Year of Living Dangerously

How do the movie characters Guy Hamilton [played by Mel Gibson], Jill Bryant [played by Sigourney Weaver] and Billy Kwan [played by Linda Hunt] express the tension between personal uses of media and public, commercial, and political uses?

 Slumdog Millionaire

What are some of the specific ways that globalization is represented in the movie Slumdog Millionaire?

 Exit Through the Gift Shop

In what ways is Banksy’s graffiti art a political and cultural commentary?

CBQM

How does local radio inFortMacPherson, NWT as portrayed in the movie CBQM both reflect and create community?

 Transfictions

In what ways does the movie Transfictions parallel the techniques and objectives of Theatre for Living as described by Director David Diamond in his class presentation. What sorts of concerns in the lives of transsexuals does the movie address?

1. What changes do Walter Benjamin and Benedict Anderson argue have resulted from mass mechanical reproduction (of words in print as well as of images)?

(Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities.

Benjamin, Walter. 1936. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”.)

2. How does Brigit Meyer use ethnographic examples to argue for a natural relation between religion and media?

(Meyer, Brigit. 2010. “Mediation and Immediacy: Sensational Forms, Semiotic Ideologies and the Question of the Medium”. )

3. What comparisons can you draw between the dynamics of news reporting in India at the time of the Deepa Wehta Water controversy and the development of politically polarized television reporting  in the United States (for example Fox News, CNN political commentators, Rush Limbaugh, etc.)?

(Rao, Ursula. 2010. “Embedded/Embedding Media Practices and Cultural Production”. In Theorizing Media and Practice.)

3. How is the practice of graffiti and attendant discourses reflective of issues of class and property? Use examples from class readings, blogs or the movie Exit Through the Gift Shop to illustrate your argument.

(Rafferty, Pat. 1991. “Discourse on Difference”.

Dickinson, Maggie. 2008. “The Making of Space, Race and Place:New York City’s War on Grafitti, 1970-the Present”.

Banksy. 2010.Exit through the Gift Shop.)

4. How does community radio inAustraliaandFortMcPherson, NWT (Canada) reflect and create community?

(Fisher, Daniel. 2009. “Mediating Kinship: Country, Family, and Radio inNorthern Australia. Cultural Anthropology”.

Allen, Dennis (Director). 2010. CBQM.)

5. In what ways did the Nicaraguan television shows described in “Spectacles of Sexuality” fulfill the goals of the NGO that provided the funding? How was the show able to raise awareness of sexual issues despite the repressive political climate inNicaragua?

(Howe, Cymene. 2008. “Spectacles of Sexuality: Televisionary Activism inNicaragua”)

6. What does Lila Abu-Lughod’s study of Egyptian melodramas reveal about the extent to which audiences absorb the meanings that the producers intended to convey? Give specific examples from her study. What does her study indicate about the constraints on meaning and the ability of media producers to impose their own messages on media consumers?

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2002. “Egyptian Melodrama—Technology of the Modern Subject?”)

7. Use evidence from Shimmering Screens, Jennifer Deger’s study of media use in an Australian Aboriginal Community, to evaluate James Weiner’s argument that indigenous use of media is inherently problematical because the media technologies and practices are products of “Western culture”.

(Deger, Jennifer. 2006. Shimmering Screens: Making Media in an Aboriginal Community

Weiner, James.1997. “Televisualist Anthropology: Representation, Aesthetics, Politics”)

8. How has European (and North American) photographic tradition maintained what Christopher Pinney terms depth, possession and exploitation, consequently affirming chronotopes? How have photographic conventions in other countries developed in different directions?

Pinney, Christopher. 2003. “Notes from the Surface of the Image”.)

9. Alex Golub argues that online video games increasingly appeal to players

because their sociality mimics real life. What social skills do players of World

of Warcraft and similar online multiplayer games have to master? What are the

implications of these games for the future of computer-based gaming? In what

ways are the effects of these games positive and in what ways are they negative (Be specific)? (Golub, Alex (2010) “Being in the World (of Warcraft): Raiding,

Realism, and Knowledge Production in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game”)

5) A lot of debate in anthropology is around the fact that since you weren’t born into or raised in the society/community you’re observing you can never really fully understand them. But WOW is a community/culture you enter into at some point and Golub emphasizes that there are people from all walks of life (although seemingly limited in ethnicity in his guild)  and different genders that are playing this game. Discuss.