Anthropology and the Media: Accounting for the Everyday Life (Primus M. Tazanu)

Media anthropology/anthropology of the media is inter-discipline and is theoretically informed by practice approaches, appropriation theories, audience reception, globalization theories, etc. Why anthropologists are interested in the media is because the media are cultural products and are sites of cultural (re)production/mediation. We emphasize on actors’ agency, how they appropriate media unlike studies that aim at uncovering media effects or audience responses. Furthermore, we are interested in the background or context of production, distribution and consumption of the media. In this presentation, I am going to use some of my work to show the ways in which social actors appropriate the media individually as well as in collaboration with other social actors. I will focus on new media and disembedded social ties, social media and political struggle and if time permits, I will talk about social media and racism. It is worth mentioning at this point that social reality can no longer be theorized such that face-to-face or co-locality is the norm or ideal. What this means is that social reality is mediated and deeply embedded in ongoing processes of interaction and negotiations some of which happen to be either online or offline.
Primus M. Tazanu (PhD, Freiburg)