VIRTUAL ISSUE: MEDIA STUDIES
Virtual Issue: Media
EDITORS' INTRODUCTION
By Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn
This Virtual Issue draws together five essays that document and analyze the roles played by contemporary media in different cultural contexts. The essays examine media as a force of cultural production and the ways media can disrupt dominant notions of sexuality, play a role in COLOR REVOLUTIONS, (re-)write history, shape subjectivities in diaspora and open up new opportunities for ethnography.
The authors in this Virtual Issue question how transformations in media technology are changing the way media is conceived, produced and circulated, and the way media can contribute to or disrupt political-economic developments and social re-alignments. Focusing on subjects that cover both "old" and "new" media, they have asked probing questions about ways citizenship, nationalism and agency have been constructed and re-constructed.
Cymene Howe explores how a social justice NGO use media to reframe discussions of abortion, domestic violence, and homosexuality by using transnational tropes of sexuality and gender to gain legitimacy in local politics. She explores the ways in which a new Nicaraguan telenovela has made “activism at a distance” possible as it bypasses the state and works through entertainment.
Paul Manning revisits student protests in the Democratic Republic of Georgia to explore how shifts in state formations, particularly in postsocialist contexts, are tied to shifts in representational formations. Drawing on fieldwork in Tbilisi during 2001, Manning examines how student protestors appropriated images and logics from the widely viewed television cartoon Dardubala, a Simpsons-like satire of Georgian life.
What role might century-old folk art forms play in globalization? Teri Silvio examines this question in her essay which analyzes how puppet plays once staged in Ming dynasty temples have been taken up in Taiwanese television serials, and popularized by devoted fan clubs. Silvio argues that "in postindustrial societies like Taiwan, new media technologies, despite their foreign origins, are not merely 'appropriated,' but come to be seen as emerging from local aesthetics and local needs."
Laura Kunreuther explores how the diaspora is made "present" in Kathmandu through the public broadcast of intimate telephone conversations between Nepalis abroad and those in Kathmandu. Kunreuther argues that on these broadcasts the voice is viewed as a key sign of emotional directness, authenticity, and intimacy. Simultaneously, she sees the figure of the voice as central in discussions about the promises (and failures) of democracy and transparent governance. Seeing these two seemingly distinct formations of voice as mutually constitutive, she writes that "sentimental discourse about the voice reiterates modern neoliberal discourse about democracy and vice versa. Both are crucial to the formation of an urban Nepali subject in this political moment, which is deeply shaped by the figure of the diaspora."
In his contribution, Brian Keith Axel reflects on how a modern linguistic ideology of communication produces a fundamental misrecognition of the formation of the modern liberal subject as a naturally communicating subject. He explores the complex features of this misrecognition as a legacy of Cold War procedures of knowledge production about communication and technology to suggest that ethnographies of new technologies of communication unwittingly proliferate presumptions about the ontological integrity of the human prior to communication and prior to the advent of technologies of communication. This dilemma offers an alternative point of departure for the study of new technologies of communication in pursuit of a renewed, critical investigation into the circulation of modern cultural forms of intelligibility.
We hope that the essays in this issue will provoke new insights and strongly encourage participation in the discussions springing up in the forums.
Spectacles of Sexuality: Televisionary Activism in Nicaragua
Cymene Howe
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 2008, Vol. 23, No. 1: 48-84.
Supplemental Material
Rose-Colored Glasses? Color Revolutions and Cartoon Chaos in Postsocialist Georgia
Paul Manning
Cultural Anthropology May 2007, Vol. 22, No. 2: 171-213.
Supplemental Material
Remediation and Local Globalizations: How Taiwan's "Digital Video Knights-Errant Puppetry" Writes the History of the New Media in Chinese
Teri Silvio
Cultural Anthropology May 2007, Vol. 22, No. 2: 285-313.
Supplemental Material
Technologies of the Voice: FM Radio, Telephone, and the Nepali Diaspora in Kathmandu
Laura Kunreuther
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 2006, Vol. 21, No. 3: 323-353.
Supplemental Material
Anthropology and the New Technologies of Communication
Brian Keith Axel
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 2006, Vol. 21, No. 3: 354-384.
Supplemental Material
