Notes and Videos for Week 1

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?