Media Worlds: Anthropology on a New Terrain

by Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin
The University of California Press, Berkeley, 2002
429 pages, 23 b/w photographs. Trade: $60.00; paper, $24.95
ISBN: 0-520-22448-5; ISBN: 0-520-23231-3.

Reviewed by Dene Grigar
Texas Woman’s University

dene@eaze.net

Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, a collection of essays edited by Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, addresses current research in the emergent subfield of anthropology of media, most notably media of radio, television, film, and video. Missing is computer-related media, as well as music, photography, and journalism, as the editors themselves make clear in the "Preface" to the book (xiii). However, the narrow focus placed on media is the inversely proportional to the expanse of geography covered, for the essays span the spectrum of the non-Westernized world from Asia, Africa, Central and South Americas, and Australia. While the book will be a necessary tool for those involved directly in the subfield, others interested in traditional forms of new media, cultural studies, and gender and ethnic studies will also find the book useful, so broad is its appeal.

In brief, Media Worlds seeks "to push media studies into new environments and examine diverse media practices that are only beginning to be mapped" (1). In this regard, the book states three goals: 1) to look at "how media enable or challenge the workings of power and the potential of activism;" 2) explore "the enforcement of inequality and the sources of imagination;" and 3) examine "the impact of technologies on the production of individual and collective identities" (3).

That the book makes good on its promises and does so with such unity and cohesiveness is the source of the book’s strength. The editors have organized the book into five sections ——"Cultural Activism and Minority Claims," "the Cultural Politics of Nation-States," "Transnational Circuits," "The Social Sites of Production," and "The Social Life of Technology," each addressing a specific concern in the field. The twenty essays offered in Media Worlds fit well into their respective categories. The overlapping of topics or ideas that frequently occurs further refines the books’ focus rather than renders it repetitive. For example, Purnima Mankekar’s "Epic Contests: Television and Religious Identity in India," Tejaswini Ganti’s "And Yet My Heart Is Still Indian", and Christopher Pinney’s "The Indian Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," from sections II, IV, and V respectively, each address different concerns yet speak to the way various media and culture elide and collide in India, from influencing religious practices and beliefs to developing identity. Additionally, authors frequently refer to each other’s research, as we see with Terence Turner’s "Representation, Politics, and Cultural Imagination in Indigenous Video," Annette Hamilton’s "The National Picture," and Jeff Himpele’s "Arrival Scenes," which further serves to unify the book and its essays.

At times language gets laden with jargon, which may make it difficult for those coming from other fields other than the anthropology of media to follow some of the heavier theoretical arguments. Jeff Himpele’s essay on the Bolivian television talk show The Open Tribunal ("parallax positions on a continuum of practices of cultural representations," 304) is a case in point. Though infrequent occurrences, a lack of citations as in Ruth Mandel’s "A Marshall Plan of the Mind" (where would one find the quote of the Know How Fund official that she cites on page 214?) and wide claims as in the quote cited by Tejaswini Ganti from an internet chat that "most [Indian] marriages are monotonous" (288) or Richard Wilk’s comment that "television broadcasting was one of the issues that led to the crushing electoral defeat of the ruling party" (173) may give pause to some scholars reading the book.

Despite these, as a text in courses in anthropology of media, anthropology,media studies, social studies, or ethnic studies, Media Worlds would be an excellent choice. Although it traces some of the same steps and features some of the same authors as Kelly Askew and Richard Wilk’s The Anthropology of Media (Blackwell Publishers, 2002) which covers a larger timeframe beginning with Mead, Bateson, McLuhan, and others, Media Worlds focuses only on current research and emphasizes more noticeably non-Western scholars and interests.

It also offers a wider range of media explored than Brian Moeran’s A Japanese Advertising Agency: An Anthropology of Media and Markets (Yale UP, 1997). Particular essays, such as Lila Abu-Lughod’s "Egyptian Melodrama—— Technology of the Modern Subject," Brian Larkin’s "The Materiality of Cinema Theaters in Northern Nigeria," Mark Hobart’s "Live or Dead? Televising Theater in Bali," are especially compelling and would appeal scholars in women’s studies, the arts, and film studies. As the title suggests, the book, indeed, moves into a "new terrain" of anthropology of media.