Two noteworthy blog contributions from our Anthropology of Media class are Jeff H.’s “Constructing Identities with Graffiti,” which examines the repeated defacement of the UBC engineers’ cairn, and Katrina S.’s “The Insurrection of Signs? Graffiti, Marc Emery and The Culture of the (Non-) Deviant,” which questions the subversive nature of a “Free Marc Emery” graffiti […]

The protagonist of the French film Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain (“The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain”), is a shy, quirky Parisian with a fantastical imagination. She is depicted as content with her interior life and self-reliance, but a series of events lead her to seek out greater human connection and eventually pursue a male […]

With the advent of MP3 players, podcasts, subscription satellite radio, and customizable Internet radio stations, options abound for individuals to craft a highly personalized, solitary listening experience. But two recent case studies—the CBQM documentary and Danny Kaplan’s exploration of Israeli radio—illustrate that traditional radio performs important cultural work for their respective communities: more than simply […]

“How much time, and how much space, is required to separate an object from its reiteration; an echo from the source of the sound?”–David Novak, “Cosmopolitanism, Remediation, and the Ghost World of Bollywood” (2010) In a fascinating sequence in the 2008 documentary RiP!: A Remix Manifesto, director Brett Gaylor traces the evolution of a work […]

David Novak argues that “appropriation is a creative act” (2010:42) and suggests that remediation, the “repurposing [of] media for new contexts of use” (2010:41), resonates with the cosmopolitan subject’s capitalism-fuelled sense of alienation. While he notes that the Heavenly Ten Stems’ live performance of the Indian song “Jaan Pehechaan Ho” triggered accusations of cultural imperialism, […]

In the early hours of November 12, 2009, a fire engulfed several buildings at the corner of Main and Broadway, a few blocks away from my apartment. On my way to work, I stopped to survey the scene. A number of the storefronts, including a popular diner, had collapsed. The night before, I’d noticed that […]

Last week in my ANTH 300 class, we watched “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube,” a talk given by cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch, who heads up Kansas State University’s Digital Ethnography program. I found the section on the “Numa Numa” video phenomenon, in which Wesch calls the original video’s star, Gary Brolsma, “the first guy on […]

In Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai examines “the complex nesting of imaginative appropriations that are involved in the construction of agency in a deterritorialized world” (1996:61). Following Appadurai, I argue that in analyzing The Pussycat Dolls’ reworking of “Jai Ho” from “Slumdog Millionaire,” it is too simplistic to write it off as a bastardization of […]

In “Culture, Globalization, Mediation,” William Mazzarella traces the effects of globalization on anthropology to a shift in the 1990s that initially placed the onus of representing locality back on the informant. This later prompted a greater need for reflexivity, both on the part of the informant and—significantly for Mazzarella—the ethnographer (Mazzarella 2004). Mazzarella aligns this […]

In “Alms Dealers,” which exposes the potential of humanitarian aid to cater conflict, Philip Gourevitch asks, “Does the modern humanitarian-aid industry help create the kind of misery it is supposed to redress?” (2010:105) When reflecting on the media’s coverage of the ongoing cholera epidemic in Haiti, we must similarly consider whether the end result is […]