in Uganda, the griot in Niger, music in Kenya, Tanzania and Congo, radio in Ghana, television in Ivory Coast, horror movies in Nigeria, internet in Senegal and an essay on mobile phones in Burkina Faso. The heterogeneity of the communication processes, their multiplicity and complexity explains the range of theoretical and methodological approaches in the volume. It testifies to the wealth of African media and their appropriation, and emphasizes how incredibly neglected this topic has been so far. The book unites 15 scholars from three continents, eight countries and from across the disciplines to map the media cultures in Africa by analyzing their actors, forms, practices, regulations and usages in past and present times. It is intended to serve as an introduction for Africanists from Social Anthropology, History, Linguistics or Political Studies interested in media, but also for scholars of Media and Communication Studies in search of information in African media cultures.
  (Frank Wittmann, Fribourg)

• Becker, H. 1982. Art worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  This is a classic account of how art worlds - and, by extension, media worlds - operate as 'networks of cooperating people', including different types of artists, critics, dealers, and so on.
  (Brian Moeran, Copenhagen)

• Benson, R. and E. Neveu (eds.). 2005. Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press.
  The book is an attempt of reflecting on the possible ways of applying Bourdieuís field theory to the studies of media and journalism. It consists of three parts: theoretical, empirical comparative and critical. Apart from the lecture of Bourdieu 'The Political Field, the Social Field and the Journalistic Field', there are articles by Michael Schudson, Bourdieu's cooperates from the journalism research group at the Centre for European Sociology and others. The book is a valuable contribution to the formation and development of the field theory of journalism. However, readers could be slightly disappointed by it if they were expecting to find a systematic picture of the field.
  (Anna Horolets, Warsaw)
  
  Published review:
  Couldry, N. 2007. Bourdieu and the media: the promise and the limits of theory. Theory and Society, Vol. 26, No.2: 209-213.
  Online: http://www.springerlink.com/content/j684184462n12275/
  Horolets, A. 2007. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, No. 15: 113-114.
  Online: blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1469-8676.2007.00004_7.x (PDF, 144 KB)

• Bird, S.E. 1992. For enquiring minds: A cultural study of supermarket tabloids. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
  One of the first of what remains a small number of case studies of a media genre by a cultural anthropologist. This anthropological study of American supermarket tabloids includes textual analysis of the papers in terms of their connections with traditional folkloric themes, as well as analyses based on ethnographic studies of tabloid writers and readers, and points the way to the further serious study of media by anthropologists.
  (Elisabeth Bird, South Florida)

• Bird, S.E. 1992. 'Travels in Nowhere Land: Ethnography and the "Impossible Audience"', Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 9 (3): 250-260.
  An anthropological intervention in the debate about how to study the media audience ethnographically, arguing against the post-modern position that ethnography is virtually impossible and that the media 'audience' essentially does not exist.
  (Elisabeth Bird, South Florida)

• Bird, S. E. (ed.). 1996. Dressing in feathers: The construction of the Indian in American popular culture. Boulder, CO: Westview Press/Harper Collins.
  Edited collection interdisciplinary essays on representation of American Indians in popular media. Contributors include scholars from anthropology, communication, American Studies, and history; they provide essays on topics from 19th Century trade cards, photographs, and theatrical productions, through movies, TV, comics, tourist postcards, and museum exhibits.
  (Elisabeth Bird, South Florida)
  
  Published review:
  Carr, H. 1998. Journal of American Studies 32 (1): 128-129. (PDF, 440 KB)

• Bird, S. E. 2003. The audience in everyday life: Living in a media world. New York: Routledge.
  This book brings together several ethnographic studies on the role of the media in everyday life. Beginning with an introductory chapter on anthropology and media, the book then offers chapters on: The role of news in interrogating moral boundaries, arguing that news 'stories' need to be understood as ongoing dialog, rather than texts; the creation of a female community through TV fan activities; a case study of the relationship between news and oral tradition; the question of aesthetic judgment in popular media studies, and how ethnographic studies can illuminate this; and an exploration of how Native American and Anglo audiences respond to media representations. The book closes with a discussion of the future of media ethnography. The book won the 2004 Best Book Award from the International Communication Association.
  (Elisabeth Bird, South Florida)

• Bird, S.E. and R.W. Dardenne. 1997. 'Myth, chronicle and story: Exploring the narrative qualities of news', in D. Berkowitz (ed.), Social Meanings of News: A Text Reader, 333-350. Sage Publications. (First published 1988).
  This article was one of the first to look at news as functioning like myth, taking the study of news beyond textual analysis toward a serious consideration of the cultural role of news in drawing boundaries, maintaining authority, and naturalizing ideology.
  (Elisabeth Bird, South Florida)

• Born, G. 1997. 'Computer software as a medium: textuality, orality and sociality in an artificial intelligence research culture' in M. Banks and H. Morphy (eds.), Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
  A fascinating ethnographic and iconographic analysis of IRCAM, 'a computer music research centre generously funded by the French state'. Born shows how IRCAM's computer programmers fail to properly document their work. This makes the entire organisation reliant on two ancient human achievements: orality and sociality.
  (John Postill, Sheffield Hallam)

• Bräuchler, B. 2005. Cyberidentities at War: Der Molukkenkonflikt im Internet. Bielefeld: transcript.
  Conflicting parties worldwide increasingly use the internet in a strategic way. By extending into cyberspace, local conflicts acquire a new global dimension. Based on ethnographic research on the online activities of Christian and Muslim actors in the Moluccan conflict (1999-2002) this study investigates processes of identity construction and community building on the internet. The author thus makes an innovative contribution to conflict and internet research and methodologically paves the way for a new cyber anthropology.
  Online chapter: http://www.transcript-verlag.de/ts287/ts287.htm
  (Birgit Braeuchler, Munich)
  
  Published reviews:
  Online review by Nils Zurawski, Hamburg: http://www.kommunikation-gesellschaft.de/
  Postill, J. 2006. Ethnos, April 2006. (PDF, 82 KB)

• Brechon, P. and J.P. Willaime (eds.). 2000. Medias et religion en mirroir. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
  This collection of studies underlines the role of media in the distribution of religious representations. The most attractive studies, from the media anthropology perspective, refer to religious ceremonies as media events and to the reception of the religious services through television.
  (Mihai Coman, Bucharest)

• Budka, Ph. and M. Kremser. 2004. 'CyberAnthropology - Anthropology of CyberCulture', in S. Khittel, B. Plankensteiner and M. Six-Hohenbalken (eds.), Contemporary issues in socio-cultural anthropology. Perspectives and research activities from Austria, 213-226. Vienna: Loecker. (PDF, 715 KB)
  This article investigates the historical development, the major theories and the ethnographic domains of an anthropology of cyberculture. In doing so, the authors use Arturo Escobar's influential paper on cyberanthropology, written in 1994, and connect potential research questions posed in this text with research projects recently conducted at the Viennese Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology. The authors conclude that the anthropology of cyberculture is not a new sub-discipline of socio-cultural anthropology, but a new field of inquiry with clear-cut domains and areas of ethnographic research.
  (Philipp Budka, Vienna)

C

• Carey, J. (ed.). 1988. Media, myth and narratives. London: Sage Publications.
  One of the most provocative books in this field. The studies are concerned with the media contents, particularly to the relation between the themes distributed by mass media and myth and between the structure of the journalistic discourse and the narrative mechanisms.
  (Mihai Coman, Bucharest)

• Coman, M. 2003. Pour une anthropolgie des medias. Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble.
  The largest synthesis of debates and studies with use the concepts of myth and ritual in media analysis. The volume includes also a proposal for a theory of media anthropology, case studies, and an analysis of the way the anthropologic perspective puts in a new light some of the basic concepts of media studies.
  (Mihai Coman, Bucharest)

• Couldry, N. 2003. Media rituals. A critical approach. London: Routledge.
  Draws on anthropological theories of ritual to critique media studies approaches to ritual. Argues that media rituals are actions that reproduce the myth of the media as privileged access points to the centre of society - the myth of the mediated centre.
  (John Postill, Sheffield Hallam)
  
  Published reviews:
  Postill, J. 2004. Anthropological Theory, February 2004.
  Rothenbuhler, E.W. 2004. European Journal of Communication 19 (3).
  Wilmore, M. 2003. Social Anthropology 11 (3).

D

• Dagron, A.G. 2001. Making waves. Stories of participatory communication for social change. New York: Rokefeller Foundation.
  Whilst not strictly media anthropology, this is a set of case studies of participatory communications projects in the developing world. It is a diverse set of case studies, not confined merely to the activities of NGOs. Anthropologists looking for interesting and unusual uses of media to investigate might want to use this as a reference.
  (Daniel Taghioff, London)

• Davila, A. 2001. Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
  Arlene Davila examines production processes in advertising industry and how media technologies play a crucial role in the shaping of (trans)national cultures and identities. She analyzes "Latino" media and particularly advertising agencies in the processes of community formation and transformation at local and transnational levels.
  (Yesim Kaptan, Indiana)

• Debray, R. 1996. Media manifestos. London and New York: Verso.
  In this book Debray outlines his proposed science of media, or mediology. He argues that a semiotics of the image is unfeasible, for images transgress rhetorics. Images apprehend time instantly which contrasts with the linearity of texts. Semioticians have tried to 'conquer' the image by studying films and cartoon strips but images are simple, not complicated; they short-circuit reality.
  (John Postill, Sheffield Hallam)

• Deger, J. 2006. Shimmering Screens: Making Media in an Aboriginal Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  Excellent recent work of Jennifer Deger on her long term work with the Yolngu community in Gapuwiyak, which looks at the negotiation of various media - photography, radio, video - with Yolngu cosmologies and concerns.
  (Faye Ginsburg, New York)

• Dickey, S. 1997. 'Anthropology and its contributions to studies of mass media', International Social Science Journal XLIX (3): 413-427.
  A useful, yet often neglected, overview of media anthropology in the late 1990s.
  (John Postill, Sheffield Hallam)

• Doostdar, A. 2004. 'The Vulgar Spirit of Blogging: On Language, Culture, and Power in Persian Weblogestan', American Anthropologist 106 (4): 651-663.
  In an ethnographic case study of a particular debate in the Iranian blogosphere, this paper concentrates on overlapping discourses of the 'proper' use of Persian, free speech, and the 'vulgar' potential of blogs. Alireza Doostdar uses a linguistic analysis based on Bakhtin's concept of the speech genre and dialogue, and the 'deep play' approach of Geertz. He also traces some connections between on and offline Persian speech patterns and social patterns.
  (Julian Hopkins, Kuala Lumpur)

• Drackle, D. 1999. 'Medienethnologie: Eine Option auf die Zukunft [Media anthropology: a future option]' in W. Kotot and D. Drackle (eds.), Wozu Ethnologie? [Why Anthropology?]. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag.
  An introduction to the emerging anthropology of media, in both senses of this term: as the anthropological study of media, and as the dissemination of anthropological knowledge to the general public. Particularly useful for undergraduate teaching.
  (John Postill, Sheffield Hallam)

E

• Eriksen, T.H. 2006. Engaging anthropology: The case for a public presence. Oxford: Berg.
  A well-argued statement for a stronger anthropological presence in the public realm, backed up with examples from the authorís own sustained engagement with the Norwegian press. Eriksen suggests that present day anthropologists have to rediscover the discipline's old craft of weaving narrative and analysis to reach a wider audience and help to shape the public sphere.
  Chapter 1 freely available online at http://folk.uio.no/geirthe/Engaging_Anthropology.html
  (John Postill, Sheffield Hallam)

• Experience Rich Anthropology Project.
  Online: http://www.era.anthropology.ac.uk
  See especially the archive of Farnham Rehfisch's field photographs, the Kinship Editor for drawing genealogies and work on the Powell Cotton museum including digitised field films.
  (David Zeitlyn, Kent)

F

• Faubion, J.D. 1999. 'Figuring David Koresh' in Marcus, G. (ed.), Critical anthropology now. Unexpected contexts, shifting constituencies, changing agendas. School of American Research Press.
  This piece is totally constructed through juxtaposition of newspaper stories on the Waco event. This could be read as a supplementary piece to Faubion's ethnography on Waco. But still it is valuable and creative piece even without seeing the whole ethnography.
  (Erkan Saka, Rice)

• Fischer, C. S. 1992. America calling: A social history of the telephone to 1940. Berkeley, CA, University of California Press.
  A highly accessible work discussing the social history of the telephone, noting that crises of moral panic and modernity (often perceived as novel aspects of the internet) were experienced a hundred years ago with the introduction of the telephone. Similarly, the telephone was appropriated and integrated by users in ways unanticipated and not necessarily welcomed by commercial organisations and policy makers, perhaps reinforcing as much as modifying social and cultural patterns.
  (Mark Gaved, Open University)

• Fishman, M. 1980. Manufacturing the News. London: University of Texas Press.
  The book analyses how social facts are constructed by journalists and why particular issues are highlighted while others - overlooked. Social reality cannot be understood outside of its context. The author cites the example of crime wave incident that became a popular issue in New York in 1979. Despite the official report of reduction in the number of crimes in the City, the journalists continued reporting growth in the number of crimes. The author argues that there are four ways through which newsmakers produce news: 1) detect occurrence, 2) interpret them as meaningful events, 3) investigate their factual character, and 4) assemble them into stories.
  (Taberez A. Neyazi, Singapore)

• Fiske, J. 1989. Television culture. London: Routledge.
  Here Fiske outlines his ideas of 'active audiences' (in chapter 5) also responding to some of the criticisms of his notions of 'semiological democracy'. For anthropologists this provides a serious look at issues of multiple meaning and the problems of interpretation in 'audience' readings of television.
  (Daniel Taghioff, London)

• Foster, R.J. 2002. Materializing the nation. Commodities, consumption and media in Papua New Guinea. Blooington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
  In this highly readable monograph Foster finds compelling evidence that Papua New Guinea (PNG), independent from Australia only since 1975, is already far more than an imagined political community (Anderson). He analyses Coca-Cola advertising, law and order campaigns,letters to the English-language press, millennial cults, betel nut chewing and other practices, and reports the emergence of a distinctly PNG public culture. Foster follows Billig in stressing the significance of banal everyday practices in the maintenance of a national public culture, whether they be reading the PNG weather forecast or viewing street hoardings in Tok Pisin, the national language.
  (John Postill, Sheffield Hallam)
  
  Published review:
  Postill, J. 2004. Ethnos 69: 1.

G

• Ginsburg, F.D., L. Abu-Lughod and B. Larkin (eds.). 2002. Media worlds. Anthropology on new terrain. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  This collection of anthropological papers covers a wide range of media phenomena: from the use of mass media by minority groups for cultural activism, via the diverse connections between national politics and media, to the study of transnational media circuits. The last two sections of the volume return to the social sites of media production and the social life of technology. By exploring socio-cultural processes of media consumption, production, and circulation, the book highlights the importance of ethnographic fieldwork in the study of media.
  (Philipp Budka, Vienna)
  
  Another reader that puts together numerous studies of specialists in visual anthropology and in media studies. The reader offers a great variety of case studies and some provocative theoretical debates.
  (Mihai Coman, Bucharest)
  
  Published review:
  Durington, M. 2004. American Ethnologist 31 (1), February 2004.
  Online: http://www.aaanet.org/aes/bkreviews/result_details.cfm?bk_id=3038

• Godzic, W. 2004. Telewizja i jej gatunki (po Wielkim Bracie) [Television and its genres (after Big Brother)]. Krakow: Universitas.
  Based on the research of Polish television production and consumption in the last years, this book is a reflection on the contemporary developments in the system of television genres. Several chapters are devoted to the processes occurring in this system: the orientation on and saturation with the news and the growing popularity of reality shows and sitcoms. The emergence and spread of the new genres have significant bearings on human condition. The author suggests that after the Panopticon of Michel Foucault and Synopticon of Zygmunt Bauman there comes an era of Demopticon. In Demopticon the viewers who search for meanings on the TV screens turn cameras on themselves, thus becoming agents of producing cultural meaning.
  (Wieslaw Godzic, Warsaw)

• Golebiewska, M. 2003. Demontaz atrakcji. [Demontage of attraction. On the aesthetics of audiovisuality]. Gdansk: slowo/obraz terytoria.
  The book is concerned with the epistemological and aesthetic status of the audiovisual message in the contemporary culture of media. The changes in the anthropological definitions are linked to those occuring in human perception under the influence of media and technology. The book applies the conception of 'attraction' (proposed by Sergey Eisenstein) to the interpretation of phenomena of the contemporary popular culture. The second main point of reference is the conception of the montage and demontage (dismantling) of human consciousness, proposed and applied by Walter Benjamin to the description of shifts of human perception and subjectivity at the beginning of the 20th century, when new technologies had been significantly influencing the sphere of culture. The analytical part of the book concentrates on the study of the film and television as postmodernist arts, the specificity of the digital image, the self-reference of advertising messages and the social advertising as an example of 'anaesthetics'. The analyses acquire a status of demontage - the mode of cultural self-reference and individual self-cognition typical of contemporary times.
  (Maria Golebiewska, Warsaw)

• Goody, J. 1997. Representations and contradictions. Ambivalence towards images, theatre, fiction, relics and sexuality. Oxford: Blackwell.
  For the author, representations are a re-presenting of that which is absent. As language users, humans cannot avoid but having doubts about the ontological status of representations. These doubts worsen with the advent of writing, leading in some literate societies to iconoclasm, the rejection of visual representations. A wonderful media survey ranging wide across historical periods and geographical areas, it offers some invaluable insights into the unintended effects of a new media practice (writing) upon an older media practice (painting).
  (John Postill, Sheffield Hallam)

• Gupta, A. 1995. 'Blurred boundaries: the discourse of corruption, the culture of politics and the imagined state', American Ethnologist. 22: 375-402.
  This is a very creatively made piece of audience research that shows how newspapers actually serve as the media to disseminate discourses and how Benedict Anderson's ideas can be elaborated ethnographically.
  (Erkan Saka, Rice)

H

• Hoybye, M.T., Johansen, C. and T. Tjornhoj-Thomsen. 2005. 'Online interaction. Effects of storytelling in an internet breast cancer support group.' Psychooncology 14(3): 211-220. (PDF, 124 KB)
  This ethnographic study explores how support groups on the internet forms strategies of empowerment to women with breast cancer. It investigates the storytelling emerging on the Scandinavian Breast Cancer Mailing list that provides a passage from isolation to inclusion in a new social world. Thus storytelling is analysed as a way of acting on experience and mediating social transformation. Our findings showed that the internet was considered a means for finding ways of living with breast cancer, which suggests that internet support groups have important potential for the rehabilitation of cancer patients.
  (Mette Terp Hoybye, Copenhagen)

I

• Iwabuchi, K. 2002. Recentering globalization. Popular culture and Japanese transnationalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
  Iwabuchi as a cultural studies scholar who has done detailed studies of the reception of, in particular Japanese, television programmes in the east Asian region. On this basis, he provides a refreshingly different take on global flows.
  (Brian Moeran, Copenhagen)

J

• Jarecka, U. 1999. Swiat wideoklipu [The World of Music Videos]. Warsaw: Oficyna Naukowa.
  The book treats video-clip as a new language of the visual and both cause and effect of its changes. In the first part the ideas and cultural processes, which formed the new version of the iconosphere are analysed. While examining the emergence of an ocularcentric perspective in Western culture, the author focuses on the main aspects of scopic regimes and the aesthetics of vanishing. The historical moment and features of the new media era, electronic images in particular, are considered in the interpretation of the visual culture. The second part of the book is devoted to the analyses of the audiovisual material from MTV, Viva, Onyx and MCM music television channels. The types of music videos - political, contemplative, consumption-oriented and beauty-oriented - match the flexible sensitivity of the audience. The author investigates the intertextuality of messages, symbols and archetypes appearing in music videos, especially in the portraits of men (e.g. eroticism) and in experiments with body images. Alternative worlds of performances in music videos are an example of the aesthetics of vanishing at work. The analyses are subordinated to three types of space in the visual: the real, the quasi-real and the utopian (mythic).
  (Urszula Jarecka, Warsaw).

• Jarvie, I.C. 1970. Towards a sociology of the cinema. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
  Jarvie's early work on cinema is a standard sociological take on how the film industry functioned in the 1960s.
  (Brian Moeran, Copenhagen)

• Jeffery, R. 2000. India's Newspaper Revolution: Capitalism, Politics and the Indian-Language Press 1977-99. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
  The book provides an insightful analyses to the growth of newspaper industry in India since independence to present time. India has witnessed newspaper revolution in terms of total number of newspapers published and circulated. Especially Indian language newspapers have grown tremendously since 1980s. The book attributes the growth of newspapers in India to: a) the rise of capitalism; b) the information technology revolution; c) growth of advertising industry; d) rise in the literacy level; e) interest in the political news.
  (Taberez A. Neyazi, Singapore)

• Jensen, C.B. 2003. 'Communicating models: The relevance of models for research on the worlds of the Internet', in S. Hjarvard (ed.), Media in a globalized society. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press.
  This chapter contains a very interesting discussion of the 'founding metaphors' to be found in Internet research, grouped under three headings: the human-machine connection, the human-human relation, and the human-machine-society configuration (see Figure 1, p. 264).
  (John Postill, Sheffield Hallam)

• Johnson, K. 2001. Television and the Social Change in Rural India. New Delhi: Sage Publication.
  The book is an ethnographic analyses of how advent of television played an important role in the process of social change in rural India. The author examines its influence on gender roles, caste and family relationships, aspirations, expectations and concerns of villagers. It studies the role that villagers consider TV played in the social and economic development of the region. The author contends that the role of TV has undergone change from that of educating, informing and entertaining to only one aspect that is entertaining.
  (Taberez A. Neyazi, Singapore)

K

• Kemper, S. 2001. Buying and believing. Sri Lankan advertising and consumers in a transnational world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  This analysis of the Sri Lankan advertising industry and Sri Lankan identity is a useful account of local adoptions of and resistances to global marketing forces.
  (Brian Moeran, Copenhagen)

• Kerr, D. 1995. 'Popular Theatre & Macro-Media' (chapter 5), in African Popular Theatre. From Pre-colonial Times to the Present Day. Oxford: Currey, Portsmouth: Heinemann, Cape Town: David Philip, Harare: Baobab, Nairobi: EAEP, p.172-195.
  The chapter is part of a historical overview of the performance arts in Africa. In the fifth chapter, Kerr describes the various performance genres that have originated since the entry of aural and visual mass media. Drawing upon data from a whole range of Sub-Sahara African countries, he shows how radio, television and cinema have gradually been taken over by postcolonials and thus been indigenised.
  (Katrien Pype, Leuven)

• Kinsella, Sh. 2000. Adult Manga. ConsumAsiaN Series. London: Curzon.
  Sharon Kinsella has provided a comprehensive account of the Japanese manga or cartoon publishing industry, based on fieldwork and interviews with editors.
  (Brian Moeran, Copenhagen)

• Kumar, S. 2006. Gandhi Meets Primetime: Globalization ad Nationalism in Indian Television. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
  Shanti Kumar's book, in which he examines television programs, print advertisements, and publicity brochures, demonstrates the transformation of the national media and the national identity in the postcolonial India through the influence of transnational and translocal media networks. Kumar's research in India illuminates the struggle for hegemony between the national and the global forces of capitalism and the role of media, specifically the television's in this struggle.
  (Yesim Kaptan, Indiana)

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• Lie, R. 2003. Spaces of intercultural communication. An interdisciplinary introduction to communication, culture and globalizing/localizing identities. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press.
  This volume explores spaces where cultures meet and mix in entangled flows and levels of globality and locality. It makes a contribution to our understanding of the complex processes of communications across and beyond borders. It provides an introduction to intercultural/international communication and changing identities. Through its interdisciplinary approach it integrates theories from communication studies, cultural studies, media studies and social anthropology. The book consists of three major parts and eight chapters. The first part specifically addresses the concepts of communication and culture. The second addresses globalizing/localizing identities. Chapters in the third part theorize the spaces in which these processes take place and use the socio-cultural phenomenon of television as an example to focus on the interdisciplinary potential of television studies.
  (Rico Lie, Wageningen)

• Lie, R. 2003. 'Anthropolgy and television studies', in: Spaces of intercultural communication. An interdisciplinary introduction to communication, culture and globalizing/localizing identities, 151-179. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press.
  This chapter explores three dimensions of the existing relations between anthropology and television studies. First, the anthropological study of media, which is concerned with the fundamental academic study of television. Subfields addressed here are: (1) the introduction and circulation of television; (2) producers of ethnographies, and; (3) soap operas and telenovelas. Second, the fourfold area of applied media anthropology, international communication, development communication and participatory communication research for social change, which are primarily concerned with communication across social, cultural, political and economic borders. They are connected to anthropology, yet situated outside the discipline of anthropology itself. Third, television studies within cultural media studies and communication studies. Here the lines of interdisciplinarity point to anthropological theories, methodologies and philosophies that have entered the mixture of communication, media and cultural studies. The four lines that are identified are: (1) myth, ritual and symbols; (2) cultural globalization/localization; (3) audience ethnographies, and (4) the anthropological philosophy. After having reviewed these areas of intersection, the chapter formulates arguments towards a new generation of anthropological television studies.
  (Rico Lie, Wageningen)

• Liebes, T. and J. Curran (eds.). 1998. Media, ritual and identity. London: Routledge.
  An excellent collection of studies, a tribute paid to Elihu Katz. The majority of the studies are focused on different media events, giving seminal theoretical insides.
  (Mihai Coman, Bucharest)

• Lule, J. 2001. Daily news, eternal stories. The mythological role of journalism. New York: The Guilford Press.
  The most elaborate embodiment of archetypal approach in media studies. Lule considers both news and myths to be the actualization of eternal stories, or archetypes, that have marked mankindís history and destiny since the most ancient times. Lule identifies 7 mythic archetypes actualized by modern news: the victim, the scapegoat, the hero, the good mother, the trickster, the other world, and the flood.
  (Mihai Coman, Bucharest)

M

• Machado-Borges, T. 2003. Only for You! Brazilians and the telenovela flow. Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International.
  The book focuses on the reception of a popular and commercial mass-media product - Brazilian 'soap-operas', or telenovelas. Ethnographic fieldwork conducted during several periods between 1995 and 2000, in the state of Minas Gerais, south-eastern Brazil, has shown that outside of the context of immediate telenovela reception, people talked extensively not only about the contents and characters of these programs, but also about subjects and products that derived from or entangled with the telenovela plot. The term 'telenovela flow' is used in order to describe and visualize this crucial part of informants' receptive experience. The book explores the contents of the telenovela flow, tracing and identifying some of its articulations and interspersions, and relating them to contemporary Brazilian society. It also examines the way the telenovela flow hails and interpellates the viewer to interact with it. The telenovela flow presents hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race and class as embodied and naturalized, yet also tangible and immediate ways of transcending or at least circumventing these very hierarchies. Engaging with the telenovela flow viewers evaluate, scrutinize, and search for ways to reinforce or transform their positions as subjects within Brazilian society.
  (Thais Machado-Borges, Stockholm)
  
  Published review:
  Halstead, N. 2006. Social Anthropology, 14/2, 287-288.

• Malefyt, T.W. and B. Moeran (eds.). 2003. Advertising cultures. Oxford: Berg.
  The volume explores relationships between anthropology and advertising practices, and includes useful chapters by Kemper, Miller, Lien and others.
  (Brian Moeran, Copenhagen)
  
  This volume is a collection of articles about the production of advertisements in different cultural settings. How do advertisers produce the strategies of persuasion? Which assumptions do they make about products and consumers? And how do they negotiate them during the making of campaigns?
  (Ursula Rao, Halle)

• Mankekar, P. 1999. Screening culture, viewing politics. An ethnography of television, womanhood, and nation in postcolonial India. Durham: Duke University Press.
  A good audience ethnography with heavy reliance on content analysis of popular soap operas in India. Though there is not much focus on the production itself, it could be read as how broader social and political environments (such as the rise of nationalism) influence the production.
  (Erkan Saka, Rice)

• Manning, P. 2001. News and news sources. A critical introduction. London: Sage.
  This is a comprehensive overview of the studies that analyse the relations between journalists and their sources and the way news is constructed in interaction. It is a well written introduction that provides an overview over the theoretical interests that guided different studies and the conclusion that were drawn.
  (Ursula Rao, Halle)

• Mano, W. 2007. 'Popular music as journalism in Zimbabwe', Journalism Studies 8(1): 61-78.
  Mano has shown how popular music function as journalism in Zimbabwe, where mass media are weak, opposition political parties are frail and the state exerts strong control over the media.
  (Herman Wasserman, Newcastle University)

• Marcus, G. (ed.). 1996. Connected: engagements with media. University of Chicago Press.
  The volume uses interview format to demonstrate the developments in mass media studies, particularly in the new media. The aim is to give some anthropological insights for future ethnographic studies in these fields. Most of the interviewees are media producers.
  (Erkan Saka, Rice)

• Marcus, G. (ed.). 1997. Cultural producers in perilous states: editing events, documenting change (Late editions: cultural studies for the end of the century). Chicago: Chicago University Press.
  The format and aim of the book is similar to the Connected volume. This is an attempt to study media producers whose locations are considered to be marginal to the high-tech global centres. To a certain extent, this volume can also be considered to study of activism through media usage. I feel this volume has intellectual affinity to Media worlds. Anthropology on new terrain (Ginsburg et al).
  (Erkan Saka, Rice)

• Marshall, J. 2001. 'Cyberspace or Cybertopos: The creation of online space', Social Analysis 45(1): 81-102.
  Online 'space' is created by the structures of communication, the patterns of naming and exchange which eventuate and by offline categorizations and uses of space. Online space both expresses and reflects the status, productivity and aims of participants and produces a 'mood', or mode of being, which can stabilize the divergence of meaning in such a world.
  (Jon Marshall, Sydney)

• Marshall, J. 2002. 'The Sexual Life of Cyber-Savants', The Australian Journal of Anthropology 14(2): 229-248.
  The paper investigates the role of netsex within an internet mailing list, and the spillage of that sexual contact into offlist and offline life. Netsex stabilises divergence of meaning, and is part of the framing conventions which revolve around the problems of authenticity.
  (Jon Marshall, Sydney)

• Marshall, J. 2004. 'Governance, Structure and Existence: Authenticity, Rhetoric, Race and Gender on an Internet Mailing List', Proceedings of The Australian Electronic Governance Conference 2004, Centre for Public Policy, University of Melbourne.
  Online: http://www.public-policy.unimelb.edu.au/egovernance/papers/21_Marshall.pdf
  This paper based on the study of the governance of the Cybermind mailing list argues that there are three main factors influencing internet governance: 1) the organisation of communication (whether the forum is a mailing list, MOO, Newsgroup, weblog etc. ; 2) existential issues of 'being' online (such as suspension of being, flame, and patterns of exchange); and 3) the rhetorical mobilization of offline categories.
  (Jon Marshall, Sydney)

• Marshall, J. 2006a. 'Negri, Hardt, Distributed Governance and Open Source Software', Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 3(1).
  Online: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal/article/view/122
  The paper argues that distributed governance is not inherently democratic, but devolves responsibility elsewhere, making it harder to confront power. Furthermore the internet is not always a model of democracy and it is argued that those involved in the construction of free and open source software are fraught with the problems which affect people in information capitalism in general.
  (Jon Marshall, Sydney)

• Marshall, J. 2006b. 'Categories, Gender and Online Community', E-Learning 3(2).
  Online: http://www.wwwords.co.uk/elea/content/pdfs/3/issue3_2.asp
  This paper presents a sketch for a theory of the rhetorics involved in categorisation and the creation of culture in online communities. It is argued that the meaning of categories depends upon the ways they are framed. Among the most important ways of framing online by Westerners are Space, Public and Private, Authenticity, Gender and Community. The paper elaborates these ideas by means of exploring the nature of online communication, power and the category of gender on the basis of the case study of the Mailing List 'Cybermind'.
  (Jon Marshall, Sydney)

• Mazzarella, W. 2003. Shoveling smoke. Advertising and globalization in contemporary India. Durham: Duke University Press.
  This is a rich and very interesting ethnography about Indian advertisement culture. It shows how advertisements are made, consumers constructed and images of India and Indian products created. Theoretically the book advances an argument about the making and unmaking of cultural differences in a globalized (or better glocalized) world economy.
  (Ursula Rao, Halle)

• Mazzarella, W. 2004. 'Culture, globalization, mediation', Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 345-367.
  A review of the literature on media and globalization. The review claims that several key strands of globalization studies have tended to reproduce substantialist and essentialist models of culture. The author suggests an alternative ethnographic and theoretical strategy on the basis of a general theory of media and mediation.
  (Hannah Knox, Manchester)

• Meyer B., Moors A. (eds.) 2006. Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
  This edited volume provides an overview of the current forms of religious mediation, the proliferation of religion in the public sphere, and the blurring of the boundaries between entertainment and religion. It analyses how leaders or more subaltern practitioners of Pentecostal, Hindu, Muslim and indigenous movements (for example Israelian Jews or Australian Aborigines) use sound and image to mediate personal identities, religious experiences and often alternative realms of belonging. The combination of ethnographic material and theoretical reflections contributes to the high quality of the texts. Very interesting and innovative.
  (Katrien Pype, Leuven).

• Miller, D. and Slater D. 2000. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg.
  A first of its kind when published, this book is cast as a classic anthropological monograph focused on a 'place' (Trinidad), and aims at showing how internet may be approached ethnographically, in the substantively broader anthropological sense of that term. Drawing on Miller's previous extensive work in Trinidad, it situates internet engagements in terms of social networks and relationships, national identity, economic history and pursuits, and religious practices.
  (Jens Kjaerulff, Victoria)

• Mithen, S. 1996. The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science. London and New York: Thames & Hudson.
  Of special interest to the study of media are Mithen's palaeoanthropological models of the relationship between the origins of art and the emergence of 'cognitive fluidity' in humans' modular minds as recently as 60,000 to 30,000 years ago. Highly speculative work, but well worth the read nonetheless.
  (John Postill, Sheffield Hallam)

• Moeran, B. 1996. A Japanese advertising agency. An anthropology of media and markets. ConsumAsiaN Series. London: Curzon.
  This study of a Japanese advertising agency is the first of its kind, and provides a detailed analysis of the industry, while also including an exemplary case study of a contact lens campaign.
  (Brian Moeran, Copenhagen)

• Moeran, B. (ed.). 2001. Asian media productions. ConsumAsiaN Series, London: Curzon.
  Asian Media Productions looks at how media forms are produced and consumed in the Asian region. It includes chapters by Ulf Hannerz, Mark Hobart, Koichi Iwabuchi, James Lull, and others.
  (Brian Moeran, Copenhagen)

• Morley, D. 2000. Home Territories. Media, Mobility and Identity. London and New York: Routledge.
  Home is no longer a stable concept/place, but the point where global and local trends intersect. The author looks at home from various perspectives: the national construction of the homeland, the gendering of the home, the role of media in opening the home to the global and in prescribing the model family, the effects of mobility, migration and urban spaces on the home and finally, the recreation of communities and new boundaries in virtual space. The book isnít based on original research, rather it is a collection of essays on the various facets of home and the role of new communication technologies in both opening up and closing down this ever changing private/public space.
  (Delia Dumitrica, Calgary)

• Morley, D. 1992. Television, audiences and cultural studies. London: Routledge.
  This is one of the works that established ethnographic approaches, especially focus group work, as a methodololgy in media studies. There is an interesting survey of psychoanalytic approaches to media, as well as of models of transmission, followed up by the classic piece of focus group work on 'The Nationwide Audience'.
  (Daniel Taghioff, London)

N

• Nyamnjoh, F.B. 2005. Africa's Media. Democracy & the Politics of Belonging. London: Zed Books.
  Nyamnjoh offers an interesting account of the mass media of Sub-Saharan Africa through the prism of the struggle for democratisation. The book balances well between general assumptions about the printed, spoken and digital communication systems in Africa and a detailed analysis of the power positions within the diverging media forms in Cameroon. Throughout the book, he argues that media in Africa have not yet been domesticated, i.e. brought closer to local notions of personhood and agency. African journalists are focussing too much upon 'citizens' denying the 'subject' identity of Africans. Njamnjoh states that Africans are both citizens and subjects, with a constant shift between them. Mass media has to consider this in order to take part in the democratisation process in a more clear and constructive way.
  (Katrien Pype, Leuven)

O

• Osorio, F. 2001. Mass media anthropology. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis: University of Chile.
  According to the author the transmission of culture through mass media is the object of study in mass media anthropology. The dissertation is a kind of literature review on the connections of mass media studies, communication studies and anthropology.
  (Pille Runnel, Tartu)

P

• Peterson, M.A. 2003. Anthropology and mass communication. Media and myth in the new millennium. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
  An attempt of bringing together scattered strands of media research with the aim of establishing media anthropology as a full-right sub-discipline. These strands come from various ways of looking at media practices through anthropological lenses as well as from non-anthropological studies of mass communication and mediation that nevertheless contain valuable insights for anthropologists. The author surveys a variety of theoretical approaches to media and produces an interdisciplinary review of research done in this area in the second half of the twentieth century. His account goes beyond simple enumeration of the trends already existing and attempts drawing a more coherent yet non-binding picture of the field.
  (Anna Horolets, Warsaw)

• Postill, J. 2003. 'The life and afterlife crises of Saribas Iban television sets', Media@lse Electronic Working Papers, no 5.
  This paper discusses the exchange of television sets among the Iban of Sarawak, in Malaysian Borneo. It focuses on two critical stages in the 'careers' of Iban televisions: their acquisition and their disposal. This approach captures these media artefacts as they transit through the gift and exchange systems that bind rural and urban Iban, as well as the living and the dead. One form of transit are burial rites at which television sets are destroyed so that the deceased can still enjoy their favourite programmes in the Afterlife - an upside-down world were only broken things work.
  (John Postill, Sheffield Hallam)
  Online: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/mediaWorkingPapers/listOfTitles.htm

• Postill, J. 2003. 'Knowledge, literacy, and media among the Iban of Sarawak: a reply to Maurice Bloch', Social Anthropology (11) 1: 79-100. (PDF, 350 KB)
  This article addresses the old divide between 'autonomous' (Goody, Ong, etc) and 'ideological' (Street, Bloch, etc) approaches to the cross-cultural study of literacy. Whilst the autonomous model highlights the world historical links between literacy and processes such as state-building, scientific development, etc, the ideological model explores the huge diversity of 'literacies' around the globe. The author proposes a synthesis of the two approaches on the basis of historical and ethnographic evidence from the Iban of Sarawak, a state in Malaysian Borneo. He also suggests that there is a strong analogy between the ideological model and the 'appropriationist' paradigm that currently prevails within the anthropological study of media.
  (John Postill, Sheffield Hallam)

• Postill, J. 2006. Media and Nation Building: How the Iban Became Malaysian. New York: Berghahn Books.
  Media and Nation Building is an intellectually engaging and thought-provoking book, and is a rich contribution to several arenas within anthropology. Media and Nation Building provides an analysis of the processes by which the Iban (one of the ethnic groups in Sarawak often referred to as Dayak) have been incorporated into the modern Malaysian state. What Postill argues is that the Malaysian state's nation building program has been overwhelmingly successful. The state's Malaysianization propaganda became 'sustainable propaganda' (analogous to sustainable development), which in turn became an ideolect, an Iban remaking of the state ideology though which they make sense of the various media and ultimately their world. In their nation building project the Malaysian state has controlled and employed various media, which Postill productively takes to include not only television, radio and newspapers, but clock and calendar time. That inclusive definition of media leads to a breadth of analysis in Media and Nation Building that researchers and teachers of media anthropology, as well as those interested in nationalism or political anthropology, should find useful.
  (Gordon T. Gray, Temple University)
  Draft chapter and abstract online at: http://johnpostill.co.uk/
  
  Published reviews:
  Gray, G. 2007. American Anthropologist.
  Mihelj, S. 2007. H-Nationalism.
  Online: http://johnpostill.co.uk/

• Postill, J. (in press) 'Localising the Internet beyond communities and networks', New Media and Society. (PDF, 72 KB)
  This article draws on ethnographic research among Internet activists in a suburb of Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) to argue for the need to broaden the current conceptual lexicon of Internet studies, particularly at the local level of analysis, to overcome their dependence on the paired notions of community and network, e.g. in phrases such as 'community networks'.
  (John Postill, Sheffield Hallam)

R

• Rotherbuhler, E.W. 1998. Ritual communication: from everyday conversation to mediated ceremony. London: Sage.
  The most clear and complete presentation of the relationship between the communication studies and anthropology. The author follows the way the anthropological theories about ritual are applied in both interpersonal communication and mass mediated communication.
  (Mihai Coman, Bucharest)

• Rothenbuhler, E. and M. Coman (eds). 2005. Media Anthropology. London: Sage.
  This reader is a welcome, 30-chapter long contribution to the two existing media anthropology readers (Askew and Wilk 2002, Ginsburg et. al. 2002). It brings to this research area a more interdisciplinary approach (Rothenbuhler is a media scholar, not an anthropologist) as well as an interest in 'classic' anthropological concerns such as myth and ritual. In addition, it devotes a section to the question of how anthropology can engage more effectively with journalists and other media professionals (cf. Eriksen 2006).
  (John Postill, Sheffield Hallam)

S

• Schroeder, I.W. and S. Voell (eds.). 2002. Moderne Oralitaet. Ethnologische Perspektiven auf die plurimediale Gegenwart. [Modern orality.] Marburg: Curupira.
  This edited volume states that there are structural similarities between primordial orality and current forms of communication. The revitalisation of orality provides a socially accepted and culturally more appropriate communicative strategy to the predominantly oral societies of the periphery. In a variety of ethnographical case studies, from the indigenous Southwest of the US to a German chat-community, the phenomenon of 'modern orality' is analysed.
  (Philipp Budka, Vienna)

• Scollon, R. and S. Wong Scollon. 2004. Nexus analysis. Discourse and the emerging Internet. London and New York: Routledge.
  An anthropology inspired analysis of the early stages of the internet use in university teaching and other contexts in Alaska. The authors offer a personal account of the multiple shifts in discourse practices caused by the introduction of the new medium of communication.
  (Anna Horolets, Warsaw)

• Skov, L. and B. Moeran (eds.). 1995. Women, media and consumption in Japan. ConsumAsiaN Series. London: Curzon.
  This book is now considered a 'classic' benchmark in studies of Japanese media, and includes media-related studies of different kinds of Japanese women - ranging from 40 year old 'traditional' types to teenage 'cuties'.
  (Brian Moeran, Copenhagen)

• Skuse, A. 1999. Negotiated outcomes: an ethnography of the production and consumption of a BBC World Service soap opera for Afghanistan. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis: University of London.
  At the height of the Taliban troubles, the author traces the social life of a BBC radio soap all the way from the production studios to its varied contexts of consumption.
  (John Postill, Sheffield Hallam)

• Spitulnik, D. 1993. 'Anthropology and mass media', Annual Review of Anthropology 22: 293-315. (PDF, 1,6 MB)
  This is a comprehensive seeming review of the literature relevant to anthropology and media, at the time (1993). It covers most of the aspects that one might struggle with in defining media anthropology. It calls particular attention to issue in linguistic anthropology, and studies of communication, as well as clearly laying out the shift from text or message based analysis towards more contextual and practice based approaches in Media Scholarship.
  (Daniel Taghioff, London)
  
  The obligatory entry point to the anthropology of media up until the early 21st century readers by Askew and Wilk (2002), and Ginsburg et al (2002) were published - both are annotated above. Still very useful today as an early review and programmatic piece.
  (John Postill, Sheffield Hallam)

• Spitulnik, D. 1996. 'The social circulation of media discourse and the mediation of communities', Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 6: 161-187. (PDF, 2,8 MB)
  A rare 'diffusionist' analysis of why certain types of radio discourse spread and become part of a country's public culture, with Zambia as the ethnographic case study.
  (John Postill, Sheffield Hallam)

• Spitulnik, D. 2002. 'Alternative small media and communicative spaces', in G. Hyden, M. Leslie and F. F. Ogundimu (eds.), Media and democracy in Africa. New Brunswick,NJ, and London: Transaction. [Published simultaneously with Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute]. (PDF, 1,2 MB)
  Focuses on the role of small media in fostering civil society in contexts where mass media are tightly controlled and highly censored. Combining ethnography of communication and media studies approaches, it examines how technological parameters and cultural influences factor into small media production and circulation, and discusses the differential effects of variables such as technological access, verbal culture, literacy, class, and gender in small media mobilization.
  (Debra Spitulnik, Atlanta)

• Stahlberg, P. 2002. Lucknow daily. How a Hindi newspaper constructs society. Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology 51, Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell.
  An ethnography that can roughly be placed within the subfield of media production. The author attempts to supersede the orthogonal visions of the mass media and locality and to demonstrate the convergence and mutual dependencies between the rootless and the rooted.
  (Anna Horolets, Warsaw)

• Street, B. (ed.). 1993. Cross-Cultural approaches to literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  This landmark volume captures a rich sample of ethnographic studies of literacy around the world. Its authors subscribe to the ideological model of literacy. In their view, literacy practices are hugely diverse and always entangled with power relations. They reject the autonomous model of literacy (Goody, Ong, etc) with its notion of a world historical great divide between orality and literacy. Instead they explore context-specific oral/literate mixes in a range of societies, the stress being on how ideology guides literacy practices. There are strong parallels between the ideological model and the implicitly ideological models adopted by most anthropologists working on media practices other than writing. Is writing/literacy a yet to be acknowledged media practice?
  (John Postill, Sheffield Hallam)

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• Taghioff, D. 2005. 'Another Subject is Possible: Reporting in the Indian Press on the World Social Forum (WSF)', SOAS Literary Review, Spring 2005.
  Online: http://www.soas.ac.uk/soaslit/2005_index.htm
  This article is about the reporting on the World Social Forum held in Mumbai. It explores the coverage in the English Language Press of India, examining how various contructions of the liberal/enlightenment self are found in the political commentary. It then contrasts this with the lack of coverage in vernacular language publications, pointing out that another subject, in both senses of the word, is possible.
  (Daniel Taghioff, London)
  

• Taureg, M. and F. Wittmann (eds.). 2005. Entre tradition orale et nouvelles technologies: ou vont les mass média au Sénégal? Dakar: Enda Tiers Monde.
  In 2003 the Goethe Institute in Dakar organised a series of seminars on the Senegalese mass media. This volume covers some of the more controversial and fascinating issues to emerge from these meetings, including the immediacy of local radio, the working conditions of journalists, corruption, the informal sector, and the popular press. The authors are mostly young media professionals, researchers and lecturers.
  (Frank Wittmann, Fribourg)

• Tilic, Dogan L. 1998. Utaniyorum ama gazeteciyim. Turkiyeíde ve yunanistan