introduction 7The Nigerian video industry is the most prolific and best-known example
of such an industry in Africa (Haynes 2000; Krings and Okome 2013a).
These different strands of media anthropology inform my own stud-
ies to varying degrees. In my attempt to explore how people in Africa
appropriate and make meaning out of foreign life-worlds—at this point,
read: “foreign media content”—I do not confine myself to audience eth-
nography but, taking appropriation more literally, turn instead to local
adaptations, or “copies,” of such content. Moreover, I understand such
appropriations as the material result of local interpretations—namely, by
those producing these copies and who in so doing articulate their “read-
ings” of the foreign “originals.” The paradigm of the active audience thus
gets a specific spin in this book, where it is translated into the agency of
those who make meaning out of the foreign material by remediating it in
the context of a local universe of meanings and by using locally specific
methods. In other words, such remediations are the result of both their
producers’ interpretation of the foreign templates and the technological
means of (re)production. Media do not represent neutral technology, but
as media studies teach us, they shape the content produced and transmit-
ted through them. They are not stable entities either. As the anthropology
of media demonstrates, they are socially shaped means of production. My
discussion therefore addresses the “copies” as texts and as forms shaped
by specific media in local use.
In an attempt to better understand the current use of media as discern-
ible in Africa (and elsewhere), anthropologists have recently invoked the
concept of mediation, which is what media do. Calling the work of media
“mediation” implies that media are not conceptualized as mere vehicles
or means of transporting messages. Rather, “underlining the centrality
of the medium (that which occupies the middle)” serves, according to
Régis Debray (2000: 111), “to highlight the efficient dynamism of the me-
diate (that through which one thing relates to another).” Its two conno-
tations, “means” and “middle,” turn the medium into something that is
located in between a and b, enabling a to contact b or vice versa. Viewed
in this light, mediation is no longer confined to technological media but
pertains to objects, the human body, and social practice as well. This is
why William Mazarella (2004: 353) states: “Rarely is it acknowledged
that mediation . .. necessarily precedes the arrival of what we commonly