Week 1 Notes: The Anthropology of Media and Mediation
Download as PPTX, PDF4 likes1,933 views
This document provides an overview of key concepts and readings for Week 1 of an anthropology course on the anthropology of media. It discusses how anthropologists have increasingly studied media and its role in cultural contexts over the past few decades. Some key points made include: - Media shapes and is shaped by cultural practices and defies easy categorization or boundaries. - Studying media has altered understandings of the relationship between the local and global. - There is a renewed interest in studying Western media and how media circulates globally. - The field has moved beyond just studying communication technologies to a broader anthropology of social mediation and how various processes circulate images and knowledge.
More Related Content
Similar to Week 1 Notes: The Anthropology of Media and Mediation (20)
Week 1 Notes: The Anthropology of Media and Mediation
- 1. ANTH 2312H: The Anthropology of Media Week 1 - The Anthropology of Media and Mediation
- 11. Key Goals and Questions What is media and how does it shape and get shaped by particular cultural contexts and practices How is media utilized in the research designs and practices of anthropologists? How does media interact and collaboratively alter our sense of embodied selves? What role do the media play in challenging the boundaries between local, regional, national and transnational scales?
- 12. Reaching our Goals We are going to cover a diverse range of topics, ideas, theories, case studies We are going to challenge our understandings of our own media worlds, while interrogating those of people from around the world We are going to work with and through a variety of media devices and processes We are going to take seriously the ways in which media challenge and interact with our sensory awareness. We are going to interrogate how the classroom itself is a site for the production and consumption of a number of forms of media and mediation.
- 13. MEDIA, MEDIUM, MEDIATION media (n.) "newspapers, radio, TV, etc." 1927, perhaps abstracted from mass media (1923, a technical term in advertising), plural of medium, on notion of "intermediate agency," a sense found in that word in English from c. 1600. medium (n.) 1580s, "a middle ground, quality, or degree," from Latin medium "the middle, midst, center; interval," noun use of neuter of adjective medius (see medial (adj.)). Meaning "intermediate agency, channel of communication" is from c. 1600. That of "person who conveys spiritual messages" first recorded 1853, from notion of "substance through which something is conveyed." Artistic sense (oil, watercolors, etc.) is from 1854. Happy medium is the "golden mean," Horace's aurea mediocritas. mediation (n.) late 14c., from Medieval Latin mediationem (nominative mediatio) "a division in the middle," noun of action from past participle stem of mediare (see mediator). Related:Mediational. - from the ONLINE ETYMOLOGY DICTIONARY
- 14. Reading 1 - Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (2002) Faye D. Ginsburg ● Professor of Anthropology at NYU ● Social movements in the United States ● Ethnography of media ● Disability research Lila Abu-Lughod ● Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. ● The relationship between cultural forms and power ● The politics of knowledge and representation ● The dynamics of gender and the question of women’s rights in the Middle East Brian Larkin ● Professor of Anthropology at Columbia's Barnard College ● Introduction of media technologies into Nigeria ● Failures and breakdowns inherent in technologies
- 15. What’s New about the Anthropology of Media? The authors are clear that the questions driving much of their work is nothing new Media Studies has been a robust field of inquiry since the 1960s, and can trace its roots back to the 1920s with the “Chicago School” of social theory Anthropological interest in media technologies has been around since the 1940s It has only grown alongside the increased ubiquity of media devices Since the 1980s, anthropologists have become committed to recognizing the power and power structures of media technologies, and the broader practices, cultural values and resistance moves they shape and get shaped by
- 16. Shifting Boundaries "...refuses reified boundaries of place and culture, so we have attempted to use anthropology to push media studies into new environments and examine diverse media practices that are only beginning to be mapped" (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod & Larkin: 1)
- 17. The Defiance of Media Media is not simply made in studios Media is not simply consumed in living rooms Media is not isolated to one environment, nation or cultural group Media defies categorization Media defies easy to trace relationships with broader social and cultural formations and practices. Media is part of our mundane lives in ways we can never fully appreciate Media plays a role in the shaping our of routines, social interactions and sense of
- 18. "...media are embedded in people's quotidian lives but also how consumers and producers are themselves imbricated in discursive universes, political situations, national settings historical moments, and transnational flows, to name a few relevant contexts" (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod & Larkin: 2)
- 19. Anthropology and the Wider World of Media Studies Media studies has been criticized for a narrow understanding of what media technologies and contexts “matter” in research They often neglect media production and consumption contexts that exist outside of the realm of Western culture Not enough interest in the movement of media products and practices into and out of non-Western locations THIS IS A DEBATEABLE POINT
- 20. The Local and the Global Studying media has altered the ways in which anthropologists understand the relationship between the local and the global Neither can be considered a static scale Recent developments in networked technologies alter anthropological notions of space and place, and the relationship between local communities and the larger connected world of global media circulation This has an impact on how we think about the word “culture” and how it is made, where it exists and how it moves and connects people.
- 21. Local and Global - Fragmentation and Expansion Media both expand AND limit us Media expands the reach of our ideas, stories and social potential Media devices are inherently limiting. They all possess a number of qualities, processes and actions that they simply can not do
- 22. Western Anthropologists Come Home The anthropology of media consolidated in the 1980s The subfield emerged along a growing interest in cultural anthropologists studying western cultures and subcultures Odd that this only became popular in the mid-20th century, considering the number of anthropologists who were born, raised and trained in North America and Europe This is tied to larger questions of racism embedded in the cultural and intellectual history of anthropology
- 23. Theories, Practices and Anthropologists on the Move "These shifts, in turn, catalyzed a critical rethinking of one of our most productive notions--culture--and the parameters of our key methodology: in-depth, intensive, and long-term ethnographic fieldwork....Increasingly, our theory and practice are unbounded, multisited, traveling, or 'itinerant'...a transformation that is particularly evident for those studying media.” (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod & Larkin: 4)
- 24. Examples Studies of media institutions (production sites, distribution houses) Studies of rabid fan culture in everything from television to romance novels Studies of nationhood Studies of political activism and media mobilization Studies of blurred boundaries between producers and consumers Studies of the physical entanglements of human bodies with and within media devices Renewed interest in questions of crucial anthropological concepts such as scale,
- 25. Umbrella Themes and Ideas THE SOCIAL FIELDS OF MEDIA CULTURAL ACTIVISM AND THE ACTIVIST IMAGINARY CULTURAL POLITICS AND NATION-STATES TRANSNATIONAL CIRCUITS THE SOCIAL SITES OF PRODUCTION THE SOCIAL LIFE OF TECHNOLOGY
- 26. Anthropologists are Mobile Anthropologists live and work with and in the world Anthropologists are still anthropologists at home We can interrogate our own media lives and practices in the same way we interrogate others Anthropology is an inherently mediated field of research, and how media is used in anthropology is a crucial consideration We can accept and embrace the “messiness” of our mediated world and still find ways to make decisions that generate a better and more equitable environment for all communities
- 29. Reading 2 - “From Media Anthropology to the Anthropology of Mediation” (2012) Dominic Boyer: Anthropologist at Rice University renewable energy energy politics digital humanities
- 30. Beyond Media Boyer suggests that we move beyond narrow-minded assumptions about the “media” Too often, researchers assume that “media” refers to communication technologies and their relevant practices and institutions, particularly radio, television, film, music, etc.
- 31. ...it is very difficult to separate the operation of communicational media cleanly from broader social-political processes of circulation, exchange, imagination and knowing (Boyer: 383)
- 32. Social Mediation "...social transaction in its broadest sense of the movement of images, discourse, persons and things" (Boyer: 383). This raises old questions about media production and consumption Raises new questions about what constitutes media in the first place
- 33. Mediation "...if one understands media as extensions of human instrumental and semiotic capacities then why should wheels, money, and clocks, for example, not also be considered alongside broadcast media such as newspapers, radio and television? Along the same lines, why could the anthropological study of roads and migration, currency and finance, commodity chains and values, and the formation and dissemination of expert knowledge, not be productively connected to anthropological research on communicational media under the rubric of a broader anthropology of mediation?" (Boyer: 384)
- 34. The Role of Technological Development The Anthropology of Media was the result not just of intellectual self-interests It emerged alongside the development of robust media technologies and infrastructures In the 1950s and 1960s, researchers became interested in the “effects” of these technologies Also interested in the effects of shifts from orality, literacy and broadcast media “WHAT IS TELEVISION DOING TO MY BRAIN?”
- 35. Visual and Media Anthropology The rise of the anthropology of media emerged as a result of developments in visual anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s This shaped a lot of anthropological theory, but also the ways in which media was being incorporated into anthropological research work
- 36. From Visual to Media Anthropology The 1980s and 1990s saw a rise in a broader interest in media, not just “the visual” This was the result of an “explosion” of new communication technologies "...from cable and satellite television to VHS and digital recording technology to cellular (mobile) telephony to the rise of the Internet radically transformed the possibilities and practices of both radial and lateral...communications across the world during the period and anthropologists, as chroniclers of the contemporary, took notice." (Boyer: 486)
- 37. Mediation and Process These new technologies altered how “media” was understood Mediation became an increasingly popular concept because it help capture the feeling that media was not ever passively produced or consumed Media is developed and interacts with society in a collaborative “process”, rather than a static “form”, that has made it difficult to hold onto assumptions about production and consumption "The redistribution of emphasis from cultural form to process meant...greater attention to the cultural agency of media producers (and receivers)" (Boyer: 386)
- 38. Production and Consumption "Under such circumstances, it is increasingly difficult to segment 'producers' and 'receivers' as distinct analytical, let alone social, categories and, as such, the justification of studying one or the other (or even both as complementary phenomena) has been increasingly pressured." (Boyer: 387)
- 39. Recursivity and Virtuality Researchers are increasingly concerned with questions of viruality (the constitution of alternative selves and environments) and recursivity (defined by Boyer as “the participation of...users in reshaping the capacities and operations of their own media use)
- 40. In Favour of Mediation "...watering down the communicational focus of media anthropology would...enhance its epistemic 'liquidity' and allow its work to flow more effectively into the groundwater of 'mainstream' anthropological research and theory" (Boyer: 389). "...sealing ourselves into a sub disciplinary discourse network, however, libel and expanding, seems to me a greater risk than dissolving a sense of unitary sub disciplinary identity and purpose that was never terribly unitary to begin with" (Boyer: 389).
- 41. This is your chance to engage critically and creatively with the readings. Using the Blackboard interface, you’ll be asked to identify a passage from the required and/or suggested readings that you find particularly insightful, maddening, moving, confusing or otherwise generative of an emotional response. Your responses to these passages can take many forms. You may decide to provide a brief academic analysis of the readings. You could also write a poem, draw a picture, write a song, or otherwise engage creatively with the course material. Alternatively, you may choose to provide examples of songs, films, websites, video games, etc. that speak to the issues that interest you in the assigned readings. In the latter case, you’ll be asked to explain how your example highlights or challenges the core issues being raised in the readings. Be sure to provide links to your examples, or attach the files within Blackboard. We’ll discuss how to do this during the first class. You are also encouraged to engage with and comment on each others' creative responses, as a way of generating both online and in-class discussions. Online engagement will also count towards your overall participation grade (See above). Creative Online Responses Start Next Week
- 42. Questions to Spark Your Fire 1. Look up the term "technological determinism", and think about its definition. Having read the works by McLuhan and others, do you think media technologies are best understood as "deterministic"? 2. Having read Boyer's article and some excerpts from McLuhan's works, what are some problems with McLuhan's ideas about media technologies that would be particularly troubling to social and cultural anthropologists? 3. What does it truly mean to take seriously that we only possess “partial perspectives” on the world? How might we describe non-visual forms of this partiality? 4. What is translation? How does it work?