Channeling the State: Community Media and Popular Politics in Venezuela by Naomi Schiller

Abstract

Reviewed by: Channeling the State: Community Media and Popular Politics in Venezuela by Naomi Schiller John W. Sherman Schiller, Naomi. Channeling the State: Community Media and Popular Politics in Venezuela. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. The early historiography on the 1998–2013 Chavista project in Venezuela has been broadly positive, a trend reflected in anthropologist Naomi Schiller’s microstudy of media and the state. The basis of the book is the author’s dissertation research under Bruce Grant at New York University, which included extensive fieldwork. A first stint in Venezuela saw the author observing telenovela-watching women in a small rural town, who cared little about the emerging government of Hugo Chávez; subsequent years were spent with the cadre of Catia TVe, a community television station located in a Caracas barrio that became politically wed to the Chavista project, partly through its interaction with ViVe TV, a much larger, state-funded outlet. [End Page 245] The intellectual recipe for Schiller’s study is the familiar mainstream engaged by so many graduate students in contemporary anthropological and historical studies: large portions of James Scott and state formation theory, a smaller dose of Lila Abu-Lughod and media theory, a sprinkling of Gramsci, and a leavening of optimism about the human condition and prospects for a better world. But within this concoction Schiller’s work is wholly microfocused on the thirty staff and roughly one hundred volunteers at the Catia TVe community center. Organizationally, she walks us through the formation of Catia TVe, which predated Chávez, and the station’s pro-Chávez engagement of the 2006 election. She analyzes class dynamics—Catia TVe staff mostly from the urban working class, their Chavista interlocutors mainly middle class. She addresses gender, finding persistent barriers, despite many positive gains. Theoretically, Schiller primarily wrestles with the meaning and potential for change by way of the state, which is itself constantly morphing and resetting possibilities or imposing new limitations, as in the matter of press freedom, with Chávez’s controversial shutting down of a major commercial outlet in 2007. This book is in the mainstream of current anthropological studies and will undoubtedly be appreciated by many. This reviewer—not so mainstream—finds it far too microfocused, and ill-equipped to answer the deeper and far more pressing macroquestions relating to the obvious failure of Chavismo. In a circa 2015 redux, the author does briefly address this failure, tossing up the old mono-export complaint of bygone dependency theory. If macroeconomics can obliterate all the efforts from below to create a better world, then what is the point of studying those grassroots efforts? If positive change does not last, why is it significant? When academics make the decision to interact only with activists, they prejudice their conclusions in ways that cannot explain other critical sociopolitical phenomena. One such glaring gap is the persistent recovery and reinvention of the Latin American political Right. Where do the Álvaro Uribes and Jair Bolsonaros come from? Venezuela will almost certainly see the ascent of a neoliberal rightist regime soon—how shall we explain it? Personally, I wish that Schiller had stayed with the telenovela-watching women in the small farm town. [End Page 246] John W. Sherman Wright State University Copyright © 2021 Association of Global South Studies, Inc