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.

A pathbreaking collection of essays in the ethnography of media--a burgeoning new area in anthropology. The co-editors are powerhouses, as are the contributors.

Screen memories: resignifying the traditional in indigenous media / Faye D. Ginsburg — Visual media and the primitivist perplex: colonial fantasies, indigenous imagination, and advocacy in north America / Harald E.L. Prins — Representation, politics, and cultural imagination in indigenous video: general points and Kayapo examples / Terence Turner — Spectacles of difference: cultural activism and the mass mediation of Tibet / Meg McLagan — Egyptian melodrama: technology of the modern subject? / Lila Abu-Lughod — Epic contests: television and religious identity in India / Purnima Mankekar — The national picture: Thai media and cultural identity / Annette Hamilton — Television, time, and the national imaginary in Belize / Richard R. Wilk — Mass media and transnational subjectivity in Shanghai: notes on (re)cosmopolitanism in a Chinese metropolis / Mayfair Mei-hui Yang — A Marshall plan of the mind: the political economy of a Kazakh soap opera / Ruth Mandel — Mapping Hmong media in diasporic space / Louisa Schein — Putting American public television documentary in its places / Barry Dornfeld — Culture in the ad world: producing the Latin look / Arlene Dâavila — "And yet my heart is still Indian": the Bombay film industry and the (h)Indianization of Hollywood / Tejaswini Ganti — Arrival scenes: complicity and media ethnography in the Bolivian public sphere / Jeff D. Himpele — The materiality of cinema theaters in northern Nigeria / Brian Larkin — Mobile machines and fluid audiences: rethinking reception through Zambian radio culture / Debra Spitulnik — The Indian work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction: or, what happens when peasants "get hold" of images / Christopher Pinney — Live or dead? Televising theater in Bali / Mark Hobart — A room with a voice: mediation and mediumship in Thailand's information age / Rosalind C. Morris.