Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Preface Introduction I. Cultural Activism and Minority Claims 1. Screen Memories: Resignifying the Traditional in Indigenous Media Faye Ginsburg 2. Visual Media and the Primitivist Perplex: Colonial Fantasies, Indigenous Imagination, and Advocacy in North America Harald E.L. Prins 3. Representation, Politics, and Cultural Imagination in Indigenous Video: General Points and Kayapo Examples Terence Turner 4. Spectacles of Difference: Cultural Activism and the Mass Mediation of Tibet Meg McLagan II. The Cultural Politics of Nation-States 5. Egyptian Melodrama--Technology of the Modern Subject? Lila Abu-Lughod 6. Epic Contests: Television and Religious Identity in India Purnima Mankekar 7. The National Picture: Thai Media and Cultural Identity Annette Hamilton 8. Television, Time, and the National Imaginary in Belize Richard R. Wilk III. Transnational Circuits 9. Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai: Notes on (Re)Cosmopolitanism in a Chinese Metropolis Mayfair Mei-hui Yang 10. A Marshall Plan of the Mind: The Political Economy of a Kazakh Soap Opera Ruth Mandel 11. Mapping Hmong Media in Diasporic Space Louisa Schein IV. The Social Sites of Production 12. Putting American Public Television Documentary in Its Places Barry Dornfeld 13. Culture in the Ad World: Producing the Latin Look Arlene Davila 14. "And Yet My Heart Is Still Indian": The Bombay Film Industry and the (H)Indianization of Hollywood Tejaswini Ganti 15. Arrival Scenes: Complicity and Media Ethnography in the Bolivian Public Sphere Jeff D. Himpele V. The Social Life of Technology 16. The Materiality of Cinema Theaters in Northern Nigeria Brian Larkin 17. Mobile Machines and Fluid Audiences: Rethinking Reception through Zambian Radio Culture Debra Spitulnik 18. The Indian Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction; Or, What Happens When Peasants "Get Hold" of Images Christopher Pinney 19. Live or Dead? Televising Theater in Bali Mark Hobart 20. A Room with a Voice: Mediation and Mediumship in Thailand's Information Age Rosalind C. Morris Contributors Index

About the Author

Faye D. Ginsburg is David B. Kriser Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Media, Culture and History at New York University. She is author of the award-winning Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (California, second edition 1998) and coeditor of Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction (California, 1995), among other books. Lila Abu-Lughod is Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies at Columbia University and author of the award-winning books Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories (California, 1993) and Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (California, 1986, 2000), among others. Brian Larkin is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Reviews

"After years of avoiding the subject, anthropologists have finally discovered that media can be profitably studied ethnographically and that anthropology of media is not only possible but essential. Media Worlds is a collection of groundbreaking essays by top-notch scholars."-Jay Ruby, author of Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology "Not just a book, but the book on the anthropology of the media. The collection works not just as an assemblage but from a sense that every paper adds another perspective to the whole."-Danny Miller, co-author of The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach