I. Introduction

September 4: Introduction

September 9 / 11: Mediation

Thomas de Zengotita, “The Numbing of the American Mind: Culture as Anesthetic,” in Harper’s Magazine, 2002
Anand Pandian, “Cinema in the Countryside: Popular Tamil Film and the Remaking of Rural Life,” in Tamil Cinema: The Cultural Politics of India’s Other Film Industry, 2008
Rosalind Morris, “A Room with a Voice: Mediation and Mediumship in Thailand’s Information Age,” Media Worlds

II. Politics of Representation

September 16 / 18: Print

Olav Velthius, “Inside a World of Spin: Four Days at the World Trade Organization,” Ethography 7(1), 2006
Jennifer Hasty, “Performing Power, Composing Culture: The State Press in Ghana,” Ethnography 7(1), 2006
Ulf Hannerz, “Reporting from Jerusalem,” Cultural Anthropology 13(4), 1998

September 23 / 25: Radio

Rudolf Mrazek, “Let Us Become Radio Mechanics,” in Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony, 2002
Debra Spitulnik, “Mobile Machines and Fluid Audiences: Rethinking Reception through Zambian Radio Culture,” in Media Worlds
Laura Kunreuther, “Technologies of the Voice: FM Radio, Telephone, and the Nepali Diaspora in Kathmandu,” Cultural Anthropology 21(3), 2006

Sept 30 / Oct 2: Video

Faye Ginsburg, “Screen Memories: Resignifying the Traditional in Indigenous Media,” Media Worlds
Terrence Turner, “Representation, Politics, and Cultural Imagination in Indigenous Video: General Points and Kayapo Examples,” Media Worlds
Louisa Schein, “Mapping Hmong Media in Diasporic Space,” Media Worlds

III. Forces of Attraction

October 7 / 9: Advertising

Brian Moeran, “The Orient Strikes Back: Advertising and Imagining Japan,” Theory, Culture, and Society 13(3), 1996
Arlene Davila, “Culture in the Ad World: Producing the Latin Look,” Media Worlds
William Mazzarella, “‘Very Bombay’: Contending with the Global in an Indian Advertising Agency,” Cultural Anthropology 18(1), 2003

October 14 / 16: Cinema

Anne Rutherford, “Nowhere to Hide: The Tumultuous Materialism of Lee Myung-se,” in Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema, 2007
Tejaswini Ganti, “ ‘And Yet My Heart Is Still Indian’: The Bombay Film Industry and the (H)Indianization of Hollywood,” Media Worlds
Brian Larkin, “The Materiality of Cinema Theaters in Northern Nigeria,” Media Worlds

October 21 / 23: Audio

Michael Bull, “No Dead Air! The iPod and the Culture of Mobile Listening,” Leisure Studies 24(4), 2005
Ian Condry, “Rap Fans and Consumer Culture” in Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization, 2006
Charles Hirschkind,"The Ethics of Listening: Cassette-Sermon Audition in Contemporary Egypt," American Ethnologist 28(3), 2001

IV. Cultures of Production

October 28 / 30: Television

John Caldwell, “Cultural Studies of Media Production,” in Questions of Method in Cultural Studies, 2005
Barry Dornfeld, “Putting American Public Television Documentary in Its Places,” Media Worlds
Mattijs van de Port, “Visualizing the Sacred: Video Technology, ‘Televisual’ Style, and the Religious Imagination in Bahian Candomblé,” American Ethnologist 33(3), 2006

November 4 / 6: Photography

Deborah Poole, “Figueroa Aznar and the Cusco Indigenistas: Photography and Modernism in Early-20th Century Peru,” Photography’s Other Histories, 2003
Christopher Pinney, “Notes from the Surface of the Image: Photography, Postcolonialism, and Vernacular Modernism,” Photography’s Other Histories
Hieke Behrend, “Imagined Journeys: The Likoni Ferry Photographers of Mombasa, Kenya,” Photography’s Other Histories

November 11 / 13: Scanning

Christian Simon, “Images and Image: Technology and the Social Politics of Revealing Disorder in a North American Hospital,” Medical Anthropological Quarterly 13(2), 1999
Joseph Dumit, “Objective Brains, Prejudicial Images,” Science in Context 12(1), 1999
Tine Gammeltoft, “Sonography and Sociality: Obstetrical Ultrasound Imaging in Urban Vietnam,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 21(2), 2007

V. Worlds of Imagination

November 18 / 20: Phoning

Gerald Goggin, “Cool Phone: Nokia, Networks, and Identity” in Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life, 2006
Heather Horst, “The Blessings and Burdens of Communication: Cell Phones in Jamaican Transnational Social Fields,” Global Networks 6(2), 2006
Vicente Rafael, “The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines,” Public Culture 15(3), 2003

November 25: Browsing

Victoria Bernal, “Eritrea On-Line: Diaspora, Cyberspace, and the Public Sphere,” American Ethnologist 32(4), 2005
Adam Reed, "'Blog This': Surfing the Metropolis and the Method of London," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 (N.S.), 2008
danah boyd, “None of the This is Real: Identity and Participation in Friendster,” in Structures of Participation in Digital Culture, 2008

December 2 / 4: Living

Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human, 2008, selections