This groundbreaking volume showcases the exciting work emerging from the ethnography of media, a burgeoning new area in anthropology that expands both social theory and ethnographic fieldwork to examine the way media-film, television, video-are used in societies around the globe, often in places that have been off the map of conventional media studies. The contributors, key figures in this new field, cover topics ranging from indigenous media projects around the world to the unexpected effects of state control of media to the local impact of film and television as they travel transnationally. Their essays, mostly new work produced for this volume, bring provocative new theoretical perspectives grounded in cross-cultural ethnographic realities to the study of media.

List of IllustrationsPrefaceIntroductionI. Cultural Activism and Minority Claims1. 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 AmericaHarald E.L. Prins3. Representation, Politics, and Cultural Imagination in Indigenous Video: General Points and Kayapo ExamplesTerence Turner4. Spectacles of Difference: Cultural Activism and the Mass Mediation of TibetMeg McLaganII. The Cultural Politics of Nation-States5. Egyptian Melodrama-Technology of the Modern Subject?Lila Abu-Lughod6. Epic Contests: Television and Religious Identity in IndiaPurnima Mankekar7. The National Picture: Thai Media and Cultural IdentityAnnette Hamilton8. Television, Time, and the National Imaginary in BelizeRichard R. WilkIII. Transnational Circuits9. Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai: Notes on (Re)Cosmopolitanism in a Chinese MetropolisMayfair Mei-hui Yang10. A Marshall Plan of the Mind: The Political Economy of a Kazakh Soap OperaRuth Mandel11. Mapping Hmong Media in Diasporic SpaceLouisa ScheinIV. The Social Sites of Production12. Putting American Public Television Documentary in Its PlacesBarry Dornfeld13. Culture in the Ad World: Producing the Latin LookArlene Dávila14. "And Yet My Heart Is Still Indian": The Bombay Film Industry and the (H)Indianization of HollywoodTejaswini Ganti15. Arrival Scenes: Complicity and Media Ethnography in the Bolivian Public SphereJeff D. HimpeleV. The Social Life of Technology16. The Materiality of Cinema Theaters in Northern NigeriaBrian Larkin17. Mobile Machines and Fluid Audiences: Rethinking Reception through Zambian Radio CultureDebra Spitulnik18. The Indian Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction; Or, What Happens When Peasants "Get Hold" of ImagesChristopher Pinney19. Live or Dead? Televising Theater in Bali Mark Hobart20. A Room with a Voice: Mediation and Mediumship in Thailand's Information AgeRosalind C. MorrisContributorsIndex