Indigenous Media Research Articles

Changing the Rules of Engagement: How Rabbit‐Proof Fence and Whale Rider Forge a New Dimension of Ethnographic Media

Full‐length, independent feature films Rabbit‐Proof Fence and Whale Rider, both released in 2002, chronicle the journeys of young indigenous female protagonists as they struggle against seemingly insurmountable odds to meet their destinies. The narrative and technical components of these films share striking similarities as they construct stories that are profoundly local, yet widely resonant. This article argues for the consideration of films as both social process and cultural product, deeply embedded in dynamic social worlds. These films signal the emergence of a new model of film production in which directors foreground their responsibilities as producers of knowledge and embrace the intersubjectivity of contemporary indigeneities. At the same time, these films and their directors are at the forefront of shifting understandings in circulation, necessarily in dialogue with proliferating examples of new indigenous media, and capitalizing upon new technologies in ways that innovatively include viewers in debates about cross‐cultural representation and the role of film(making) in social life. In this newly engaged model of production and circulation, the social relationships forged between filmmakers, actors, viewing publics, and many others, take on unprecedented significance in constructing indigeneities in specific national contexts.

Globalization and the public sphere

Recent accounts of Habermas's conception of the public sphere concern the interlocking of multiple networks and spaces. In a global context new interfaces between existing (counter-) public spheres can lead to multiple counter-publics. This article explores this phenomenon through the examination of the communicative spaces that offer alternatives to Australia's mainstream public sphere from three different strands of Sydney's community media: diasporic media (Assyrian Radio SBS), Indigenous media (Koori Radio) and discursive sites that operate in between ethnic and mainstream media (Forum for Australia's Islamic Relations).

Indigenous Language Media: A Veritable Tool for African Language Learning

This paper takes the position that African language pedagogy should go beyond classroom activity and the space should be enlarged to include the media of mass communication. The paper reiterates the fact that communication is a vehicle for education. The mass media, because of their general accessibility, are said to be veritable tools in popularising the use and learning of African languages that are, presently, being threatened out of existence by the European languages foisted on the African peoples through the advent of colonialism. For the mass media to achieve this task, the media using African languages must be encouraged and sustained. The paper raises this point with the observation that most African languages, at present, are not in use, especially in the print media, while the existing (African) indigenous language newspapers are not enjoying favourable disposition from the people. To make the African indigenous language mass media serve as effective tools for teaching and learning African languages, governments in Africa and nongovern-mental organisations must pay adequate attention to these media while also encouraging their acceptance by the public.

Indigenous Media Gone Global: Strengthening Indigenous Identity On‐ and Offscreen at the First Nations/First Features Film Showcase

For 12 days in May 2005, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), as well as several other screening venues in Washington, D.C., hosted a group of renowned indigenous filmmakers from around the globe for the groundbreaking film showcase, “First Nations/First Features: A Showcase of World Indigenous Film and Media.” This film showcase highlighted the innovative ways in which indigenous filmmakers draw on indigenous storytelling practices to create cinematic visions that honor their long‐standing indigenous cultural worlds while reaching local and world audiences. In this essay, I highlight the onscreen impact through an analysis of several films featured in First Nations/First Features, as well as the offscreen impact emphasizing how the indigenous directors used this opportunity to strengthen social networks and share experience in this industry, which may develop into future collaborative film projects.

CODEPINK Alert: Mediated Citizenship in the Public Sphere

This paper investigates the relationship between activism and technology through a discourse analysis of a web-based activist group, CODEPINK, a self-identified women's movement for peace. It explores CODEPINK'S website, along with mainstream newspaper reports about the group. The paper demonstrates that the web-based discourse negotiates the group's identity, and facilitates intrapublic and interpublic deliberation. An analysis of newspaper reports shows that CODEPINK has achieved a certain measure of recognition in the broader public sphere, but that mainstream recognition comes with the consequences of simplified and polarized coverage. Ultimately, the Internet serves several valuable functions for these activists. CODEPINK has used the web as a way to: provide members with an indigenous medium; develop group consensus through centralized organization and mobilization activities; and establish access, via publicity, to the broader public sphere. These uses are significant because they have enabled CODEPINK to achieve a measure of recognition and legitimacy, or public credibility. Overall, the paper illustrates that the Internet can operate as a tool and as a space for citizens seeking to gain recognition in and meaningful access to mediated or face-to-face public spheres.

A History of Aboriginal Futures

This article addresses the paradox of the persistence, growth, and increasing circulation of work in indigenous media and acrylic painting in Aboriginal Australia, despite the alarming political turn against gains made by indigenous Australians over the last decade, not only by right-wing politicians but intellectuals as well. Indigenous people in settler nation-states have faced a range of dilemmas in imagining their futures. In Australia, debates about the significance of an indigenous presence and history continue to rage. This article reviews the range of policies extended toward Australia’s Aboriginal people (ranging from pastoral care in the face of expected dying out to assimilation to self-determination and beyond), the cultural and political projects through which Aboriginal urban activists and remote communities have attempted to construct their futures, and a consideration of the media through which these futures are imagined.

National and local agency support for Scottish SME internationalisation activity: lessons for small transition economies

This paper identifies the continuing and new threats to peripheral old industrial areas from EU enlargement and restructuring of inward investment flows. It recognises a key role in regional and national economic development strategies has been assigned to indigenous small and medium enterprises. Research is reported on interventions and frameworks established by national and local agencies in Scotland to initiate and develop export activities by SMEs. This offers a better understanding of which factors create successful foreign market entry strategies and behaviour. The paper assesses whether there are lessons from these strategies which are appropriate for the new member states of the EU.

Nunavut

This article expands the discussion of Inuit broadcasting in northern Canada to encompass actual texts, about which little has been written. Specifically, I focus on Nunavut, a 13-part television series produced in 1994-5 by Igloolik Isuma Productions. Nunavut is considered the first dramatic series to be created entirely by Inuit. While drawing upon Ginsburg’s emphasis on the significance of ‘embedded aesthetics’ to indigenous media producers, I argue that Nunavut’s visual and narrative forms are essential to its cultural and political goals of sustaining and reviving Inuit culture, and, therefore, that any exploration of the series must not separate form from intention. I also build on John Hartley’s arguments for conceptualizing television as a teacher of cultural citizenship. Inuit media productions not only teach Inuit about their culture, but how to practice it. In this sense, Inuit media has been a significant source in mobilizing cultural citizenship. Nunavut’s aesthetic and narrative choices, which attempt to link past and present Inuit identity and forge a political future that encompasses indigenous identity, exemplify TV’s ‘love of influence’ (Hartley, 1999: 43).

Optic/Haptic/Abject: Revisioning Indigenous Media in Victor Masayesva, Jr and Leslie Marmon Silko

This article uses Hopi videomaker Victor Masayesva, Jr’s 1992 film, Imagining Indians, and Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1991 novel, Almanac of the Dead, as test cases through which tore-evaluate a central debate in visual anthropology about the meanings and values of indigenous visual media, and as complex representations which force us to move beyond that debate’s endorsements and critiques. Through their shared embrace of anti-visualist modes, both Masayesva and Silko develop alternative strategies of visualization intended to revise neo-colonial relations – strategies which seek to reconstruct the modes of visual mastery linked to a Western optic into a more desiring, pleasurable relation to the image through the resources of proximity and tactility. They not only redraw the territory of subject– object relations informed by the gaze, but more foundationally may be said to rewrite the ‘scription’ through which social rules are inscribed upon the body, and to redesignate what Homi Bhabha has called the ‘rules of recognition’ that regulate colonial encounters.

Packaging Indigenous Media: An Interview with Ivan Sanjinés and Jesús Tapia

ABSTRACTAn interview with two key figures in the indigenous video movement in Bolivia conducted at the Taos Talking Pictures Film Festival in New Mexico. In the interview, Ivan Sanjinés and Jesús Tapia describe the development of indigenous video centers and organizations in Bolivia, their work with video makers across Latin American, their goals during their 2002 U.S. video tour, their reactions to their audience's questions, and notions of authorship and collaboration as a process that extends from communities in which videos are made to hemispheric networks of media makers. I introduce the interview by situating indigenous video in Bolivia within the wider and significant historical shift toward indigenous politics in Bolivia in the 1980s and 1990s and draw from the interview new meanings for the term indigenous media that involve the ways video makers assemble and package a multiplex of technologies, resources, social organizations, cultural principles and imagery into a representational form that extends beyond the completed videotape.

Television, Nation, and Indigenous Media

Broadcast television has most often been understood as a site for the narration of unified national identity. But at the same time, it has been associated with the development of diversified cultural citizenship. This article considers some of the issues arising from situations in which cultural identities have clashed with national ones, especially the case of Indigenous issues on Australian television. The evolution of new forms of citizenship is matched by post-broadcast forms of television, in which audiences can be seen as organized around choice, affinity, and the production as well as consumption of media. These developments have powerful implications for the way nations are narrated in broadcast television and for our understanding of how television itself is evolving. The article argues that Indigeneity points the way to new notions of both nation and television.

Multiculturalism, postcoloniality and transnational media

Reflecting the burgeoning academic interest in issues of nation, race, gender, sexuality, and other axes of identity, Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media brings all of these concerns under the same umbrella, contending that these issues must be discussed in relation to each other. Communities, societies, nations, and even entire continents, the book suggests, exist not autonomously but rather in a densely woven web of connectedness. To explore this complexity, the editors have forged links between usually compartmentalized fields (especially media studies, literary theory, visual culture, and critical anthropology) and areas of inquiry-particularly postcolonial and diasporic studies and a diverse set of ethnic and area studies. This book, which links all these issues in suggestive ways, provides an indispensable guide for students and scholars in a wide variety of disciplines. Essays in this groundbreaking volume include Julianne Burton-Carvajal on ethnic identity in Lone Star; Manthia Diawara on diasporic documentary; Hamid Naficy on independent transnational film genres; Robyn Wiegman on whiteness studies; Faye Ginsburg on indigenous media; and Jennifer Gonzales on race in cyberspace; Ana M. Lopez, on modernity and Latin American cinema; and Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan on Warrior Marks and multiculturalism and globalization. A volume in the Depth of Field Series, edited by Charles Affron, Mirella Jona Affron, and Robert Lyons

Rethinking indigenous media: rituals, ‘talking’ drums and orality as forms of public communication in Uganda

The current discourse on globalization has many far-reaching implications not only for African economics and politics, but also for the vital question of how we communicate in a ‘global village’. African governments and their development partners often tend to extrapolate communication models from the developed world and apply them wholesale in local environments in Africa that are quite unique. This paper argues that such communication strategies often do not impact on the rural masses for which they are meant because they are not ‘contextualized’ to the local settings, cultural dialectics and worldview of the people. The bulk of the rural people are non-literate, poor and have little or no access to modern mass media such as television, radio, film, newspapers, the internet and email. The roll-out of modern media should continue to occupy centre stage in planning by African governments, development agencies and nongovernmental organizations, and these modern media should continue to be used to disseminate various campaign messages (HIV/AIDS awareness, immunization of children, maternal health care, poverty eradication, etc.) to the communities. But given the dearth of these media in many poor countries, the limitation of their coverage to the urban centres, and the costly equipment involved, a strategy that relies solely on them has its drawbacks. Communication planners should not overlook the significant role indigenous forms such as popular theatre, drumming, village criers, storytellers, orators, etc., have played – and continue to play – in communication among rural, poor communities. The paper illustrates the ways in which these media continue to be utilized in development communication in Uganda, for instance, because of the way they are embedded in the cultural ideology of the rural people.

Media worlds: anthropology on new terrain

List of Illustrations Preface Introduction I. Cultural Activism and Minority Claims 1. Screen Memories: Resignifying the Traditional in Indigenous Media Faye Ginsburg 2. Visual Media and the Primitivist Perplex: Colonial Fantasies, Indigenous Imagination, and Advocacy in North America Harald E.L. Prins 3. Representation, Politics, and Cultural Imagination in Indigenous Video: General Points and Kayapo Examples Terence Turner 4. Spectacles of Difference: Cultural Activism and the Mass Mediation of Tibet Meg McLagan II. The Cultural Politics of Nation-States 5. Egyptian Melodrama--Technology of the Modern Subject? Lila Abu-Lughod 6. Epic Contests: Television and Religious Identity in India Purnima Mankekar 7. The National Picture: Thai Media and Cultural Identity Annette Hamilton 8. Television, Time, and the National Imaginary in Belize Richard R. Wilk III. Transnational Circuits 9. Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai: Notes on (Re)Cosmopolitanism in a Chinese Metropolis Mayfair Mei-hui Yang 10. A Marshall Plan of the Mind: The Political Economy of a Kazakh Soap Opera Ruth Mandel 11. Mapping Hmong Media in Diasporic Space Louisa Schein IV. The Social Sites of Production 12. Putting American Public Television Documentary in Its Places Barry Dornfeld 13. Culture in the Ad World: Producing the Latin Look Arlene Davila 14. And Yet My Heart Is Still Indian: The Bombay Film Industry and the (H)Indianization of Hollywood Tejaswini Ganti 15. Arrival Scenes: Complicity and Media Ethnography in the Bolivian Public Sphere Jeff D. Himpele V. The Social Life of Technology 16. The Materiality of Cinema Theaters in Northern Nigeria Brian Larkin 17. Mobile Machines and Fluid Audiences: Rethinking Reception through Zambian Radio Culture Debra Spitulnik 18. The Indian Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Or, What Happens When Peasants Get Hold of Images Christopher Pinney 19. Live or Dead? Televising Theater in Bali Mark Hobart 20. A Room with a Voice: Mediation and Mediumship in Thailand's Information Age Rosalind C. Morris Contributors Index

Hegemony and discourse

As part of large, complex social structures, media organizations exist in constantly shifting relationships with each other, with the societies within which they work and with the internal and external audiences with which they communicate. The role of indigenous media groups in hegemonic processes, then, cannot be seen as monolithic or monologic, as some scholars have suggested. An examination of Inuit videography groups reveals that media organizations support or resist hegemonic pressures differentially; some work ‘within the system’ to further worthwhile aims, while others struggle against hegemonic coercion in an effort to expose that coercion and foster alternative power structures. Any models relating to the role of media in hegemony must reflect the heterogeneous stances and discursive relationships adopted by and among various media organizations.

Desconfianza and Problems of Representation in Urban Ethnography

Anthropologists writing about "indigenous media" have identified ways in which ethnographic research involving visual technology can affect the cultural identity and political power of ethnographic subjects, providing them with tools to enhance their own identity-building projects. In this essay I contend that ethnographic writing can also be a form of indigenous media, an implement of self-representation for people otherwise marginalized from the national political mainstream. But the efforts of native informants to establish control over the ways in which they will be represented in print can also create desconfianza , a feeling of mistrust and suspicion of the ethnographer among the people being studied. I reflect on the relationship between desconfianza and the politics of ethnographic practice, and the extent to which questions of performance and representation, far from being mere matters of ethical or philosophical interest to anthropologists alone, are in fact deeply implicated in the political and economic survival of the peoples being represented.

Bridging the Gaps: Towards a history of Indigenous media in Australia

(2002). Bridging the Gaps: Towards a history of Indigenous media in Australia. Media History: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 9-20.

Traditional protest media and anti‐military struggle in Nigeria 1988–1999

This article, derived from an extensive research report sponsored by the Ford Foundation through a grant administered by the African Centre for Democratic Government, Nigeria documents the deployment of traditional media theatre, oratory, folk music in the anti-military struggle of 1988-99 in Nigeria. These resources were used successfully by civil society to engage the authoritarian state in this period, notwithstanding the state's use of them to bolster its hegemony. Most of the protest artists were persecuted, but maintained their position and thereby deepened social anger against the military. THIS ARTICLE SEEKS TO DOCUMENT POPULAR RESISTANCE to military dictatorship through the use of traditional protest media in the Yorubaspeaking area of Nigeria. Based on fieldwork conducted in Ibadan and Lagos between January and June 2000, it shows how in times of repression, when the regular channels of free expression are closed or suppressed, civil society falls back on indigenous modes of communication to express dissent and to censure the authorities. Ibadan and Lagos were selected as study sites because they contain a rare concentration of indigenous media workers such as Ewi poets, theatre artistes, and folk musicians, whose work was scrutinized, and with whom this researcher carried out in-depth interviews. Historical and archival research was employed to complement the insights gained from primary data. As is well known, the period between the late 1980s and 1999 when a civilian democracy was inaugurated, was one of intense repression in Nigeria. The woes of a failed structural adjustment policy, aborted transitions and the ravages of a predatory and monumentally corrupt military class brought a once thriving nation to its knees, and to the bottom of the international economic pecking order. A 'transition without end' mounted by General Babangidal culminated in an annulled election in 1993, and gave way to the dark age of the Abacha period, between late 1993 and 1998. The brutal dictator's death in June 1998 ushered in the government of General Abdulsalami Abubakar, who, under pressure from a resurgent civil The author is a lecturer in political science at Lagos State University, Nigeria. He was formerly editorial page editor of the Daily Times, Nigeria's oldest newspaper. 1. Larry Diamond, Anthony Kirk-Greene and Oyeleye Oyediran (eds), Transition Without End: Nigerian politics and civil society under Babangida (Vantage Publishers, Ibadan, 1997).

Indigenous media then and now: Situating the Navajo film project

(2000). Indigenous media then and now: Situating the Navajo film project. Quarterly Review of Film and Video: Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 273-286.

Media imperialism revisited: some findings from the Asian case

The media imperialism thesis has long argued that the expansion of Western media production into developing countries has resulted in the domination of their national media environments and the consequent destruction of their indigenous media production. This article examines the empirical tenability of this claim with regard to Asia. Delineating the region's media developments, it identifies forces such as national gate-keeping policies, the dynamics of audience preference and local competition, all of which inhibit and restrict the proliferation of Western cultural production. On the basis of this empirical evidence, the article argues that the claims made by proponents of the media imperialism thesis seem overstated in the Asian context. In conclusion, the article suggests that although media imperialism is perceived as a very real danger by governments, there are in fact several other problematic trends such as the rampant growth of commercialization and the decline of public broadcasting, the dominance of entertainment programming and a lack of genuine diversity in program genres and formats that collectively represent a more significant threat to media systems in Asia.