ABSTRACT
The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology provides a broad overview of the widening and flourishing area of media anthropology, and outlines key themes, debates, and emerging directions.
The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology draws together the work of scholars from across the globe, with rich ethnographic studies that address a wide range of media practices and forms. Comprising 41 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into three parts:
- Histories
- Approaches
- Thematic Considerations.
The chapters offer wide-ranging explorations of how forms of mediation influence communication, social relationships, cultural practices, participation, and social change, as well as production and access to information and knowledge. This volume considers new developments, and highlights the ways in which anthropology can contribute to the study of the human condition and the social processes in which media are entangled.
This is an indispensable teaching resource for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students and an essential text for scholars working across the areas that media anthropology engages with, including anthropology, sociology, media and cultural studies, internet and communication studies, and science and technology studies.
Introduction; PART I: Histories; 1. Media Anthropology and the Digital Challenge; 2. Indigenous Media: Anthropological Perspectives and Historical Notes; 3. A Longitudinal Study of Media in Brazil; ; PART II: Approaches; A. Media as Infrastructure; 4. "Here, Listen to My CD-R": Music Transactions and Infrastructures in Underground Hip-Hop Touring; 5. "Technology is Wonderful Until It Isn't": Community-Based Research and the Precarity of Digital Infrastructure; 6. Media Migration; 7. The Digitally Natural: Hypomediacy and the "Really Real" in Game Design; B. Media as Practice; 8. Media Practices and Their Social Effects; 9. Television is Not a Democracy: The Limits of Interactive Broadcast in Japan; 10. Producing Place through Play: An Ethnography of Location-based Gaming; 11. PhotoMedia as Anthropology: Towards a Speculative Research Method; 12. Content-as-Practice: Studying Digital Content with a Media Practice Approach; C. Media as Materiality; 13. The Materiality of the Virtual in Urban Space; 14. Anthropology and Digital Media: Multivocal Materialities of Video Meetings and Deafness; 15. Cloudwork: Data Centre Labour and the Maintenance of Media Infrastructure; 16. Media Anthropology and Emerging Technologies: Re-working Media Presence; D. Media as Representation; 17. #Everest: Visual Economies of Leisure and Labour in the Tourist Encounter; 18. Postcolonial Digital Collections: Instruments, Mirrors, Agents; 19. Ethnographies of the Digitally Dispossessed; PART III: Thematic Considerations; A. Relationships; 20. "Friends from WeChat Groups": The Practice of Friendship via Social Media among Older People in China ; 21. Mediated Money and Social Relationships among Hong Kong Cross-boundary Students; 22. Narratives of Digital Intimacy: Romanian Migration and Mediated Transnational Life; B. Social Inequality and Marginalisation; 23. Mediating Hopes: Social Media and Crisis in Northern Italy; 24. Digital Inequality and Relatedness in India after Access; 25. In This Together: Black Women, Collective Screening Experiences, and Space-Making as Meaning-Making; 26. Black Gamer’s Refuge: Finding Community within the Magic Circle of Whiteness; C. Identities and Social Change; 27. Inking Identity: Indigenous Nationalism in Bolivian Tattoo Art; 28. Being Known and Becoming Famous in Kampala, Uganda; 29. The Hall of Mirrors: Negotiating Gender on Chilean Social Media; D. Political Conservatism; 30. Media Anthropology and the Crisis of Facts; 31. Conspiracy Media Ecologies and the Case for Guerilla Anthropology; 32. Researching Political Trolls as Instruments of Political Conservatism in Turkey: A Historical Framework and Methodological Reflections on a Discourse Community; 33. Performing Conservatism: A Study of Emerging Political Mobilisations in Latin America using "Social Media Drama" Analysis; E. Surveillance; 34. Algorithmic Violence in Everyday Life and the Role of Media Anthropology; 35. Queer and Muslim? Social Surveillance and Islamic Sexual Ethics on Twitter; 36. Queer Sousveillance: Publics, Politics, and Social Media in South Korea; F. Emerging Technologies and Contemporary Challenges: Data, AI and VR; 37. The Algorithmic Silhouette: New Technologies and the Fashionable Body; 38. Unlocking Heritage In Situ: Tourist Places and Augmented Reality in Estonia; 39. Precarity, Discrimination and (In)Visibility: An Ethnography of "The Algorithm" in the YouTube Influencer Industry; 40. AI Design and Everyday Logics in the Kalahari; 41. Ethnography of/and Virtual Reality; Afterword; Appendix; Index
