I haven’t done research on borderlands but my working hypothesis is that international borders, even today within the EU, still matter a great deal. They are not dissolving or going all blurred and fuzzy as hoped by some. When you cross an international border, you are stepping into another culture area, even in 2009.

Contra [Fredrik] Barth, I suggest it’s not so much the borders as the stuff contained within them that matters: historically centralised states (around Madrid and Lisbon) that developed their own transport and telecommunication networks, political systems, common market, public culture, lingua franca, overseas projections, etc. Yes, there are strong centrifugal tendencies in the regions, esp. within the Spanish state, but you can’t undo centuries of cultural homogenisation in a few decades.

My question is: is there any evidence that border regions of Spain and Portugal are becoming culturally, linguistically, etc, more similar or hybridised?

Back from a short break, with a full inbox, and a few hours to actually do some real blogging before everything kicks in again tomorrow. This article from Aleks Krotoski in The Guardian piqued my interest, not least because I’ve just been writing some stuff along the same lines. I can’t remember reading Aleks’ stuff before, but I’m now subscribed to her blog on technology and interactivity – looks like she’s a smart (and busy) cookie.

Why World of Warcraft May Be the Future of the Nation-State, Aleks Krotoski, The Guardian

When a bunch of trolls have their own currency, telecoms and justice system, governments get nervous

I have never played World of Warcraft. I do not intend to. I have no prejudice against players of this massively multiplayer online game; some of my best friends are deeply engaged in it. And although they keep applying pressure with invitations to virtual dinner parties and online raids, I resist. I will not align with Alliance or Horde, I won’t be a blood elf, a tauren or a gnome. I’m quite happy just looking, watching, studying the new world order that they’re building.

Read on…

Starting from the thesis that Malaysia has successfully been ‘built’ as a nation by the state as well has ‘materialized’ by other means, this paper attempts to define the extent to which the state has become a source of identity for a minority indigenous group, the Kadazandusun of the Bornean State of Sabah. The analysis of various cases showing the reaction of Kadazan villagers to the development propaganda and the discourses present in the media demonstrates that, while Malaysia has indeed materialised among the Kadazandusn through the involvement in the national educational and political system and mediascape, the government propaganda is rejected on the basis of its perceived Malayising agenda, imposing to indigenous peoples to either become like the majority or be marginalised. On the other hand, consumption practices, and the media messages encouraging them, constitute a national community of consumers, but on the other encourage identification with a global consumer culture and of novel practices and subjectivities.

Como es bien sabido, los escoceses son, por lo general, muy nacionalistas. Sin embargo, no insisten en que su especifidad cultural este basada en la lengua gaelica – una lengua que pocos escoceses muestran interes por aprender. Ademas, a menudo se rien los escoceses de sus supuestas peculiaridades raciales (p. ej. las cabelleras rojas) y “tradiciones” (muchas de ellas, como la falda escocesa, productos de la modernidad, vease Hobsbawn y Ranger, The Invention of Tradition). Pensemos, en este sentido, en los forofos escoceses y sus pelucas de color naranja chillon bajo una “tipica” gorra escocesa (tartan hat). Este saber reirse de los estereotipos culturales seria impensable en la regiones españolas que buscan reconocimiento como naciones dotadas de lenguas propias (en España aun creemos en la ficcion decimononica de que la lengua es el alma de un pueblo). Un caso ilustrativo es el de la region de Murcia, donde ciertos sectores proto-nacionalistas luchan por que se reconozca la “llengua murciana” con intervenciones como la siguiente:

Er Clú e Fulibán Arlético Zudiá, (Club de Fútbol Atlético Ciudad en castellano) es un clú e fulibán d’España, e la Rigión e Murcia. Comencipió a rular en 2007. Aboricamesmo juba en la Sigunda Devisión B. Dimpués e la güena campaña en Sigunda Devisión der CF Zudiá e Murcia, en la que queó er quarto crasificao, er presidior der Zudiá e Murcia, Quique Pina, mendió su praza ar empresario granaíno Carlos Marsá, que tresmuó l´equipo a Graná y lo rinombró como Graná 74, equipo e Treciera Devisión qu’el mesmo presidía. 

Lo que en el Reino Unido – o en cualquier otro pais europeo, como Alemania o Italia - se consideraria una variante dialectal y no escrita, aqui se intenta “recuperar” y elevar al estatus de co-oficialidad con el castellano. Se trata, en fin, de convertir un dialecto paria en una lengua paritaria. Es este un proceso de ingenieria sociolinguistica que se observa en otras regiones españolas como Asturias o Aragon y que tiene a otros europeos perplejos.

Foto: Party Domain

Reviewed by:
Carlos D. Torres, Doctoral Candidate, Anthropology, University of Colorado – Boulder
Caroline S. Conzelman, PhD, Anthropology, University of Denver

for Indigenous Peoples site

One of the strengths of cultural anthropologists (as opposed to political scientists or mass media researchers) conducting research in the emerging field of media anthropology is that through their deep relationship with a particular place, particular people, and particular media, they are able to more holistically document the visible and audible evidence of cultural production in all of its situated complexity. Jeff Himpele, in Circuits of Culture: Media, Politics, and Indigenous Identity in the Andes, in this way creates a comprehensive media ethnography of La Paz, Bolivia, but he also goes beyond geographic constraints to look at the history of media circulation and distribution in the country as its own unique narrative and constitutive cultural process. Himpele performs an ethnographic service to his readers by offering a focused perspective of an emerging indigenous public media sphere, with increasing political consequence, that largely has been unobserved, unnoticed, unanalyzed, unarticulated, and thus unknown. At base this is a superb example of an intimately engaged, meticulously researched longitudinal ethnography.

Read on…

My recent encounters with Galician and other Spanish nationalists (both pro- and anti-Spain) on the blogosphere, YouTube and elsewhere have got me thinking about the need to do some theoretical outreach. This is because the things I hear from both sides of the divide sound to me very dated, oddly very mid-nineteenth century. Don’t ask me how best to go about this, I’m only just starting to think about it and the issues are far from simple. Let me start with one or two things we know about ethnic and national identity – but do please interrupt me if I ramble as I think aloud:

1. As a result of migration, intermarriage, war, interethnic contact, trade, mass schooling and a myriad other factors, a lot of people around the world today (in 2009) have a mixed ethnic, national and/or religious background. I have no figures to hand, but let me instead offer an anecdote for now, while I go and find them. When I was in secondary school near Madrid circa 1980, a teacher asked our overcrowded classroom (40+ souls) whether any of us had four grandparents who came from Madrid. Only one of us, Carlos Gomez Caño aka ”Caño”, came forth. The rest of us? Typical Madrileños, products of the huge waves of immigration that hit Madrid during the Franco era*. Madrid is known, of course, as Spain’s breakwater (el rompeolas de España).

2. Peoples, ethnic groups, nations, etc, have no ‘soul’, no ‘essence’; this is just a Romantic fantasy – they have histories of sociopolitical change and continuity, linguistic and other cultural commonalities (as well as inner differences), but not souls or essences.

3. Although identity is not always as fluid or situated or blurred as many social theorists influenced by postmodernism wish it were, neither is it as fixed and certain as nationalists would like it to be. Our social identities are a composite of parental, peer group, educational, mediated, and other biographical influences – a composite fashioned in part by our own agency as knowing beings.

4. Having multiple identities is not only perfectly possible, it can also be great fun. We are used to hearing, for example, about Northern Ireland’s deep ethnoreligious cleavage. What people tend to forget, though, is that a Northern Irish sports fan may well find herself supporting Northern Ireland in one sport (e.g. soccer), Ireland in another (rugby), Britain and Ireland in another (Lions’ rugby team), Great Britain in another (the Olympics), Europe in yet another (golf, Europe vs. the USA), and so on. Northern Ireland is today de facto (but not de jure) simultaneously in the UK and in the Republic of Ireland, apart from being its own province and an integral part of the EU. Multiple identities that we don’t often hear about.

Next post

Hi all,

In Media Res, a fantastic project  dedicated to experimenting with collaborative, multi-modal forms of online scholarship, has dedicated this week to *work on indigenous media,* and comments from scholar working in the field are most welcome. Great chance for people on this list to add their ideas and work to the mix but you need to comment by the end of this week. The Indigenous Media inaugurated by my post on Monday on Isuma TV which will show up through the link below.  Each day this week, a different scholar curates a 30-second to 3-minute video clip/visual image slideshow accompanied by a 300-350-word impressionistic response. Check them out. If you can, take a minute or two to write some comments — a great way to link people to your work as well — and to demonstrate that this is an exciting area of work based on the comments it provokes. Here is the link

 http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/theme-week/2009/19/indigenous-media-may-4-8-2009

In order to respond, you must be logged in which just takes a minute or two. Please feel free to cross-promote this event on any blogs, message boards, social networking sites or other spaces you frequent.

Best.

Faye

Later in a pub near the Rapid stadium I joined a group of football fans who were watching the crucial Barcelona-Real Madrid match. Although I like playing football I’m not much of a fan and my knowledge of today’s football industry is very limited. The whole pub were behind Barcelona, so I thought the appropriate thing was to support the underdogs, el Madrid. Besides, I grew up near Madrid. The match was great, but una verdadera catastrofe para el Madrid (2-6)!! Quality television of a different kind.

caused outrage from both left and rightwing politicians and intellectuals in France, where the very word “community” is seen as an affront to the republican ideal. The British approach of multiculturalism is seen as dangerously divisive.

In his celebrated book, Banal Nationalism (1995), Michael Billig explores the mundane, generally unnoticed ways in which nationalism is reproduced, for example, through weather maps on television or in newspapers in which one’s own country (of residence) is highlighted using a different colour.

I was reminded of Billig’s book reading today’s El Pais newspaper. Under the heading El PSE y el PP avanzan en su intención de reformar a fondo la radiotelevisión vasca we are told that the pro-Spain socialists (PSE) and conservatives (PP), who are about to form a new government in the Basque Country following regional elections there,  intend to overhaul public radio and television (EITB) in the region. With no apparent irony, their stated aim is to ‘reinforce the defence of pluralism on public radio and TV, which they regard as leaning too heavily towards nationalism’ (excesivamente escorada hacia el nacionalismo) after decades of Basque nationalist (PNV) rule.

One of their first targets is precisely the current weather maps shown on regional TV. The aim is to ‘revise the whole symbolism’ (revisar toda la simbologia), leaving behind the present arrangement whereby Navarre and the French Basque Country are included in the weather maps as being integral parts of Euskal Herria (the Basque nationalists’ greater Basque Country, see both maps that accompany this post). In the proposed new weather maps, these neighbouring territories will now be ‘clearly differentiated’ from the Basque region proper (i.e. as defined by the pro-Spain parties – see the three provinces in lila below).

I find this to be a very interesting example of what we might call ‘asymmetrical nationalisms’: although both positions are equally nationalistic, El Pais attaches this label to the Basque variant only. The pro-Spain variant goes under the name of ’pluralism’. In the long term, both camps seek to ‘normalise’ the region by means of their own version of banal nationalism, but at present they appear too evenly matched for that to happen. Cartoon: Clionauta blog.

Those [Galicians] who use variants with a Galician accent are perceived as a group with few chances of social success (pouco dotado para o exito social), whilst those who speak in a Galician that is phonetically Spanish are regarded as an innovative and socially competent group [...] (my translation)  

See also this telling comment from a Galician blogger, who claims that “our political and intellectual class… try hard  to speak a Galician with no traces of a Galician accent” so as not to sound “like a country bumpkin” (paleto):

Algo evidente, al escuchar la televisión de Galicia o a nuestra clase política e intelectual. Se esfuerzan por hablar un gallego sin trazas de acento gallego. El caso más claro es el del topónimo Coruña. Las fuentes orales y escritas son claras: el gallegohablante decía habitualmente Cruña; pero como eso les sonaba a “paleto”, normativizaron el castellanismo A Coruña.

References

Real Academic Galega 2003 O galego segundo a mocidade. A Coruña: Real Academia Galega.

Regueira, X.L. 2006. Politica y lengua en Galicia. In M.C. Lluch and J. Kabatek (eds) Las Lenguas de España. Madrid: Iberoamericana.

His thesis is entitled “Between the local and the state: practices and discourses of identity among the Kadazan of Sabah (East Malaysia)”. It will be made available online as soon as Fausto has made some minor corrections as requested by the PhD examiners, Prof Victor King (Leeds) and Dr Karen O’Reilly (Loughborough). This project was co-supervised by Sarah Pink and myself. While we’re waiting for the full text, here is the abstract:

This thesis investigates the effects of the nation-building agenda carried out by the Malaysian state on the sense of collective belonging of the Kadazan people of the Bornean State of Sabah. The thesis includes a reconstruction of the formation of the two most important forms of collective identification, the nation and the ethnic group, and the analysis of the way in which Kadazan villagers identify themselves in relation to discourses circulating in various media and the practices in which they get involved in their everyday life. Kadazan villagers consistently show a rejection of the state propaganda and a general unwillingness to identify themselves as members of the Malaysian nation, which I attribute to their marginal position within the Malaysian state. They more often identify themselves as members of their ethnic group or village, collective forms of identification that seem to allow for a higher degree of participation in their definition than the national one. The empirical analysis of the everyday self-identification in relation to practices and discourses shows a complex picture, as Kadazan villagers differently situate themselves as Malaysian, Kadazan, Sabahan and members of their village on different occasions and contexts. One of the explanations of this fact lies in the ambiguous character of Malaysian nation-building, promoting unity while at the same time treating citizens differently depending on their ethnic and religious background. The official discourse and practice of ethnic and religious differentiation has been deeply internalised by the Kadazan and has become a primary reason for their opposition to the state, as they feel treated as second-class citizens. Another explanation for the development of a sense of belonging to various collective forms of identification among the Kadazan rests in the fact that their recent history has made these significant as expression of different sets of shared lived experiences, providing the basis for the development of senses of commonality with members of the national, sub-national, ethnic and village communities at the same time.

Keywords: identity; collective identification; nation-building; ethnicity; practice; media; Kadazan; Malaysia; Sabah

My first attempt at organising my data back in the UK was to arrange the various grassroots initiatives along a continuum that went from community-like social formations at one end, to network-like formations at the other end. At the community end, for instance, I placed a ‘gated community’ that had tightened its security by means of new technologies and neighbourhood events. At the network end of the spectrum, I placed a loose network of Internet activists stretching across divides of project and neighbourhood.

With hindsight, the trouble with this framework was that, by a priori positing two dominant formations (community and network) I was explaining away a key problem in need of explanation, namely what difference, if any, digital technologies are making to the formation of social and political relations in the suburb. I was not alone, though, in this conceptual foreclosing. In the bourgeoning literature on Internet localisation (i.e., how local residents, firms and authorities around the world are appropriating the Internet to pursue local aims), community and network are precisely the paradigmatic concepts of sociation. Since I have discussed elsewhere the problems that come with relying on community and network for this task (Postill 2008), rather than repeat that argument here I shall bracket out this conceptual pair and proceed to explore alternative concepts in the study of Internet localisation.

Continued…

The governance debate was brief and took part largely outside the forum. It centred on whether to introduce rules that would make the forum more ‘mature’, less tolerant of rude and inappropriate behaviour (name-calling, lewd jokes, spamming, private revelations, etc). While some participants saw the proposed rules as a threat to the free flow of ideas and information, others considered them long overdue. My difficulty as a researcher resided in how to remain a participant observer without being seen to take sides.

Over a nourishing mamak meal in Taipan, a commercial district in the suburb, I shared my worries with one of the key participants in the debate. I was pondering whether to take my musings to the forum, or steer clear of the fray. He advised me not to become involved. He explained that Malaysia, unlike countries in the developed West, is a developing nation where democracy is still in its infancy. Tongue in cheek, he reminded me of the first commandment of Hollywood time travel: ‘Thou shalt not change anything’. I was not to tamper, therefore, with local efforts to create a citizens’ forum where maturity and fair play would one day be the norm.

I felt flattered to be considered a time traveller from a future world of seamless online democracy. After all, one of my two countries of origin, Spain, has only recently embraced democracy, let alone e-democracy. My own experience of online engagement with local authorities in Spain, Britain and other supposedly ‘advanced’ countries is minimal. Moreover, having reviewed the literature on e-democracy around the globe, it does not appear as if the West had much to teach Subang Jaya. Western local authorities and cyberactivists may, in fact, wish to learn from this suburb.

Read on…

By Lorenz, antropologi.info

In 1996, Emma Baulch went to live in Bali to do research on youth culture. She hang out in the death metal scene among unemployed university graduates clad in black T-shirts and ragged jeans; in the punk scene among young men sporting mohawks, leather jackets, and hefty jackboots; and among the remnants of the local reggae scene in Kuta Beach, the island’s most renowned tourist area.

Read more…

Hi all,

For those of you interested to know more about indigenous media research, here are some books you might want to check out:

Recommended by Peter Crawford:

Postma, M. and P. I. Crawford (eds.)(2006), Reflecting Visual Ethnography, Leiden & Hoejbjerg: CNWS Publications & Intervention Press.

Philipsen, H.H. and B. Markussen (eds.), Advocacy and Indigenous Filmmaking, Hoejbjerg: Intervention Press

>From Guven Witteveen:

Aaron Glass’ work about a traditional dance of one of the NW coastal indigenous groups in North America; also with W. Osman about her film in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan.  PDF version of the Anthropology News (November 2008) should soon be online with a link from http://www.aaanet.org (under publications), or at anthrosource.net The interviewer/author is Dinah Winnick.

>From Christopher Westgate:

Worth & Adair’s Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology

>From Amadou Adamou

Hoque, Abdul (2006) Radio and indigenous peoples. The role of radio in the sustainable livelihoods of indigenous peoples: A case study of the Rakhaing and the Garo people in Bangladesh. University of Tromso.

Best,
Liezel

9 November 2008 update:

Hi All,

To this list of books on indigenous media, I think we should add Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart (eds) *Global indigenous media: culture, politics and poetics*

Thanks.

Ayo

Discussant: Dr. Kira Kosnick (Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main).

ABSTRACT

While much media research has focused on how the media represent immigrants and ethnic minorities, this paper examines how media coverage of immigrants is perceived among migrant families in Sweden. The analysis is based on results from the three-year project ‘Media practices in the new country’ (funded by the Swedish Research Council) and involves immigrant families (mainly with children in the ages 12-16) living in Sweden with origin from countries such as Greece, Kurdistan, Iran, Lebanon, Somalia, Syria, Turkey and Vietnam. The methodological approach is ethnographic with extended in-depths interviews and observations in the homes of the families (both adults and children) as well as to some extent visual methods, such as disposable cameras. The approach implies close readings of how media use (e.g. television, Internet, print media) is perceived and negotiated within the private sphere of the informants’ homes. It also gives a unique insight into family discourse about these matters, since parents and children are interviewed, sometimes together.

A key concept for the project is citizenship, which traditionally, e.g. within jurisprudence and political science, has been tied to the issue of national identity. However, within sociology and social psychology citizenship is seen in a broader sense, which includes other kinds of identities, such as cultural, social and religious identity as well as informal and formal participation. By ideally providing an equal flow of information and promoting communication among people, media might be seen as a facilitator of a living democracy. However, in today’s media saturated society with increased access to different media (e.g. minority, transnational, national and local media) claims are raised that democracy is under threat and that multicultural civil society tends to be fragmented, encouraging exclusion rather than inclusion between cultural groups. Do specific cultural readings encourage the formation of, for example, so called ‘media ghettos’ and/or ‘multiple public sphericules’? If so, what are the implications for identity processes and how citizenship and participation in society is perceived? Thus, the paper takes as its task to illuminate the omplex relationship between different readings of certain media texts in order to attain knowledge about the role of media in the perception of the Swedish (Western) society in terms of cultural codes, language, values, norms, and traditions. The study shows that there is close interconnections between specific media readings and the perception of, for example, dominating discourses in society related to immigration. Several key issues are discussed among the informants in order to confirm cultural affiliation such as the search for the ‘truth’ and media objectivity, seeking alternative portrayals of reality from transnational media (e.g. Al-Jazeera). Other topics raised are cultural imperialism, non-ethical Western journalism in terms of ifestyle, values and violence, but also the need of belonging to a national mediated public sphere. The paper shows that, despite predominant critical voices, it is not simply about minority and diasporic media displacing local and national media but rather that the informants prefer a mixed-up media usage.

Biographies

Ulrika Sjöberg is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies, Halmstad University, Sweden. Her main research interests involve young people’s media use, media and ethnicity and media literacy among pupils and teachers. She is currently working with the projects ‘Media practices in the new country ’ , ’Mediated childhoods in multicultural families in Greece’, ‘Media literacy from an educational perspective,’ and ‘internet appropriation among college students: a global and contextual approach’. Sjöberg has worked with several methodological approaches in her research such as surveys, interviews, drawings, diaries, observations and photo-taking. Her most recent publications include for example ‘It took time to understand Greek newspapers – The media experience of Swedish women in Greece’ In Communications: The European Journal of Communication Research , 2006. Sjöberg is also the co-editor of the book ‘Mediated Medien und Migration. Europa als multikultureller Raum , 2007, (S Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften).

Ingegerd Rydin is Professor in Media and Communication Studies at Halmstad University, Sweden. Her research interests cover issues related to young audiences (media reception), young people’s media production, portrayal of children and young people in the media and media’s role in the lives of migrant children. She is currently engaged as project leader in the project ‘Media practices in the new country’ and a project on ‘Young people as media consumers in ten years’. She worked as principal researcher in the European project CHICAM (Children in Communication about Migration) and has co-published with Liesbeth de Block ‘Digital Rapping in Media Productions’ in Digital Generations, 2006, Lawrence Erlbaum and with Sonja De Leeuw ‘Diasporic Mediated Spaces’ in Transnational Lives and the Media , Palgrave 2007 and ‘Migrant children’s digital stories:identity formation and self-representation through media production’ in European Journal of Cultural Studies , 2007, 10(4).

Kira Kosnick – Professor of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main. With a background in cultural anthropology and sociology, her work focuses on minority media practices, Turkish migration to Europe and urban spaces. Her latest book is Migrant Media: Turkish Broadcasting and Multicultural Politics in Berlin (2007). In this study she tries to elaborate a new approach to “migrant media” in relation to the larger cultural and political spaces through which immigrant life is imagined and created. She is currently beginning an ERC-funded project on ethnic club scenes in European metropolitan centres.

Nordicom, University of Gothenburg, 2008, 223 p. ISBN 978-91-89471-65-8, Price € 30

Publishers’ blurb:

The book Mediated Crossroads focuses on family, young people, ethnicity and the media in the context of increasing migration in contemporary Western societies. The book includes studies covering both media use and reception. It reflects on the growing interest in ethnic minorities – both on the macro and micro level – within media and cultural studies. The contributing authors present empirical work on the media and cultural practices of migrants in a wide range of countries such as Belgium, Finland, Greece, Israel, Sweden, Switzerland, and the U.K, and the empirical data are framed by theoretical discussions on a more general level. The collection of studies is characterized by a discursive, everyday life perspective, in which concrete cases of migrant life – with a focus on children, women, families or young people – in relation to media and popular culture are analysed. The book deals with central issues in ethnicity and media research, such as how diasporic groups negotiate their identities, cultural experiences and tradi tions in everyday life in an environment that is increasingly permeated by various media, not least the Internet.

More…

Since the post-modern turn in the social sciences, the constructionist perspective has reduced ethnicity, culture and, indeed, also peoples – all former key issues in anthropology – to exist only within inverted commas. Recent case studies often focus on how ethnic minority identities worldwide are deeply dependent on counter-colonial imagery and inverted mirroring of the mainstream population. Hence, minority identities are presented as constructed, created and imagined with little regard to any reality of alleged ethnic purity and or authenticity.

In the meantime, ‘ethnic minorities’ throughout South East Asia (and elsewhere for that matter) continue to experience very real clashes with their nation-states on the basis of very real sociocultural
and political differences, while some indigenous political representatives are trying to convert cultural/ ethnic specificity into special collective rights at the national level and at the United Nations’ international fora on indigenous peoples. Thus, ironically as it may seem, they take strategic advantage of static ethnic stereotypes of colonial origin as part of a decolonization process.

The seminar wishes to address how theoretical-constructionist perspectives and in-depth empirical perspectives can cross-fertilize rather than bypass one another in the case of South East Asian ethnic minorities.

The seminar will take place November 19, 2008 at NIAS – Leifsgade 33, 3 floor. 2300 Copenhagen S.

Organizers: NIAS and ADI
Venue: NIAS, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Leifsgade 33, 3 sal.

More information »

Asian Americans and the Media, by Kent A. Ono and Vincent Pham (Polity, 2008). U.S. media representation of Asian Americans, including newer internet-situated media.

Certain Victory: Images of World War II in the Japanese Media, by David C. Earhart (M. E. Sharpe, 2008). Gathered for the analysis are over 800 images selected from 2,500 newspapers and magazines published between 1937 and 1945.

Common Sense: Intelligence as Presented on Popular Television, by Lisa Holderman (Lexington Books, 2008). “Examines the constructions of intelligence and intellectuality in popular television and the social/cultural implications of those constructions. It considers the complexity of popular television images, the influences of these images as they both verify and vilify intelligence, and explores the representations of inteeligence on television by looking at a variety of TV genres and through a range of theoretical perspectives and methods.” –Publisher’s website

The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, by Jonathan Zittrain (Yale, 2008). “The Internet’s current trajectory is one of lost opportunity. Its salvation, Zittrain argues, lies in the hands of its millions of users. Drawing on generative technologies like Wikipedia that have so far survived their own successes, this book shows how to develop new technologies and social structures that allow users to work creatively and collaboratively, participate in solutions, and become true “netizens.”—from The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It blog

Global Capital, Local Culture: Transnational Media Corporations in China, by Anthony Y.H. Fung (Peter Lang Publishing, 2008). Uses interview and other data to examine the China strategies of such companies as Warner Bros. Pictures and Viacoms MTV Channel among others as they adapt to the political and economic constraints of working in China.

Global TV: Exploring Television and Culture in the World Market, by Denise D. Bielby and C. Lee Harrington (New York University, 2008). “Explores the cultural significance of global television trade and asks how it is so remarkably successful despite the inherent cultural differences between shows and local audiences. How do culture-specific genres like American soap operas and Latin telenovelas so easily cross borders and adapt to new cultural surroundings? Why is “The Nanny,” whose gum-chewing star is from Queens, New York, a smash in Italy? Importantly, Bielby and Harrington also ask which kinds of shows fail. What is lost in translation? Considering such factors as censorship and other such state-specific policies, what are the inevitable constraints of crossing over?” –Publisher’s website

Hate on the Net: Extremist Sites, Neo-Fascism On-line, Electronic Jihad, by Antonio Roversi (Ashgate, 2008). A detailed study of websites that incite violence, whether real or symbolic. Four types are focused on: football hooligans, neo-fascists, neo-Nazies, and Middle-Eastern militant Islamists.

In my own research in Sarawak in 1996-1998 and 2001 I lived among people who consider themselves to belong to the bansa (or bangsa, in Malay) ’Iban’, i.e. the Iban people or Volk. The exception was a local politician who considered herself to be, first and foremost, Bangsa Malaysia. Although the term Iban only became widely adopted after the Second World War (previously the label ‘Sea Dayaks’ had been used) I think it is undeniable that those in rural Sarawak who use this term to refer to themselves share a common origin in the Kapuas region of what today is Indonesian Borneo (Kalimantan), a common language – with some minor dialectal variants -, form of domicile (the longhouse), Christianised worldview, etc, and a common repertoire of boundary markers when interacting with members of other ethnic groups (Bidayuh, Melanau, Chinese, Malays, etc).  

That said, I agree with TH Eriksen, Vered Amit and other colleagues who insist that we should not privilege the ethnic a priori. When in 2003 I moved my field research base from East to West Malaysia to work in a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, my initial aim was to study what difference, if any, new digital technologies were making to the governance of this multiethnic township (Subang Jaya-USJ). However, I soon came to realise that although ethnicity was – as always in Malaysia – literally all over the place, there were other key organising principles at work in the local political scene, such as neighbourhood of residence, educational background, profession, age, gender, etc. I didn’t find the kind of interest in people’s ethnic or subethnic  origin (Minangkabau, Kadazan, Hakka, Hokkien, Cantonese, etc.) that I expected to find in a recently settled suburban frontier. Instead local activists were primarily concerned with getting the local authorities to solve problems affecting the residents, regardless of their ethnic origin. Had I gone into the field with a rigid ‘ethnic template’ (Amit 2007) I would have missed out on the many other forms of emergent residential sociality besides those based on (sub)ethnic ties.

At the same time – and here perhaps I differ from both Amit and Eriksen – I suggest that these emerging micro-socialities cannot be understood without reference to the broader ethno-religious faultlines running through the locality, and indeed across the entire Malaysian territory. For example, although this suburb is over 70% ethnic Chinese, its municipal council (MPSJ) is staffed almost entirely by Malays – a manner of Native reservation surrounded by a non-Native (as far as the state is concerned) population.  

Reference

Amit, V. (2007) ‘Globalization through “Weak Ties”: A Study of Transnational Networks Among Mobile Professionals’, in V. Amit (ed.) Going First Class? New Approaches to Privileged Travel and Movement, pp. 53-71. Oxford and New York: Berghahn.

- What we are trying to do is shift the analytical gaze in a direction where the nation-state and the ethnic group are not viewed as the most important unit.

Exeter Centre for Ethno-political Studies, University of Exeter, UK

Workshop: The field of literature in the context of ethno-national conflicts, February 2009

Please submit proposal (abstracts of around 300 words) by October 1st, 2008

Please direct all inquiries and abstracts to Clémence Scalbert Yücel
(c.scalbert-yucel@ex.ac.uk)

CALL FOR PAPERS

The aim of this workshop is to study the development and mechanisms of literary worlds evolving in or around several languages that, in the context of ethno-national conflicts, may strongly be associated with particularistic or nationalistic demands. Focusing on minority languages and literary worlds, the workshop aims at proposing a reflection on the existing theories of the sociology of literature, mainly the theory of the fields (théorie des champs) elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu (1992) and to try to reconsider it principally by challenging its mono-state and mono-national frames. 

The sociological theory of the fields seems to be functioning within a united and unified, monolingual, national space. The literary field microcosm is analysed as a world evolving within unique, closed, national spaces, i.e. the field of power and the national social space – understood as a macrocosm. The theory does not deal with inter or trans-national issues and seems to assume that distinct institutional mechanisms of literature evolve within strictly national frameworks. Related to this restriction, one should also mention that his reading does not deal with the spatial issue: the literary phenomenon is studied in national spaces, excluding reflections on supra or infra-national spaces and levels (Saint-Jacques, Viala 1999).

Furthermore, nationhood and national spaces are assumed to be monolingual.  Research in literature and sociology of literature owes Pierre Bourdieu’s work a great debt and his theory enabled in-depth studies of certain contexts or of a national literature as understood by the common sense (one state, one language, one literature). Moreover it is strongly attractive for the study of minority literature, in particular because of the notion of power it incorporates. It may however have concealed a plurality of scales and some complex dynamics of the literary worlds and foremost, among them, those that, evolving with different languages, seem definitively plural and hence open toward different literary and political worlds. How to adjust the theory to such cases? How to go beyond? What more specifically about the situations in which languages are associated with particularistic or nationalistic demands that are closely related to different and competing fields of power? Indeed, in those peculiar contexts, the usage of one or another language may lead to sometimes contradictory fields opening, shutting or crossing effects.

The workshop will concentrate mainly but not exclusively on the situations of nationalist (minority) movements within established nation states. Cases such as the Basques in Spain and France, the Kurds in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, etc., the Samis in Finland, Norway and Sweden, or the Berbers in Morocco and Algeria may be exemplary cases to question this theory because of both the linguistic and spatial characteristics they present: they all present situations where a minority language associated with a particularistic or nationalist movement underwent a process of strong domination even if the situation may have evolved toward a more important recognition today. Moreover, some of the languages they use together sometimes with the dominant languages have not undergone a full process of standardisation and may then be multiple. This, together with the fact that they evolve in trans-national contexts, increase the points of ruptures/ connection in the field, and the levels of analysis. 

Through analyses of the development, structure and functioning of these literary worlds, the analysis of the production and diffusion of texts and books, the sociability networks, but also translation or intertextuality, the workshop expects to question the process of autonomisation/integration of these minority fields of literature vis-à-vis the main national field of literature and vis-à-vis the political fields (both minority and national). The workshop will focus on the phenomenon of opening, of de-compartmentalization, of passing through, but also of blockades associated with the use of different languages, associated to particularistic or nationalistic claims, in the literary world. This focus on contact or sometimes also absence of any contact should lead us towards new perspectives on both the mechanisms of interactions between different literary universes and theirs articulations with the fields of power.

References

Bourdieu, Pierre (1992), The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Lahire, Bernard (1999) « Champ, hors-champ, contrechamp », in Bernard Lahire (ed.), Le travail sociologique de Pierre Bourdieu, Paris : La découverte, p. 23-57.

Saint-Jacques, Denis ; Viala, Alain (1999), « À propos du champ littéraire: histoire, géographie, histoire littéraire », in Bernard Lahire (ed.), Le travail sociologique de Pierre Bourdieu, Paris : La découverte, p. 59-74.

A few colleagues have asked me about this paperback edition as they hope to use it for their undergraduate teaching. My own suggestion is that it would be a useful book to add to reading lists for courses or modules on general anthropology, media anthropology, media studies, Southeast Asian studies and development studies. For example, it could be usefully contrasted with Derek Freeman’s classic monograph Report on the Iban within a module introducing the history of anthropology, or used alongside other media ethnographies.

In her otherwise positive review for H-Net, Sabina Mihelj (Loughborough University, UK) says that ‘the conceptual merits of the book are less easy to pinpoint’ than its merits in relation to existing studies of media and nationalism. I have to cordially disagree with this assessment. Media and Nation Building is both an empirical exploration of media and social change among a Borneo people as well as a conceptual exercise that takes key anthropological notions such as orality, literacy, time, ritual and artefact and asks about their usefulness – or otherwise – in the study of increasingly mediated social worlds. This is, in other words, an anthropological study through and through. I argue that media anthropologists, in common with most other sociocultural anthropologists, have paid a great deal of attention to processes of cultural appropriation at the expense of processes of cultural diffusion – the concept of diffusion having been all but abandoned by our professional ancestors over 80 years ago. In the book I suggest that there is no appropriation without diffusion (or ‘adoption’ without ’spread’, for those who dislike the word ‘diffusion’). By the same token, there is no diffusion without appropriation. Through my historical and ethnographic materials I track some of the paths of diffusion and appropriation of media forms such as radio, television, pop music, propaganda and clock-and-calendar time from urban centres in Malaya and Sarawak to rural Iban longhouses.

I am not suggesting that this is all there is to media and social change, but rather that if we are going to continue to study the appropriation of new media forms (along with other important processes such as their circulation**, distribution, production, etc) we will also need to consider their diffusion or spread across historical time and geographical space.

See also review of Media and Nation Building by Gordon Gray for American Anthropologist, June 2007

**For a recent anthropological study that focuses on media circulation in Bolivia, see J. Himpele’s (2007) Circuits of Culture. University of Minnesota Press. See also Postill, J. 2007 paper ‘The elements of media’

The Migra-Nord network of scholars and students working on media, migration and ethnic relations in the Nordic countries have their website here; see also their English-language bibliography