Media (Anthropology)

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Are we satisfied with the conventional media for anthropological research and publication? The question is obviously not a new one. Even before anthropological research and scholarship had consolidated its modern standards of fieldwork, theory, and ethnography in the first decades of the twentieth century, anthropological writing was already part of an ecology of recordings and representations of other ways of being human that ranged from colonial propaganda to exotic-pornographic photography to early filmic and acoustic experiments in salvage ethnography. All absorbed and reproduced the politics of race and empire around them, just as early anthropological writing did. Films like Edward Curtis's In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914) and Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922) offered, despite their myriad flaws, early glimpses of the potentialities of ethnographic film and indigenous media (see Ginsburg 2002). By the 1930s and 1940s we find larger-scale projects of documentation and salvage-the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song, for example-but also early experiments in using

I explore how film censorship has increasingly shaped film production and circulation at film festivals, public screenings, and theatrical releases in post-2000 Turkey. I argue that film censorship in Turkey now works through two levels. First, through direct intervention, whereby state institutions continue to censor film production. Although the renaming of control commissions from previous decades via the 2004 "Cinema Law" creates the illusion that censorship boards have been abolished, fieldwork data proves otherwise. Secondly, state institutions designate various non-state actors as proxies of the state and grant them well-calculated power to employ on their behalf when necessary. I draw upon fieldwork data and case studies to analyze how the political climate in Turkey has suppressed cultural production, freedom of expression, and political resistance to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government both through bans on artistic expression and processes of delegitimization, targeting, threats, and violence.

et celui de Denis Monière, (2002) pour le schisme sur la question politique entre optimistes (Charles Firestone, Stefano Rodota et Ian Budge) et pessimistes (Richard Davis, Anthony Wilhelm). 2 Réseau DEL 3 Voire à ce titre l'important travail critique du philosophe Paul Mathias (MATHIAS, 1997) et http://pmat.ciph.free.fr/

Romain Jacoud évoque une boucle qui aujourd'hui se refermerait à la manière d'un tore : au même endroit, mais un cran au-dessus. Il explique comment le commerce-échange qui innerva nos civilisations subit la tentation du monde taylorien et devint commerce-mercantilisme. Par la magie d'un univers que les réseaux ont rendu systémique, le marchand semble avoir retrouvé sa vertu de « civilisateur interne » et, redécouvrant son client, a ouvert la voie au commerce-communication entre un « consommateur partenaire » et un « commerçant interactif. » Nouvel échange donc, non plus d'objets mais de messages.

Abstract
The escalation in cases of rape in Nigeria is a cause of major concern with cases frighteningly surging to 717 between January and May 2020. This informed the choice to carry out research on this unfortunate development. Several factors have been held accountable for the incessant rate of rape in Nigeria, prominent amongst this is indecent dressing. The aim of this research is to find out if really indecent dressing is considered one of the factors responsible for the rise in rape cases. The study proposed to ascertain the level to which sexually violated victims speak out, and the rate to which social media exacerbates indecent dressing. This paper was appropriately premised on the cultivation theory in which people begin to view the television world as the real world. In relation to this study, exposure to dressing (decent or indecent) on social media is emulated by ladies suggesting social media exerts some influence over users which inadvertently could lead to rape. Methodology employed was the survey method with the questionnaire as the instrument of data collection administered to members of organisations that advance women’s rights. Findings revealed that dressing whether decent or indecent is not considered a factor in rape, and the reporting of incidents of rape are low by victims. Social media was found also to have an influence on the high incidence of indecent dressing.
Keywords: Decent, Dressing, Indecent, Rape, Social Media, Stakeholders.

Les nouvelles technologies sont un moyen de s'ouvrir au monde. D'ici 2020, ce sont 20,8 milliards d'objets qui devraient être connectés dans le monde. En 2015, la France comptait déjà 72,1 millions d'abonnements téléphoniques en France-7 milliards dans le monde-et presque autant de téléphones en service. On ne compte plus le nombre de tablettes également et l'émergence des voitures intelligentes. Ces chiffres ont de quoi donner le tournis. Ces objets, qui ont pour vocation de transformer-ou du moins d'améliorer-notre quotidien, ont-ils pris l'ascendant sur notre vie sociale ? Qu'en est-il de la relation humaine dans tout ça ? En France comme ailleurs, dans un climat social particulièrement tendu, ces technologies qui accompagnent notre quotidien, favorisent-elles le lien entre les personnes ? Jusqu'à récemment, les relations humaines traditionnelles, consistaient en la capacité des êtres humains à s'entretenir entre eux sur des sujets plus ou moins sérieux, au quotidien, dans toutes circonstances : échanger sur les conditions de travail avec des collègues de bureau, sur la météo avec un voisin de palier ou sur le dernier épisode de sa série préférée avec un ami, etc. Le Web : une révolution ? Non, le Web n'a rien « inventé » à proprement parlé. Du moins pas pour créer des relations entre les humains. Ce qu'Internet a bouleversé, c'est la portée de ces relations : hier on discutait avec ses proches, famille ou amis près de chez soi. Aujourd'hui, on peut entrer en contact et échanger avec le monde entier en quelques secondes. Ce qui a changé, c'est donc le médium, le support, l'outil grâce auquel la connexion entre ces personnes va s'effectuer : cela se passe désormais autour d'une application ou d'un réseau social. Oui, nous sommes devenus « addicts » à la technologie... Difficile de le contredire, mais difficile également de l'accepter : nous sommes devenus techno-dépendants. Qui se souvient de la dernière fois qu'il a rejoint une destination inconnue sans GPS ? Peut-on encore se passer de son smartphone ? Une étude a montré que les générations actuelles ont plus de difficultés à se passer de Facebook et de Twitter que d'être privé de manger, de fumer ou de faire l'amour1. Il existe même des cliniques spécialisées dans la prise en charge des personnes ayant une addiction aux technologies et on ne compte plus les articles qui évoquent les nouvelles méthodes de « déconnexion ». ...et c'est la meilleure chose qui nous soit arrivé. En dehors de ces quelques exceptions, le constat est limpide : la technologie rend service, aide l'humain, appuie ses actes et permet les relations. Non, la technologie ne crée pas les échanges, elle les transforme. Jusqu'ici, pour écouler les vêtements de ses enfants devenus trop petits, on devait attendre la brocante annuelle de la ville ou du village. Aujourd'hui ? On peut déposer une annonce sur des sites de revente en quelques clics. Facile, pratique, utile. Ce qui n'empêche pas les brocantes de continuer à prospérer en parallèle. Il y a désormais-réellement-une application pour tout. Il existe des réseaux sociaux pour ne plus aller faire son jogging tout seul, des communautés en ligne pour aller chasser des Pokémons en groupe, on peut choisir ses « coworkers » et son lieu de travail, même pour quelques heures... Ce que les internautes recherchent désormais, ce sont d'autres personnes qui partagent les mêmes centres d'intérêts autour d'événements qui leur ressemblent. Et cela est devenu accessible à tous. Les exemples de relations sociales devenues possibles grâce aux nouvelles technologies ne se comptent plus. Souvenez-vous des premiers « Apéros Facebook » : des centaines, parfois des milliers d'internautes sans autres points communs que la proximité géographique et l'appartenance à un même réseau social. Un phénomène nouveau par son ampleur, rendu 1

This collection of short essays is adapted from a panel at the 2018 AES/SVA conference organized around the theme of “Resemblance.” The authors are grappling with long-term dissertation and research projects that wade in the waters of images, technologies, and rumors, and their debris. Engaging in “varying processes of knowledge production that often lead to multiple outcomes,” the authors invite their readers to stand with them in the midst of their thinking, to walk with them in a Bhutanese art gallery, to look sideways at a censored film in Turkey, to hold a book made of repurposed rubbish in Chile (Collins, Durington, and Gill 2017, 143).

The collection draws attention to the role of conference presentations as a key mode in the production of anthropological knowledge—in particular, the serendipity of finding and making unexpected connections through the practice of attending and presenting at conferences. Reading the collection below raises questions about what each piece gains from being part of the whole that the authors may not have had in mind while conducting their fieldwork and, more broadly, the comparative project at the heart of the production of anthropological knowledge. Embracing the spirit of multimodal anthropology, this collection welcomes readers to the messiness and excitement of ideas and images in motion both in the world and as anthropologists interpret them. Recognizing the historical emergence of technologies that make the infrastructures and effects of media ever more invisible (Kittler 1996), the authors of this multimodal collection reflect on how control over representation serves as a conduit for power and as a tool for redirection in response to power. Representations are inseparable from the media through which they circulate, and the essays here ground their analyses in the examination of specific media: cardboard, speech, film, digital images, and paint. The various ethnographic examples help elucidate the material and tangible way power works through representations and the media that facilitate them.

In this way, the authors of this collection participate in a number of key scholarly conversations. The authors follow in Alfred Gell’s (1998, 6) theoretical lineage of attending to the distributed agency of the material, considering various media in terms of a “system of action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it.”  Like Gell, scholars Dilip Gaonkar and Elizabeth Povinelli (2003, 396) have argued that focusing on the circulation of forms in public culture “orients . . . analysis toward the calibration of vectors of power” instead of focusing on “meaning.” So, too, the discussion below recalls W. J. T. Mitchell’s (1996, 82) proposal that images be “seen as complex individuals occupying multiple subject positions and identities” and “not merely a by-product of social reality but actively constitutive of it.” Many of the works examine how socially shared representations or “images” can often turn or be turned to ends other than originally intended.

Providing a series of unique glimpses of media circulation from Uganda, Bhutan, Turkey, Chile, and Thailand, the authors’ contributions illustrate the way that political power, especially local nationalisms, effectively constrains and enables various forms of local media circulation. Sonay Ban’s work argues for reconsidering how we choose to represent censorship, drawing attention to the less direct and more dispersed forms of control over film in recent decades in Turkey. Cecilia Salvi considers how publishers of cartoneras editoriales in Chile turn cardboard, a material seen as worthless or garbage, into a medium for a local literary culture informed by ideas of democracy. Vaia Sigounas’s essay addresses how the image of success in Uganda gets subverted through rumor and what this may say about resistance, inequality, and uncertainty during an election. Bronwyn Isaacs analyzes how various aesthetic regimes of celebrity, Buddhism, and monarchy come to inform each other in the construction of the Thai national imaginary. Jason Hopper’s work describes how Bhutanese artists repurpose national imagery to reconcile their pursuit of free expression with the high value placed on cultural preservation and social harmony.

Media circulation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is sometimes described as moving along open vectors of distribution according to a political vision “that takes the world rather than the nation as its political space” (Ignatieff 1998, 21). The authors of this multimodal collection attend to local visions of power and the “foreclosures, inhibitions or even ‘stickiness’ that may shape and hinder movement in a world of seemingly open digital vectors” (Spyer and Steedly 2013, 23). Finding unique appropriations and movements of photos, newspapers, paintings, films, cardboard, speech, and other materials, the authors in this collection insist on the ongoing importance of grounded ethnography and attention to local political concerns in the study of contemporary forms of media and representation. At the same time, this diverse group of studies shows how representations continue to circulate and take on new significance through scholarship itself.

Social media platforms have quickly transformed communication, relationships, identities, education and power relations. These platforms have also become a popular topic for discussion and research, yet most claims made about social media are very general. This course takes an anthropological approach to social media in order to speak about the ways social media use is embedded in and reflective of specific cultural contexts. The course concentrates on content of social media rather than platforms, and also explores social media as a research method for understanding how people's lives converge in both online and offline spaces. We will consider the incredible variation in social media that emerges on different continents, among people of different class and religious backgrounds, for people with different gender and sexual identities, and among people who are differently embedded in global systems. Course Objectives Students will be able to: 1. explain key terms that are central to an anthropological understanding of social media 2. relate social media to topics of cultural and social diversity 3. relate issues in the study of social media with power relations, ideology, and social institutions 4. think comparatively in terms of both universals of social media as well as local inflections 5. apply anthropological methods to their own project 6. apply key themes, theories, and approaches of anthropology to their own analysis

Indigenous futures are not only vital for Aboriginal people; they also provide valuable insight into global challenges. Building on Indigenous futurisms scholarship on Native science-fiction films, I engage recent Indigenous Australian video projects that draw more subtly on futures to illustrate how and why they articulate generative hope in the postapocalyptic present.

This collection of essays engages the ways in which anthropological understandings of Indigenous media can be expanded and reimagined through a focus on futurity. Throughout, the contributors pose two distinct yet interconnected questions: What does the future of Indigenous media hold? And, how is the future itself being increasingly asserted through Indigenous media production? In a sense, then, the collection serves as both retrospective and opening. We reflect on the history of Indigenous media scholarship in tracing the trajectory of emerging forms and content, while also considering how the future is mobilized as a means for establishing temporal sovereignty in relation to anachronistic pasts. In doing so, we aim to provoke new questions about the histories, politics, and futures of Indigenous self-representation.

This conversation considers some of the disciplinary divides and anxieties surrounding contemporary research on media and mobility through a discussion of linkages between these two research fields and the role of non-media centric focuses on media across the disciplines. The conversation was sparked by the three-day workshop, Anthropologies of Media and Mobility: Theorizing Movement and Circulations across Entangled Fields, held in September, 2017 at The University of Cologne.1 One of the coconvenors Roger Norum sat down with a trio of leading scholars working on media and mobility, Heather Horst, David Morley, and Noel B. Salazar. They address a number of critical topics such as the nature of binary and category disruption, contextually dependent forms of media, the value of collaborative scholarship, the roles of methodologies in academic practice and the critical role played by early-career researchers in pushing various boundaries across our fields.

Turkey has witnessed a proliferation of Islamic television channels since the liberalization of broadcasting in the 1990s. The programming of these TV channels was initially distinctly theological in character, with shows focusing on the doctrinal, scriptural, and ritualistic aspects of Islam. More recently, however, they have started producing family-friendly entertainment programs as well as shows aimed at “strengthening the family.” Islamic broadcasters intend their family-focused programming as civil initiatives against what they see as the increasing corrosion of the “moral fabric of the family” and devaluation of “family values” in contemporary Turkish society. In these TV shows, audiences are provided with guidance and techniques that would help them cultivate ethical dispositions, knowledge, and skills so that they could assume autonomy and responsibility for administering their families more effectively. Islamic broadcasters explicitly identify their role as assisting the state in  fighting social problems through their programming. Moreover, the discourses and sensibilities promoted on television articulate with the biopolitical concerns of the nation-state and the emerging rationalities of governance. While Islamic television professionals’ self-ascribed mission to “strengthen the family” emerges from a religiously inspired moral imperative to provide service, it simultaneously indicates their internalization of neoliberal rationalities of governance that promote the responsibilization of non-governmental actors for providing social services as well as that of individuals for supporting and caring for their family members. [Keywords: Islam, television, media, family, family values, secularism, neoliberalism, Turkey]

You can download the paper at: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/670934

During the onslaught of the Islamic caliphate on Kobanî, Syria, media outlets across the globe broadcast pictures of brave and often unveiled Kurdish women fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), a quintessentially male force of destruction. The images of women fighting Islamist male aggressors aroused outrage, admiration, and pity among observers. But had all Kurdish fighters been male or had women fought for ISIS, viewers might have reacted differently. To examine some of the most widely disseminated gendered pictures and videos of the Syrian uprising in the media, this article draws on Mohja Kahf’s three categories, which typify how Muslim women, Arab women, or both are perceived by the Anglophone reading and viewing public: the first is victims; the second, escapees; and the third, pawns of patriarchy and male power. While this typology helps in examining gendered images of the Syrian uprising, it also obscures the socioeconomic realities on the ground.

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Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in the city of Alto Hospicio in northern Chile, this book describes how the residents use social media, and the consequences of this use in their daily lives. Nell Haynes argues that social media is a place where Alto Hospicio’s residents – or Hospiceños – express their feelings of marginalisation that result from living in city far from the national capital, and with a notoriously low quality of life compared to other urban areas in Chile.

In actively distancing themselves from residents in cities such as Santiago, Hospiceños identify as marginalised citizens, and express a new kind of social norm. Yet Haynes finds that by contrasting their own lived experiences with those of people in metropolitan areas, Hospiceños are strengthening their own sense of community and the sense of normativity that shapes their daily lives. This exciting conclusion is illustrated by the range of social media posts about personal relationships, politics and national citizenship, particularly on Facebook.

May 21, 1998 is a date widely remembered by the Indonesian people, especially by those of them who suffered under the three decades of Soeharto's rule. That date, Soeharto announced his unscheduled resignation in the wake of several days of civil unrest. Soeharto was deposed by "people power", with students taking to the streets and demanding change. They stood up in the front, backed up by the professors, NGO activists, women & mothers, businesspeople, and other citizens. Plus of course, the press.
Another support which was strongly used is the Internet. Through that medium, information spread out by minute, all around the clock, running behind and beyond the eyes of the armed-government. The Net was then becoming the weapon to boost the information, reaching a wider community within a much shorter period of time.
After the departure of Soeharto, the Indonesian traffic of information on the Net lost its focus. People went back to their own agendas. Individuals and groups sought to have their own views heard. The nature of the Net allows them the freedom to pour out their feelings and needs. The Net then became a jumble of competing and contradictory themes. Words against words may subsequently be connected to disorderly action in the off-line world for now people are more disrespectful of the law.