Embracing the Media
Simulacrum
History it would seem has overtaken theory, at least
as regards the study of media in everyday affairs. It is
already a cliche to observe that these days revolutions
are likely to begin with an assault on the central television
broadcasting facility. Those who seek to supplant
official television messages know full well the power of
mass media to influence the population at large, whether
by inciting revolt or, after the revolution, massaging the
new status quo. The revolutionary perceives history as
a social force subject to change, and in the media age,
change is increasingly the product of altered
representations. Alter the simulacrum, and real life
tends to respond, although not always as expected.
Advertisers, like revolutionaries, have been onto this
simple formula for many years. One wonders why
anthropological theory and social research in general
lag so far behind. How mass media acquired this
extraordinary cultural power, and so thoroughly
penetrated the fabric of everyday life, is in abroad sense
the subject of the following essays.
Although scrutinized from a variety of disciplinary
perspectives, mass media have until recently eluded the
kind of cultural analysis which seeks to understand the
experiences of social life as forms of symbolic practice.
What does it mean to live in an age of mass media, an
age in which simulation is paramount and the "real" of
everyday life largely unrepresented? How are urban
and rural lifeways changing now that television, motion
pictures and videocassettes have penetrated all but the
66 Volume 10 Number 1 Spring 1994
Victor J. Caldarola
Guest Editor
sim-u-la-crum, n. 1. a slight, unreal, or superficial
likeness or semblance. 2. an effigy, image or
representation.
most distantly isolated communities? How have cultural
representations, boundaries and substantive practices -
indeed the very idea of culture - fared under the
transformative glare of this vast outpouring of sound
and image? What are the consequences of media
simulations displacing or perhaps augmenting the
interpersonal contacts which until the development of
mass media defined our concept of community?
Conversely, how are vernacular cultures, traditional
beliefs and their syncretic derivatives influencing the
reception and impact of media formats and programs
among local audiences? And finally, is it reasonable at
this time to demand that anthropology embrace the
jjiedia simulacrum and acknowledge the pervasive
cultural influence of simulated social life?
These are some of the issues facing the practitioners
of an emerging field of inquiry which we have tentatively
entitled culture/media studies. These efforts,
representing an impromptu coalescence of diverse
theoretical and empirical concerns, collectively
acknowledge the multiform varieties of mass media as
extraordinary purveyors of cultural values and,
increasingly, the preeminent sites of conflict and
negotiation within and between cultural worlds. These
studies explicitly foreground a cultural-analytic
perspective which recognizes media experience as a
nexus of signifying practices grounded in the routines
of contemporary life. The emphasis on cultural practices,
combined with an implicitly comparative point of view,
Visual Anthropology Review
distinguishes this workfrom much of the media research
in communication studies, and offers a powerful new
paradigm for the analysis and critique of local, national
and transnational cultures and their myriad
interconnections.
This special issue of Visual Anthropology Review
highlights several culture/media approaches, each a
response to the astonishing cultural power and ubiquitous
pseudo-social presence of visual mass media throughout
the world today. The essays explore commercial or
government controlled moving-image media, and the
diverse cultural impacts, interpretive juxtapositions,
sociopolitical influences and reception strategies
associated with television, motion pictures and
videocassette programs. These most prominent forms
of imaged experience are examined as cultural
phenomenon in their own right, focusing not on the
media programs themselves, but on the elaborately
constructed interpretive practices which surround their
production and use. Thus media representations are
shaped by a constellation of interrelated factors: the
technology and economics of production, distribution
within the global economy, the reception practices and
interpretations of local audiences, and the national
political contexts in which mass media systems are
characteristically embedded. This approach is relatively
unconcerned with media content since the very notion
of objectively measured content is antithetical to cultural
analysis. Instead, these essays begin with the assumption
that meaning is never intrinsic to cultural artifacts such
as media programs, but assigned by producers,
distributors, audiences, and in the case of mass media,
policy makers.
The impetus for culture/media studies in
anthropology has come partly as a reaction to
communications research which routinely ignores or
minimizes the encompassing embrace of culture, and
partly from recognition of the dramatic role mass media
have assumed in the production and dissemination of
cultural representations, values and ideologies. We are
indebted to such pioneers as Hortense Powdermaker,
Eric Michaels and Sol.Worth1, and to the organizers and
participants of several American Anthropological
Association conference sessions which have recently
Victor J. Caldarola is an independent researcher in Washington, D.C. He is currently writing a
book on mass media, reception practices and Muslim orthodoxy in the Republic of Indonesia.
Visual Anthropology Review
drawn attention to these issues. This special issue of
VAR draws upon work originally presented at three
AAA sessions: The Ethnographic Realities of Mass
Communication (1990), organized by Elizabeth Hahn,
Television and the Transformation of Culture (1991),
organized by Victor Caldarola, and Culture and Mass
Media: Production, Representation and Reception
(1992), organized by Tamar Gordon and Mayfair Yang.
Equally important is a recent convergence of theory
and method regarding the study of contemporary
cultures. A resurgence of ethnographic methodology
across the social sciences has brought about renewed
emphasis on the constitution of everyday life experience.
At the same time, cultural analysis has been revived as
a means of comprehending the subtle interconnections
among global, national, local and personal dimensions
of experience; while the boundaries that once separated
research disciplines such as mass communication
research, British cultural studies, ideological analysis,
literary studies and social psychology have become
increasingly porous, particularly with regard to mass
media and media audiences.2 Yet much uncertainty
remains about possible anthropological contributions
to this field of study
Part of the difficulty stems from limitations in the
current terminology. Visual anthropology, for example,
has never shed its early connection with educational
film. In common usage, itcontinues to mean "visualizing
anthropology" rather than "anthropology of the visual,"
although the distinction is gradually fading. But whether
images are to be treated as anthropological addenda, the
marginal arcana of the discipline's ivory tower gaze, or
as significant artifacts of the human experience, is
indeed the critical issue. While intricate debates continue
regarding the nature and validity of "ethnographic"
film, contemporary culture is increasingly dominated
by mass media images brought to us by commercial or
government-controlled systems. This continuous flow
of news, fictional drama and entertainment - this vast
network of electronic storytelling - has little in common
with conventional ethnographic film, but differs only
slightly from other forms of representation which have
long been subject to anthropological analysis: the arts,
performance, ritual, language and narrative.
Volume 10 Number 1 Spring 1994 67
 Yet even if we label it anthropology of mass media,
which implies a certain revisionist attitude, it is important
not to misconstrue the disciplinary predicament of
these efforts. Until quite recently, television, cinema
and other forms of popular mass media were perceived
as completely irrelevant to the concerns of academic
anthropology. Although overtly cultural in form, content
and practice, the fact is these media were rare in the
communities most visited by anthropology's field
workers. This situation has changed dramatically since
the late 1970s as television and other moving-image
media have expanded rapidly throughout Third and
Fourth World communities. By the 1990s, television
had become a nearly universal cultural phenomenon,
and the impact of media-simulated social life
unavoidably obvious. Yet media experiences are still
widely excluded from ethnographic studies, their often
subtle and transitional influences disregarded in favor
of identifiably traditional lifeways. Thus,
anthropologists who study culture/media issues today
must overcome a legacy of avoidance and exclusion,
and despite the trendy cross-disciplinary rhetoric, often
find themselves in professionally risky positions. The
same is true for communication scholars who cross over
into cultural analysis, especially when it involves
extensive ethnographic field work.
On the other hand, a gradual revolution in
anthropological theory is clearing the way for culture/
media studies by undermining the notion of locally-
bound cultural systems in favor of a "cultural
borderlands" concept where multiple influences intersect
and interpenetrate across local and global domains.
Rosaldo (1989) has written eloquently of the
"borderlands" approach to cultural analysis, noting that
the borders or intersections are at once culturally dense,
permeable and "saturated with power." This is in fact
a remarkably accurate description of the capacity of
television and other mass media to transcend or mediate
cultural border zones and, in the process, thoroughly
eliminate the possibility of locally autonomous cultural
systems. The door is open, then, for anthropologically
informed analyses of mass media, the media experience,
and the cultural practices which govern media use and
influence.
The authors ofthe following essays are all concerned
with the mass media experience as an assemblage of
cultural practices and electronic simulacra. The media
simulations themselves are in effect malleable artifacts
68 Volume 10 Number 1 Spring 1994
in which are invested the interpretive sensibilities of all
interested parties: television producers, social elites,
regional subcultures, state authorities, native filmgoers,
individual consumers, and so on. In each case, the
subject of inquiry is the elaborate network of cultural
influences which extend beyond media and from which
all symbolic transactions acquire meaning. Each essay
examines culture through the active lens of media
experience. These are exercises in context and
contingency, which is perhaps the only legitimate way
of analyzing the massive cultural transformations
associated with the media revolution. In practice,
however, the simulacra of mass media are as much
simulations as any of the more pedestrian forms of
representation encoded in ritual activity, the arts,
performance and narrative traditions, and so we should
not be surprised if anthropological analyses of mass
media resemble studies of these more conventional
forms.
These essays extend anthropological inquiry to
industrial as well as developing nations, to ex-colonies
and neocolonial powers, and to Western and non-
Western modes of media consumption. The comparisons
demonstrate the tremondous diversity of media
experience despite technological similarities, and
suggest the interrelatedness of the historical, political
and cultural influences which affect the use of mass
media and also the configuration of media systems and
policies. Less specific perhaps is the implication that
the particular representational vehicles by which a
culture is mediated or reproduced - whether television
or the traditional arts - are all equally authentic. It
follows that media practices must also be seen as
culturally authentic, rather than inappropriate or naive
responses to sophisticated foreign (ordomestic) cultural
products. These essays demonstrate without a doubt
the cultural appropriateness of media use, whatever the
origins of media programs or the social implications of
particular readings. Yet the appropriateness of a cultural
response does not necessarily indicate an equitable set
of relationships, and it is here that the analyst's work
often crosses over into cultural critique.
Finally, these essays illustrate the intricate dynamics
of interpretation evoked by media programs, including
the volatile mix of ideologically dominant, negotiated
and oppositional readings, and how these perspectives
are related to the social construction of identity.
Especially apparent is the observation that all participants
Visual Anthropology Review
in the mass media exchange operate within restrictive
fields of sociopolitical influence, implying definite
interpretive boundaries. In other words, media
interpretations cannot be both culturally-contingent
and infinitely variable. In fact, there is every indication
that dominant and oppositional readings represent
patterns of contingency rather than division, which
suggests that the principal task of an anthropological
approach to mass media is to reveal these contingent
patterns in all of their cultural specificity.
NOTES
1. Several excellent reviews are available, including
Gross (1981), Lyons (1990), Ruby (1991), and Spitulnik
(1993).
2. See as examples, Abu-Lughod (1993), Ang (1985,
1990), Intintoli (1984), Li vingstone (1990), Lull (1990),
Marcus and Fischer (1986), and Morley (1986).
REFERENCES
Abu-Lughod, Lila (ed.)
1993 Screening Politics in a World of Nations, a special
section of Public Culture 5/3: 463-604.
Ang, Ien
1985 Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the
Melodramatic Imagination. London: Methuen.
1990 Culture and Communication: Towards an
Ethnographic Critique of Media Consumption in
the Transnational Media System. European Journal
of Communication 5: 239-260.
Gross, Larry
1981 Sol Worth and the Study of Visual Communication.
In Sol Worth, Studying Visual Communication.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.
Intintoli, Michael
1984 Taking Soaps Seriously: The World of Guiding
Light. New York: Praeger.
Livingstone, Sonia M.
1990 Making Sense of Television: The Psychology of
Audience Interpretation. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Lyons, Andrew P
1990 The Television and the Shrine: Towards a
Theoretical Model for the Study of Mass
Communications in Nigeria. Visual Anthropology
3/4: 429-456.
Visual Anthropology Review
Lull, James
1990 Inside Family Viewing: Ethnographic Research
on Television s Audiences. London: Routledge.
Marcus, George E. and Michael M. J. Fischer
1986 Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An
Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Morley, David
1986 Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic
Leisure. London: Comedia.
Rosaldo, Renato
1989 Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social
Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press.
Ruby, Jay
1991 Eric Michaels: An Appreciation. Visual
Anthropology 4/3-4: 325-343.
Spitulnik, Debra
1993 Anthropology and Mass Media. Annual Review
of Anthropology 22. Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews
Inc.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This special issue of Visual Anthropology Review
would not have been possible without the generous
assistance of the following independent reviewers: Janet
Hoskins, Michael Intintoli, Barry Dornfeld, Robert
Sapora, Jay Ruby, Michael Fischer, Tamar Gordon,
Ron Burnett, Eugene Cooper, Jane DeGroot, John
MacAloon, and Jayasinhji Jhala.
Volume 10 Number 1 Spring 1994 69