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KELLY ASKEW and RICHARD WILK (eds.), The Anthropology of Media: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002, 416 p.
I have been teaching an undergraduate "culture and media" course for seven years, and in the first class I tell students that media have not yet been recognized as a legitimate subfield of anthropological research, despite the growing evidence of anthropologists developing important arguments about media and its place in social life. I have always found this aversion surprising (as do the editors of the volume under review) since media and anthropology are similar in at least one fundamental way: both are mediums that translate/negotiate/intervene between parties to effect understanding. Many of the debates in media studies are similar to those of anthropology: questions of representation, interpretation, relations of power, ethics and responsibility apply to both domains. I have found that media studies can be an interesting lens through which students come to learn about a number of these issues in contemporary socio-cultural anthropology. I was therefore very excited to see the publication of this edited volume, if for no other reason than that it is the first textbook to articulate an anthropological approach to media and assemble a number of ethnographic and theoretical perspectives that contribute towards understanding the significance, roles and effects of media in contemporary societies.
This reader represents media in all their variety and in doing so sets a new, more inclusive agenda for anthropological research-to date, there has been a tendency to "ocular-centrism" in anthropological treatments of media-witness...