Global Media Studies

An Ethnographic Perspective

Marwan Kraidy, Patrick D. Murphy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134380138
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Global Media Studies explores the theoretical and methodological threats that are defining global media studies as a discipline.
Emphasizing the connection of globalisation to local culture, this collection considers the diversity of modes of reception, reception contexts, uses of media content, and the performative and creative relationships that audiences develop with and through the media. Through ethnographic case studies from Brazil, Denmark, the UK, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, South Africa, Turkey and the United States, the contributors address such questions as: what links media consumption to a lived global culture; what role cultural tradition plays globally in confronting transnational power; how global elements of mediated messages acquire class; and regional and local characteristics.

Part I
INTRODUCTION

1
TOWARDS AN ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACH TO GLOBAL MEDIA STUDIES¹

Patrick D. Murphy and Marwan M. Kraidy

For much of the early history of the study of media reception, qualitative researchers in communication and media studies produced ethnographies of audiences that were often theoretically sophisticated but empirically thin. Inspired by cultural studies, most markedly by Stuart Hall’s model of encoding and decoding, qualitative media research adapted concepts from semiotics, reader-response theory, and even psychoanalysis, to construct increasingly polished conceptual arguments. In spite of ethnography’s place in this cultural turn and its subsequent influence on the field, theoretical growth occurred at the expense of methodological development. Rather than demonstrating a commitment to immersion, building of trust, long-term observation, or participation in the daily lives of research participants, the corpus of reception work was marked by its reliance on discussion groups, solicited and unsolicited letters and in-depth interviews. This gap fostered a tradition of “ethnographic” inquiry where rigorous participant observation and description were largely absent (Abu-Lughod, 1997; Nightingale, 1993), and often replaced by an increasingly textual and rhetorical usage of ethnography.

But what are the reasons for this drift towards “quasi-ethnographic” studies? And why have so many studies that clearly lack ethnographic credentials been formulated under the ethnographic rubric? Three factors shaping the politics and practice of media ethnography account for the division between the declared application of ethnographic techniques and the concomitant underdevelopment of field experience. The first factor shaping the relationship between ethnographic theory and practice is the “political economy” of ethnographic scholarship. Extended fieldwork is costly, requiring significant institutional and time resources that tend to be concentrated in a select group of elite universities. Ironically, the study of media audiences, itself a democratic recognition of the importance of mass entertainment in the daily lives of working-class and middle-class audiences, is constantly under threat of becoming the epistemological privilege of well-funded scholars at elite institutions.

Second, many media scholars encountered the theoretical concerns of the “posts” (poststructuralism, postmodernism and postcolonialism) before the messiness of fieldwork was initiated and worked through. As a result, a growing body of media ethnography has been shaped more by the critique of ethnography’s association with colonialism and Western discourse than by the surprise and productivity of the field encounter (Murphy, 1999a). In other words, political concerns over ethnography have in large part trumped epistemological issues – a point of tension that has somewhat hobbled ethnography’s induction into the broader tradition of qualitative inquiry in communication, at least as an empirically rigorous enterprise. As is made clear in the development of this chapter, we are not dismissing the inclusion of issues of power and inequality in ethnographic scholarship. In fact, ethnography has a central place in critical-cultural scholarship and shoulders a special burden when it comes to questions of power and inequality because its gaze is fixed on the practices of everyday life. What we are arguing against, rather, is letting these issues define ethnographic practice in such a way that the researcher’s task becomes little more than tapping oppressed voices or moments of tactical resistance and articulating them to theory. Instead, if questions of power and inequality are to be taken seriously, they need to be relocated at the heart of ethnographic practice and given the kind of close study that allows us to think concretely and creatively about how they work through and are shaped by cultural practice.

The third, and perhaps the most fundamental reason for the gap between the application of ethnographic techniques and the field experience is the very challenging nature of field work on media reception. For example, how does one “participate” in the somewhat “closed” contexts (bedroom, automobile, living room, headphones, etc.) of much media consumption? Unlike the less closed-in and more performative-ritualized spaces that have been the customary sites for ethnographic inquiry throughout anthropology’s history, media technologies are creating increasingly intimate, microcosmic and virtual reception environments and practices. This makes the notion of participant observation of media audiences extremely arduous in many cases, and suggests a rethinking of what constitutes “doing fieldwork.” Here we suggest that media ethnography be understood as a research process of forming communities and making conversations that underscore a systematic and long-term investment in form, purpose and practice.

Examining the forces that have shaped ethnographic inquiry in the discipline of communication also means reconsidering its potential to nourish and challenge theory. This chapter takes up that task specifically in the realm of global media studies. By exploring the history and regional trajectories of media ethnography, as well as the epistemological and political issues of representation that have confronted anthropology and which are relevant to media studies, we attempt to map a path for media ethnography as a means through which to engage and engender a vision of global media studies theory grounded in the practices of everyday life.

Ethnography and the complexity of media reception

When considering how the three factors outlined above converged over the years and fostered a history of quasi-ethnographic media ethnographies, one must ask: what makes a “good” media ethnography? More recent studies such as those by Gillespie (1995), Mankekar (1999), Tufte (2000) and some of the research presented in Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod and Larkin (2002) have shown signs of bridging the gap between description and fieldwork, concretely demonstrating that cultural immersion and long-term participant observation have a central place in media ethnography. However, even in light of these fine examples of media ethnography, the unique research dilemmas of the study of media reception lead one to ask: must media ethnography be based on something akin to participant observation to be “ethnographic”? Is a commitment to immersion, the building of trust, long-term observation, and the participation in the daily lives of research participants the only (or even best) road for researchers interested in studying the relation between media reception and cultural practice? The very diversity of modes of reception, reception contexts, uses of media content, and the performative and creative relationships that audiences develop suggest that media ethnography is a highly complex, multifaceted endeavor. Indeed, even the notion of research site has become much more fluid in recent years, as the mise en scéne of “the field” is increasingly loaded with local adaptations of global cultural capital mediated via new “spaces,” practices and imagined communities of media reception. Here the social and the symbolic display the sort of deterritorialized formations and borderlessness that postmodernists have been talking about for years.

Engaging this complexity is pivotal for the elaboration of a broader ethnographic project committed to understanding how the phenomenon of globalization is played out locally in relation to particular traditions, systems of belief, and texts which have altered them. The point of analysis, therefore, should be the resulting hybrid cultures: that is, the stylistic features of local cultural life that emerge materially and discursively as “tonalities” (Geertz, 1983) of global culture. To seek out and understand such features of mass mediated intercultural encounters (e.g. how cultural hybridity is constituted and what its ingredients are), researchers in the field of international communication must commit themselves to methods of inquiry that reposition the importance of context and everyday life in theory. Such an ambitious research agenda evokes the following questions. What patterns and practices link media consumption to a lived global culture? How do audiences negotiate global messages locally? How do the global/ideological elements of mediated messages fix to and acquire class, regional, and/or community characteristics? What role does popular memory play globally in confronting and/or altering transnational power? How does the introduction of Western ideals about consumption shape local notions of resource control and management? A second set of questions about globality are in fact inherent in the practice of ethnographic knowledge. What/where is the research site? What investment does the ethnographer have with the research community? How do the subjects/participants of the research speak through the ethnographic text and what voice do they have?

Articulating ethnography and international communication

With its largely localized focus, media ethnography offers much to the internationally oriented and increasingly intercultural field of global media studies. Just as ethnography faced a representational crisis in anthropology, which we explicate later in this chapter in relation to media ethnography, theories of international communication have been mired in debate around issues of power and influence. For much of its development, ideological power (involvement, control, participation, resistance, and negotiation) has been a central problematic and common thread in international communication theory. The cultural imperialism thesis is grounded in theories of dependency that emerged as a reaction to the paradigm of modernization that dominated the field since the early works of Lerner (1958), Schramm (1964) and Rogers (1969). In stark opposition to modernization theory’s functionalist grounding, the notion of cultural imperialism was firmly rooted in critical political economy (Schiller, 1976, 1996). It questioned modernization theory and propelled issues of power and culture to the forefront of international communication research. However, the cultural imperialism thesis’s almost singular focus on structural issues of ownership and distribution, in addition to the rise of political conservatism in the United States and Great Britain in the 1980s, caused its demise. While Schiller (1991) insisted that we were “not yet [in] the post-imperialist era,” other writers (Boyd-Barrett, 1998; García Canclini, 1990; Mattelart, 1994 and 1998) called for the recognition and exploration of mediated cross-cultural hybridities, and Mowlana (1994) advocated epistemological reorientation. These calls were accompanied by scholarship that shifted attention to the rising importance of “the local” as a space for media and cultural theory and research (Appadurai, 1996; Braman, 1996; Kraidy, 1999). However, the stance that locality and its cultural manifestations (e.g. hybridity, reconversion) embody qualities of resistance rather than accommodation has received much more theoretical treatment than empirical engagement; and in postcolonial studies, the concept of hybridity itself is at the center of a heated debate concerning the cooptation of concepts of ethnic and cultural difference for the marketing needs of global capitalism (Kraidy, 2002).

The elaboration of audience ethnography for global media studies offers a heuristic opportunity to examine the local implications of globalization, which concern how the majority of the world population experiences globalization in its everyday life. After all, ethnography’s main preoccupation has been the construction of what Geertz (1983) called “local knowledge,” even if that focus on the local was not always explicitly stated. And even much earlier it was Geertz (1973) who reminded us that it is through

almost obsessively fine combed field study in confined contexts that the mega-concepts with which contemporary social science is afflicted (modernization, post-modernity, conflict, oppression, structure, meaning, etc.) can be given the kind of sensible actuality that makes it possible to think not only realistically and concretely about them, but, what is more important, creatively and imaginatively with them.

(p. 23)

Geertz’s assertion resonates with a renewed sense of urgency in today’s heated debates on globalization, because of the theoretical dilemmas of globalization as a phenomenon, process, and predicament given form and sustenance locally. That is, if global media studies is to establish a more grounded theoretical orientation toward globalization, as in our opinion it should, then that theorizing needs to be informed by the material produced through fieldwork. This means that global media studies must establish a more salient commitment to ethnographic inquiry – one both nourishing to and driven by theory.

Such a commitment is not a simple task, as it requires a certain investigative flexibility in the study of media audiences: one sensitive to a range of political and economic forces and distinct reception communities, in addition to subject positions tied to gender, ethnicity, class, religion, and sexual orientation, while also paying homage to the epistemological critiques levied against the ethnographic enterprise in the 1980s and 1990s. As a result, media ethnography faces a complex challenge as a central method of inquiry in international communication theory: ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• PART I. Introduction
• PART II. Situating Ethnography in Global Media Studies
• PART III. Researching the Local
• PART IV. Articulating Globalization through Ethnography
• PART V. Afterword
• Index