introduction 5blind to the presence and use of modern media among the people they
studied. Media were associated with the societies most anthropologists
came from, and thus with the self rather than the other. Media meant con-
tagion with modernity (Probst, Deutsch, and Schmidt 2002), and despite
a recurring interest in understanding the processes of “acculturation” and
“culture contact,” many anthropologists tended toward the “traditional.”
Some notable earlier exceptions notwithstanding (Carpenter 1972;
Powdermaker 1962), it was only at the beginning of the 1990s that the an-
thropology of media, along with the anthropology of globalization, firmly
took root. Meanwhile, roughly two decades later, this has grown into a
veritable subdiscipline, built on a number of canonical texts, textbooks, in-
troductions, and readers (Askew and Wilk 2002; Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod,
and Larkin 2002; Peterson 2005).
Media anthropology is composed of a number of different research
strands that sometimes feed into one another but are often kept separate.
Three of these strands are particularly relevant for this book and worth
mentioning here. The first draws on theories of active audiences, which
were among the leading paradigms of media and cultural studies during
the 1970s and 1980s. This new paradigm reversed the then-prevalent con-
ception about the distribution of agency between media texts and audi-
ences, insofar as audiences, who since the days of the Frankfurt School
had been viewed as mere passive recipients of media texts, were now at-
tributed agency in their consumption of films, tv serials, and music (Ang
1996; Hall 1992). Anthropologists took up this new conception and ap-
plied it to the study of how audiences made meaning out of media content
produced in societies different and often far away from their own. W hat
today reads almost as a truism—that audiences interpret media content
against the backdrop of their everyday lives and the social and historical
context of the particular society they live in—was established by anthro-
pologists who studied how Papua New Guinean villagers made mean-
ing out of Rambo movies (Kulick and Willson 1994), Trinidadians dealt
with American soap operas (Miller 1992), Nigerians approached Indian
movies (Larkin 1997), and Senegalese audiences viewed Latin American
telenovelas (Werner 2006).
The second line of research relevant for this book is media anthropol-
ogy’s discovery that like media texts, the different forms of media on their