Anthropology and Mass Communication: Media and Myth in the New Millennium (Anthropology & ...) by Mark Allen Peterson

Author:Mark Allen Peterson [Peterson, Mark Allen]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2003-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

The role of mass media in forming socialities—even fan socialities—is by no means limited to those centered around media consumption and production activities. As vehicles for the distribution of collective representations, media can combine with other artifacts that offer resources for the creation of meaning. Nobuhiro (1998) describes a simple example of this in his account of the “cult” surrounding the race-horse Oguricap in Japan. Oguricap’s initial popularity arose on the racecourse, and as stories, photographs, and accounts of “the grey monster” emerged, they attracted large numbers of women to the previously all-male environs of the racecourse. The cult of Oguricap exploded after a nationally televised race (the majority of women fans of the horse in fact never saw him on the racetrack). Retired after this, his last and most successful race, Oguricap’s history was read as a powerful symbolic narrative of the unknown (Oguricap had no distinguished pedigree) succeeding against the odds, then suffering defeat (he was hurt after one race) and cruelty (his new owners ran him before he was completely recovered), only to triumph in his final and greatest challenge. After the final race, Oguricap was commodified as a stuffed doll, which became extremely popular. Secondary appropriations of both the doll and the horse followed, not only into other forms of media such as manga, but in everyday conversation and narrative accounts of self, especially by women. The cult of Oguricap is an example of the ways in which mass mediation is never only about texts and their interpretation; it is always also about the social practices by which people appropriate media texts to accomplish the work and meaning of everyday life.

The example in this chapter emphasizes how the shift to ethnography moves us from a notion of the power of text to a notion of interpretive practice. Interpretive practices involve the reception and interpretation of media texts, but they suggest that the relationship between texts and identities and subjectivities is more complex, and more socially mediated, than many textualist theories would imply. The shift to an ethnography of media consumption reveals the roles that situations, socially organized norms of interpretation, and intertextuality can play in the construction of individual subjectivity, as well as individual and group social identities.

Perhaps even more disruptive to textualist theories of media representation is the inescapability of the connections between other social practices and the practices of media interpretation, such that everyday sociality comes to shape as well as be shaped by media. Nowhere is this more obviously true than in the case of fan cultures, whose practices emphasize the fact that consuming media is not the same thing as consuming culture; on the contrary, culture is always and everywhere a generative process. Recognizing this fact opens up new possibilities not only for the study of consumption, but for the study of production; it asks us to consider the ways in which the activities of media production produce not only texts but persons. Media culture involves more than the text—it constitutes social

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.