Debate Section

JOHN POSTILL

What is the point of media

anthropology?

I
After long decades of neglect, the anthropological study of media is now booming.
The period between 2002 and 2005 alone saw the publication of no less than four
overviews of this emerging subfield (Askew and Wilk 2002; Ginsburg et al. 2002;
Peterson 2003; Rothenbuhler and Coman 2005) as well as the founding of the EASA
Media Anthropology Network, which by May 2009 boasted over 700 participants.
Anthropologists have now undertaken media research in many regions of the world,
from the Arctic and the Amazon to Western Europe and New Guinea, and worked on
media ranging from writing, film and television to software, Second Life and mobile
phones. Media anthropologists are also at the forefront of recent theoretical advances
in media and communication studies in areas such as cultural activism (Ginsburg 2008),
transnational media (Mankekar 2008), mobile telephony (Horst and Miller 2006),
virtual materiality (Boellstorff 2008), free software (Kelty 2008) and media practice
theory (Brauchler and Postill forthcoming). These are very exciting times indeed for
the anthropology of media.
Yet a nagging doubt remains. Given anthropologys late arrival at the study of media and
communication, what can our discipline hope to contribute to this long-established field
of interdisciplinary research? What is, in other words, the point of media anthropology?
Mark A. Peterson (2003: 3) has suggested that media anthropology has three main
contributions to make: thick ethnographies, a decentred West and alternative theories.
First, in contrast to other media scholars, media anthropologists conduct relatively
extended, open-ended fieldwork in which media artefacts and practices are but one part
of the social worlds under study. Second, media anthropologists are as likely to work in
remote corners of the global South as they are in metropolitan areas of Europe or North
America. This wide geographical scope allows them to broaden the media research
agenda from its traditional North Atlantic heartland. Third, media anthropologists
bring to the study of media a long disciplinary history of grappling with sociocultural
complexity through theories of exchange, social formations and cultural forms. This
theoretical expertise, argues Peterson, can help the field to finally leave behind the
simple models of communication that dominated its earlier history.
Whilst concurring with this assessment, I wish to suggest that there is one
crucial dimension missing from Petersons and other existing media anthropological
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programmes, namely history. Let me illustrate this absence by means of a few examples
from the literature. For instance, Ginsburg et al.s reader Media Worlds: Anthropology
on New Terrain opens with a Michael Leunig cartoon entitled The consumers in which
a Stone Age family is sitting in front of a cave wall painting of a deer as if watching a
primitive form of television (2002: xvii). However, the remainder of the book is most
decidedly not about the prehistoric origins of media consumption but rather, with one
or two exceptions, about ethnographic research into contemporary media. Similarly,
Askew and Wilks (2002: xxi) reader The Anthropology of Media opens with a twopage timeline of media development (Croteau and Hoynes 2000) that takes us from
the invention of paper in China in 100 CE through Gutenbergs 1456 Bible to the
advent of digital television in 1998. Again, the media anthropological texts presented
throughout the rest of the book make scant mention of such developments and instead
concentrate on contemporary media worlds. Finally, in Petersons (2003: 38) own
introduction to media anthropology he follows Hockett (1977) in suggesting that mass
media transformed the normal setting for human communication, i.e. the face-to-face
dyad or small group, but does not pursue the matter historically. In sum, by and large
these authors equate media anthropology with media ethnography.
To adapt Tim Ingolds (2008) recent argument about anthropology vs ethnography,
my thesis is that media anthropology is not media ethnography. I am not proposing,
though, that we abandon our ethnographic investigations. Instead I am saying that
we should add historical depth to the geographical breadth of media anthropology.
Ingold (2008: 74, 78) understands history as the continuous emergence of social-life
processes, rejecting with Kroeber and Evans-Pritchard any notion of history as abstract
chronological time. To my mind, this is an unhelpful dichotomy that downplays
historical discontinuities, not least the worldwide spread of clock-and-calendar time
that accompanied the rise of global capitalism and the nation-state system (Postill 2002).
Moreover, without chronological tools it is hard to envisage how media anthropologists
with an historical bent could go about tracking the uneven spread and adoption of media
innovations such as writing, radio or mobile telephony. And how could we possibly
study media events such as 9/11 in America (Rothenbuhler 2005), People Power II in
the Philippines (Rafael 2003) or the assassination of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands
(Eyerman 2008) without chronicling the unfolding of these events in real time across
different media platforms and physical settings? In my own study of internet activism
in suburban Malaysia (Postill forthcoming), I was able to reconstruct from Britain a
local mobilisation against the municipal council that took place after I had left the field.
This was possible thanks to the multiple digital trails left by actors across a number of
online archives which allowed me to date and time the sequence of key public events
down to the minute.
But as we all know from bitter experience, digital contents are not always as reliable
as in this instance (Peterson 2003: 67). Internet and SMS users, for example, can
often modify contents without leaving a trace, an ability that casts a long shadow
of societal doubt over the trustworthiness of digital representations. Doubts over the
veracity of a forwarded email or SMS text can arise at any point in its social life
cycle, and entire digital genres such as solidarity email chains (e.g. in support of
political detainees, see Cortazar Rodrguez 2004) carry a heavy burden of suspicion
in a cyberspace teeming with urban legends, hoaxes and rumours. There is nothing
new, however, about people questioning the truth-claims of certain representations. In
his cross-regional historical survey of societal ambivalences towards icons, paintings,

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sculptures and other representations, Jack Goody argues that [a] wariness about representation that, by definition, is not the real thing, is one element in the worldwide
history of culture (1997: 152). Although having doubts about representations is for
Goody inherent to human cognition, he found that the expression of these doubts
varies greatly across cultures and historical periods. Particularly striking was the rarity
of iconoclasm in Africa when compared to the Near East and Europe a contrast
that Goody links to the presence or absence of writing. Faced with the cognitive
contradictions of seeking to represent the divinities through figurative art, religious
leaders in Israel, early Christianity, Islam or Protestantism stressed the need to rely
exclusively on the written word of God (Goody 1997: 53). An engagement with
such longue duree studies of media congeries can provide media anthropologists
with a broad comparative canvass against which to set their own micro-historical
accounts. Applying Goodys scheme to the present age of digital reproduction raises
questions for future research about the kinds of cognitive ambivalences that digital
representations may trigger, and how these compare with those triggered by previous
(analogical) representations. In turn, an ethnographic sensibility honed in the study of
contemporary media can be invaluable in the reconstruction of past media practices and
events in collaboration with cultural historians, cognitive anthropologists and other
specialists.
To recapitulate, I have argued that media anthropology has four main contributions
to make to the interdisciplinary study of media and communication. In addition to
Petersons three contributions (ethnographic, geographical and theoretical), I have
proposed a fourth one: media historical research. It is time, I suggest, to venture beyond
our ethnographic comfort zones and into the media worlds of our ancestors.

References
Askew, K. and R. R. Wilk (eds.) 2002. The anthropology of media. London: Blackwell.
Boellstorff, T. 2008. Coming of age in Second Life: an anthropologist explores the virtually human.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Brauchler, B. and J. Postill (eds.) forthcoming. Theorising media and practice. Oxford and New York:
Berghahn.
Cortazar Rodrguez, F. J. 2004. Rumores y leyendas urbanas en Internet. Archivo del Observatorio para
la CiberSociedad (http://www.cibersociedad.net/archivo/articulo.php?art=194) Accessed June
2009.
Croteau, D. and W. Hoynes 1997. Media/society: industries, images and audiences. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Pine Forge Press.
Eyerman, R. 2008. The assassination of Theo van Gogh: from social drama to cultural trauma. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Ginsburg, F. D. 2008. Rethinking the digital age, in D. Hesmondhalgh and J. Toynbee (eds.), Media and
social theory. London: Routledge.
Ginsburg, F. D., L. Abu-Lughod and B. Larkin (eds.) 2002. Media worlds. Anthropology on new terrain.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Goody, J. 1997. Representations and contradictions: ambivalence towards images, theatre, fiction, relics
and sexuality. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hockett, C. 1977. Logical considerations in the study of animal communication, in The view from
language. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Horst, H. and D. Miller 2006. The cell phone: an anthropology of communication. New York: Berg.
Ingold, T. 2008. Anthropology is not ethnography, Proceedings of the British Academy 154: 69
92 (http://www.proc.britac.ac.uk/cgi-bin/somsid.cgi?page=154p069&session=825683A&type=
header) Accessed June 2009.

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Kelty, C. 2008. Two bits: the cultural significance of free software. Durham: Duke University Press.
Mankekar, P. 2008. Media and mobility in a transnational world, in D. Hesmondhalgh and J. Toynbee
(eds.), The media and social theory. London: Routledge.
Peterson, M. A. 2003. Anthropology and mass communication. Media and myth in the new millennium.
New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Postill, J. 2002. Clock and calendar time: a missing anthropological problem, Time and Society 11:
25170.
Postill, J. forthcoming. Grounding the internet: an ethnography of cyberactivism and local governance
in a Kuala Lumpur suburb. Oxford and New York: Berghahn.
Rafael, V. 2003. The cell phone and the crowd: messianic politics in the contemporary Philippines,
Public Culture 15: 399425.
Rothenbuhler, E. 2005. Ground Zero, the firemen, and the symbolics of touch on 9/11 and after, in E.
Rothenbuhler and M. Coman (eds.), Media anthropology. London: Sage.
Rothenbuhler, E. and M. Coman (eds.) 2005. Media anthropology. London: Sage.

MARK ALLEN PETERSON

Response to John Postill

II
I recently began watching the 1943 Columbia movie serial The Phantom with my
seven-year-old son. The serial fascinated him. Why was it broken into pieces? Why
does each piece end with a cliffhanger? I tried to explain the context to him kids of his
grandmothers generation spending their Saturdays at the matinee watching a newsreel,
a cartoon, a serial and a movie but he could relate this to almost nothing in his own
experience. His older sister tried to compare the episodes to a television series, but his
experience of TV is that of discrete stories in a timeless world of readily available DVDs,
streaming video and pay-per-view. Intergenerational cultural translation is necessary not
only from his grandmothers era but across the seven-year gap between him and his
sister.
There is so much going on in this tiny scrap of data. My sons socially constructed,
technologically mediated viewing practices confronted texts produced for a very
different kind of imagined audience with its own now extinct media practices and
led him to seek to put them in an historical context. As he watches, his intertextual
knowledge responds to correspondences between this and other Phantom texts from
other times, places and media. My son is a bit of a Phantom fan he enjoyed the 1996
Paramount film, which he has seen on DVD, the cartoon series Phantom 2040, which
he saw on television, and he has a couple of hardbound collections of the comics he
picked up at a bookstore in India. These texts themselves reveal much about changing
production contexts. A transnational intertextual artifact, the Phantom is, at best, a
Colonialist fantasy about Black tribal peoples who live in peace thanks to the guidance

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of a line of wise and powerful white men. At its worst, as in this 1943 serial, the
representations are overtly racist. My sons comics are printed by Eurobooks, an Asian
imprint of the Scandinavian Egmont corporation which has, since the death in 1999
of the Phantoms creator, Lee Falk, used a different writer/artist team than the King
Features Syndicate that publishes the Phantom in the US. And because these books were
published in India, the Phantoms mythical homeland of Bangalla had become Denkali
to avoid confusion with Indias own Bengal. The viewing itself is part of a gendered,
kinship experience: for my son and daughters, Dad is the one you watch superhero
movies with. But there are social consequences: my son cant play The Phantom with
his friends because this character is outside the local shared ludic repertoire dominated
by Batman, Spiderman and the X-Men.
There is nothing unique about this anecdotal account. Indeed, I chose it because
it seemed simpler to describe and contextualise than some other, similar accounts I
might have used, such as a Sudanese refugee TV-watching party in Cairo in 2000
or the electronic Ram Lila offered by the local BJP party in Malviya Nagar,
Delhi during Navratra in 1993. Any would serve to illustrate my point that most
media consumption throughout the world is simultaneously an everyday experience
and a deeply complicated transcultural and transhistorical one. Media practices
simultaneously serve functions in the immediate social milieu, engage with textual
structures themselves part of a complex web of intertextual meanings indexed during
consumption, and link such acts to similar acts elsewhere in time and space through
historically contingent flows of images, technologies and economic exchange. Every
act of media consumption or production offers insight into a world of meanings,
relationships and systems of interaction.
Anthropology is better positioned than many other disciplines to explore media
practices around the world. Ours is a discipline accustomed to linking the richness
of everyday social action to broader structures. More importantly, ours is a discipline
that tends to look at media as situated within other sets of human action rather than
approaching social phenomena with a priori assumptions about what media is.
This is especially apparent in the fact that a growing amount of media
anthropology is being written by anthropologists who are not particularly interested in
the media. Increasingly anthropologists studying very different topics Indonesian gay
and lesbian subjectivities (Boellstorff 2003), African tourism (Bruner 2001), Japanese
wedding speeches (Dunn 2006) find themselves writing about media. Anthropology
is an empirical discipline, and increasingly our informants themselves are engaged in
media practices and talking about them in every aspect of their lives.
John Postills challenge that part of what anthropology can offer media studies is a
processual and historical perspective is thus a little puzzling. I am quite sympathetic to
anthropologists of media making use of history in understanding human engagements
with media. In addition to the work Postill cited, Thomas Wolfe (2005) and Natalia
Roudakova (2008) offer fine examples of historically informed, nuanced approaches
to changing media cultures in post-Soviet Russia. I myself have recently hazarded
an effort at longue duree studies by attempting to track some of the twisting global
trajectories of jinn from Islamic doctrine and folklore through their transmogrification
into wish-granting genies by 18th-century print capitalism and 20th-century television
and film productions around the world (Peterson 2007). Nonetheless, Postills vision
remains largely programmatic rather than descriptive of what anthropologists actually
do.

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More to the point, why history as a defining aspect of media anthropology? There
is already a field of media history with its own journals, associations and canonical
texts. Certainly anthropology should be prepared to attend to historical contexts where
relevant the anecdote above suggests two distinctly relevant historical contexts, that
of intergenerational access to media and that of changing representations of race and
political agency but history, as Levi-Strauss (1966) pointed out, is not always equally
relevant.
This brings us back to the wider question of What is the point of media anthropology? which is, after all, another way of asking whether there is a specifically
anthropological approach to examining human engagement with media or whether
there are merely anthropologists engaged in interdisciplinary media studies.
Many anthropologists have an aversion to the policing of disciplinary borders. They
draw broadly from comparative literature, cultural studies, critical race theory, gender
studies, performance studies, philosophy, post-colonial studies, queer theory and social
history. Efforts to determine what is or is not media anthropology may be viewed as
insular and self-defeating.
Other anthropologists argue that it is important to locate the disciplinary
centre of media anthropology, to find a feature or set of features that make the
work of anthropologists studying media specifically anthropological. The most
common feature selected is ethnography understood as long-term, intimate research
engagement with a community rather than the range of less complex engagements that
go by that name in cultural studies (Nightingale 1993).
I recognise the appeal of locating a clearly anthropological centre to the work of
media anthropologists. At the same time, I would hesitate to toss out work by Bateson
(1980), Drummond (1995), Feldman (1994), Kottak (1982), Traube (1991) and others
simply on the grounds that they are not rooted in ethnography.
I embrace the Geertzian (1977) approach that anthropology is what anthropologists
do a cop-out, perhaps, maybe even a tautology. But when I review the large and
growing literature by anthropologists writing about media, I come to the conclusion that
the point of media anthropology is to broaden and deepen our understandings of human
engagements with media through the application of the anthropological perspective
broadly comparative, holistic in its approach to complexity, ethnographically empirical,
aware of historical contingency and relativistic. This is, I hope, more than sufficient to
justify media anthropology.

References
Bateson, Gregory 1980. An analysis of the Nazi film Hitlerjunge Quex, Studies in Visual
Communication 6 (3): 2055.
Boellstorff, Tom 2003. Dubbing culture: Indonesian gay and lesbi subjectivities and ethnography in an
already globalized world, American Ethnologist 30 (2): 22542.
Bruner, Edward 2001. The Maasai and the Lion King: authenticity, nationalism, and globalization in
African tourism, American Ethnologist 28 (4): 881908.
Drummond, Lee 1995. American dreamtime: a cultural analysis of popular movies and their implications
for a science of humanity. Lanham, MD: Littlefield Adams.
Dunn, Cynthis Dickel 2006. Formulaic expressions, Chinese proverbs, and newspaper editorials:
exploring type and token interdiscursivity in Japanese wedding speeches, Journal of Linguistic
Anthropology 16 (2): 15372.
Feldman, Allen 1994. On cultural anesthesia: from Desert Storm to Rodney King, American Ethnologist
21 (2): 40418.

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Geertz, Clifford 1977. Thick description, in Clifford Geertz, The interpretation of cultures, 330. New
York: Basic Books.
Kottak, Conrad Phillip 1982. The father strikes back, in Conrad Phillip Kottak (ed.), Researching
American culture: a guide for student anthropologists, 98104. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
Levi-Strauss, Claude 1966. The scope of anthropology, Current Anthropology 7 (2): 11223.
Nightingale, Virginia 1993. Whats ethnographic about ethnographic audience research? In G. Turner
(ed.), Nation, culture, text: Australian cultural and media studies, 16477. London: Routledge.
Peterson, Mark Allen 2007. From jinn to genies: intertextuality, media, and the rise of global folklore,
in Mikel J. Koven and Sharon Sherman (eds.), Folklore/cinema: popular film as vernacular culture,
93112. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Roudakova, Natalia 2008. Mediapolitical clientelism: lessons from anthropology, Media, Culture and
Society 30 (1): 4159.
Traube, Elizabeth 1992. Dreaming identities: class, gender and generation in 1980s Hollywood movies.
Boulder: Westview.
Wolfe, Thomas C. 2005. Governing Soviet journalism: the press and the socialist person after Stalin.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

JOHN POSTILL

Response to Mark A. Peterson

III
The problem with Mark A. Petersons assertion that anthropology is what anthropologists do is that it is formulated in the present tense. The implication is that anthropology
is what anthropologists do at present. Instead, I would suggest that anthropology
encompasses what anthropologists did in the past, what they do now, and what
they will or might do in the future. The main aim of my opening statement was
precisely to open a public debate on the future(s) of media anthropology, an exercise
that is already taking place in other subfields (see Pink 2006; Rylko-Bauer et al. 2006)
but is long overdue in the anthropology of media. Having clarified this point, I can now
address Petersons question of why I have chosen history as a defining aspect of media
anthropology.
First, because history has been a defining aspect of sociocultural anthropology for
at least 30 years as it was indeed before Malinowskis fieldwork revolution (Kuklick
1996; Kuper 1992). Historical research is not merely something that anthropologists
do if and when it is relevant to a specific project, as suggested by Petersons brief
reference to Levi-Strauss (1966). In fact, some of the more influential and contested
anthropological works of the past three decades have been historical studies, including
Geertzs (1980) Negara, Rosaldos (1980) Ilongot Headhunting, Wolfs (1982) Europe
and the People Without History, Sahlins (1985) Islands of History and the Comaroffs
(1991, 1997) Of Revelation and Revolution. This does not mean, though, that all

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areas of anthropological inquiry have engaged equally with historical anthropology.

As the Manchester School has taught us, all social fields are internally differentiated,
with some sectors of the field (i.e. subfields) enjoying better insulation from external
influences and changes than others (Epstein 1958). The field of anthropology is no
exception. Thus whilst the anthropology of colonialism has been profoundly shaped by
historical concerns and methods (Merry 2003), the anthropology of time has remained
an oddly ahistorical enterprise in which clocks, calendars, radios and other chronometric
media have been largely ignored (Postill 2002). At present the anthropology of media
lies somewhere between these two poles, but perhaps closer to the ahistorical pole:
although media anthropologists have conducted a number of historical studies (as
pointed out by Peterson), to date the bulk of studies have concentrated on coeval media
worlds.
The second reason to focus on history is because I believe anthropologists have
an important contribution to make to the historical study of media. Take, for instance,
the second edition of Briggs and Burkes (2005) A Social History of the Media, a
groundbreaking work translated into more than ten languages. In their introduction,
these authors give pride of place to a well-known debate between two anthropologists,
Jack Goody (1977) and Brian Street (1984), around the sociocultural consequences of
writing. What these anthropologists, and particularly Goody, brought to the debate
was both an ethnographic sensibility to social context as well as an understanding
of the uneven processes of cultural appropriation that have accompanied the global
spread of writing. Another example is the media historical work of the anthropologist
Brian Larkin (2002), who has studied the materiality of cinema theatres in colonial
Kano, northern Nigeria. Like Sahlins (1985) or Goody (1977) before him, and Kelty
(2008) after him, Larkin deftly combines archival research with fieldwork to produce
a compelling account. My point is not that the historical anthropology of media does
not exist, but rather that we need more studies like Larkins media studies that avoid
the twin parochialisms of geography and history (see Burke 1992: 23).
A third and final reason is that a more historical approach to media will enable
media anthropologists to make new connections across different kinds of media and
specialist literatures. It is telling in this regard that the medium of writing is still not
part of the emerging media anthropological canon. For example, whilst Don Kulicks
co-authored work on film-viewing practices in a Papua New Guinean village (Kulick
and Willson 2002) is featured in the reader The Anthropology of Media (Askew and
Wilk 2002), his study of literacy practices in that same village appears in Cross-Cultural
Approaches to Literacy, a volume edited by Brian Street (see Kulick and Stroud 1993).
The explanation for this epistemic segregation between the anthropology of writing and
that of other media is not hard to find: most contemporary media anthropologists have
studied ethnographically one or two modern media (radio, television, film, blogging,
etc.) but paid little heed to the long social histories of earlier media such as writing.

References
Askew, K. and R. R. Wilk (eds.) 2002. The anthropology of media. London: Blackwell.
Briggs, A. and P. Burke 2005. A social history of the media, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Polity.
Burke, P. 1992. History and social theory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Comaroff, J. and J. L. Comaroff 1991, 1997. Of revelation and revolution. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.

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Epstein, A. L. 1958. Politics in an urban African community. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Geertz, C. 1980. Negara: the theatre state in nineteenth century Bali. Princeton: Princeton University
Press
Goody, J. 1977. The domestication of the savage mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kuklick, H. 1996. Diffusionism, in A. Barnard and J. Spencer (eds.), Encyclopaedia of social and cultural
anthropology, 1602. London: Routledge.
Kulick, D. and C. Stroud 1993. Conceptions and uses of literacy in a Papua New Guinean village, in
B. Street (ed.), Cross-cultural approaches to literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kulick, D. and M. Willson 2002. Rambos wife saves the day: subjugating the gaze and subverting the
narrative in a Papua New Guinean swamp, in K. Askew and R. R. Wilk (eds.), The anthropology
of media. London: Blackwell.
Kuper, A. 1992. Introduction, in A. Kuper (ed.), Conceptualizing society. London: Routledge.
Larkin, B. 2002. The materiality of cinema theaters in Northern Nigeria, in F. D. Ginsburg, L. AbuLughod and B. Larkin (eds.), Media worlds. Anthropology on new terrain. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Levi-Strauss, Claude 1966. The scope of anthropology, Current Anthropology 7 (2): 11223.
Merry, S. E. 2003. Hegemony and culture in historical anthropology: a review essay on Jean and John
L. Comaroff, From revelation to revolution, Vols. I and II, American Historical Review 108 (2):
46070.
Pink, S. 2006. The future of visual anthropology. London: Routledge.
Postill, J. 2002. Clock and calendar time: a missing anthropological problem, Time and Society 11,
25170.
Rosaldo, R. 1980. Ilongot headhunting 18831974. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Rylko-Bauer, B., M. Singer and J. van Willigen 2006. Reclaiming applied anthropology: its past, present,
and future, American Anthropologist 108 (1): 17890.
Sahlins, M. 1985. Islands of history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Street, B. 1984. Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wolf, E. 1982. Europe and the people without history. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

MARK ALLEN PETERSON

Response to John Postill

IV
It would be easy to dismiss John Postills catching me as saying anthropology is what
anthropologists do as a minor issue of semantics, especially as he knows I have written
at length about what media anthropologists have done in the past. On the contrary, I
fear he is right. I was originally trained as a linguistic anthropologist and so taught to
believe semantics matters. In context, I was clearly talking about what anthropologists
have done, yet I chose to use a simple present tense over a more complex construction. I
wrote in the ethnographic present as anthropologists have so often done, and continue
to do, a legacy of our own media history handed on by our predecessors and kept
alive not only by authors but by the media system the editors, proofreaders and

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others through which our work sees print. For example, I recently contributed a
chapter to an edited volume on media anthropology. Cognisant of the fact the data were
from fieldwork 15 years ago, I put the ethnographic description into the past tense,
only to have the copy editor shift it into the ethnographic present.
In fact, my own work is heading in just the directions Postill is advocating. I have
just completed fieldwork among news producers and consumers in India, more or less
replicating the work I did in 1993. The goal is to explain the profound changes in
news culture over 15 years while bringing an ethnographic sensibility to this process.
Examining the rise of television news alongside a vibrant press, I am seeking to make
new connections across different kinds of media across space and time, as he calls for.
It is thus ironic to find myself positioned against Postill on the relevance of
history to media anthropology. Our debate is more a matter of emphasis than strong
disagreement. I see his stress on historicising media anthropology as programmatic, a
call for anthropologists to heed (and one I endorse), rather than a defining characteristic
of what media anthropology currently contributes (the present tense again) to the wider
field of media studies.
It is, indeed, important for comparative studies of media across time and space to
exhibit an ethnographic sensibility, which I take to mean recognising and respecting
the existence of multiple forms of knowledge and practice (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea
2006), and an effort at thick description (Geertz 1973) and thick contextualisation
(Ortner 1995) that does justice to the complexities of these knowledges and practices as
they play out in everyday life. To Postills list, I would add the work of Mark Pedelty
on Bolero (1999, 2004), which brilliantly examines the ways the modern becomes the
traditional over time, and some of the role(s) media plays in this.
Pedeltys work also addresses Postills question about the boundaries of media.
Although there is discussion of cassettes and radio, television and film, much of
Pedeltys work focuses on musical performance singers in town squares, night clubs
and cathedrals. Are these media? What about circuses and passion plays? Peacocks
(1968) brilliant study of ludruk plays in Indonesia has been held up as a model of how
to study the interrelations of producers, text and consumers (e.g. Spitulnik 1993)
but is theatre media? It seems to me that policing the boundaries of what constitutes
media is as fraught as the problem of locating the boundaries of anthropology in this
work were calling media anthropology. I hope the future will bring more efforts to
understand the complex interrelationships between multiple forms of media literacies
and media practices.
Postills use of the concept ethnographic sensibility leads me to express concerns
about Jack Goodys work as a model for the kind of work that historicised
media anthropology would produce. While appreciating the importance of Goodys
pioneering work as a stimulus to contemporary thinking about literacy, it is not work I
would hold up as a model (Goody 1977, 2000; Goody and Watt 1963). As many before
me have pointed out (Street 1984; Parry 1986; Fuller 1988; Schousboe and Larsen
1989), in Goodys work literacy often seems to operate through its own autonomous
agency, independent of its social contexts. As Street argued, We cannot predict the
social concomitants of a given literacy practice from a description of the particular
technological concomitants (Street 1984: 97). Shifting the focus to reading (Boyarin
1993) and situated literacies (Barton et al. 2000) a turn to practice has immensely
improved our ethnographic sensitivity to the contexts of literacys conventions and
consequences but often at the cost of attention to historical process Postill is prescribing.

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I remain unconvinced that history is an answer to the question What is the point
of media anthropology? But I acknowledge that it could become one, and I am content
to wait and see if this is a direction taken by the growing number of anthropologists
looking at media around the world.

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C 2009 European Association of Social Anthropologists.