Turner’s Anthropology of Media and Its Legacies

Abstract

In the 1990s, Terry Turner produced some of the most conceptually and ethnographically important research anywhere in the anthropology of media, apparently without having intended to do so. This article reviews the impact of his collaboration on the Kayapo Video Project both in terms of its effects in Kayapo communities and in terms of the debates it catalyzed in anthropology over the relationship of human productive powers with representation and social mediation in its broadest sense. Turner’s anthropology of media (and indeed his anthropology more generally) emphasizes that human production always contains a historical excess within itself, which is the potential to transcend and to transform fundamentally the dominant social relations of production and reproduction in a given time and place. As such, Turner’s work challenges what I describe as more ‘Hegelian’ theories of media that emphasize the inaccessibility of social mediation to human agency. In conclusion, I celebrate Turner’s own historical excess and his vehement rejection of the pure/applied split in anthropological knowledge and praxis.