The im-mediacy of media?Media mediating themselves

Unit 4

Chona Rita R. Cruz (Cindy) 86-16518PhD Media Studies

Media 301: Media and CultureEulalio R. Guieb III, PhD

(Not) Made by the human hand: media consciousness and

immediacy in the cultural production of the real

Mattijs Van De Port (2011)

Main Theoretical Inquiry

• This essay shows how sensations of im-mediacy are sought and produced in a great number of fantasy scripts: those that undo media-awareness by concealing or denying the involvement of the human hand, and those that reveal the mediation process and the workings of the human hand in it.

• It ponders “chagrin over mediation” and the place of the medium in “the cultural production of the really real” and the transcending of the mediation process despite all awareness of the media involved.

Main Points

• “ACHEIROPOIETA, ‘not made by human hands’, refers to a quality attributed to many sacred icons. And it is exactly the absence of any human involvement in their making that greatly enhances their power.” (Van De Port, 2011, 74)

• “The ‘cultural production of the real’ is made up of the rhetorical, performative, and aesthetic practices through which people seek to upgrade the reality calibre of the stories-they-live-by.” (Van De Port, 2011, 75)

• “The interrogation of the chagrin over mediation and the accompanying dream that if only we could do without media, an encounter with the real of our imaginations would be possible.” (Van De Port, 2011, 75)

• “The moment we recognize the medium for what it is, ‘[it] constructs a corresponding zone of immediacy, of the unmediated and transparent, which stands in contrast with the medium itself.’” (Van De Port, 2011, 75)

• “History provides innumerable examples how ‘zones of immediacy’ came to be imagined as repositories of a ‘really real’, of transcendental truth and authenticity.” (Van De Port, 2011, 75)

• “Zones of immediacy – dream-destinations is to stress their illusionary character. There is no such thing as an unmediated knowing of reality. Fantasy is always at work to sustain the subject-s sense of reality.” (Van De Port, 2011, 75)

• “Two major modes of mediating immediacy: ‘naturalised’ and no longer experienced as a medium, and the mediation process as flauntingly revealed and highlighted for what it is, whose ‘unmasking’ produces its own sensations of immediacy.” (Van De Port, 2011, 76)

• “The understanding that the mirror shows ‘reality as it is’ hinges in large part on the mirror’s un-media-like qualities: the seeming capacity of a looking-glass to bring us to ourselves without the interference of a medium. The mirror image qualifies as acheiropoita, and therefore speaks the truth.” (Van De Port, 2011, 77)

• Other examples: novels, temples, mosques

• “As such, a realm of the sacred is achieved without ever being aware of how the particular architectural structuring of space produces that effect.” (Van De Port, 2011, 78)

• “Willing suspension of disbelief on the part of audiences is a pre-requisite for the magic of a theatre production to occur.” (Van De Port, 2011, 78)

Three religious fantasy scripts through which the medium vanishes:

• Spontaneous icons: the world is scripted as an agent that brings the believer’s convictions and beliefs back to him, and denies the involvement of “the human hand”. (Van De Port, 2011, 78-79) Appearance of God in things, glossolalia

• The body – the denial that the body is a medium seems to be grounded in sensations of pre-reflexive, bodily awareness: the body “speaks” in ways that the mind cannot grasp, and with an immediacy that precedes all opinionating. (Van De Port, 2011, 79) Stigmata, speaking in tongues, bodily manifestations of Divine presence, physical transformation of people possessed by spirits (Van De Port, 2011, 79-80)

• The divine medium – attributes the medium itself with sacred [or possessed] qualities. The medium is an instance of divine [or evil] immanence. The attribution of supernatural qualities to media is greatly facilitated by the fact that in contemporary media societies mediatic and religious imaginaries are already inextricably entangled. (Van De Port, 2011, 81)

• The erasure of the medium from consciousness allows for the sensation that one’s religious imaginations are immanent to the world, rather than human fabrications. (Van De Port, 2011, 82)

The moments when an awareness of the medium arises – breakdown in media

visibility

• The introduction of a new and superior medium, which is often associated with immediacy and the unmediated vis-a-vis the older technology and the rise of awareness in its being a medium (CDs vs. vinyl records, HDTVs vs. SD TVs) (Van De Port, 2011, 82-83)

• The breakdown of invisibility of the mediation process also occurs when a medium is introduced in an arena where it had hithertho not played a significant role. (83) – Catholic websites

• The users’ lack of skills in operating the medium (Van De Port, 2011, 83)

• The media being out-of-place in particular settings (Van De Port, 2011, 83)

• From the denial to the involvement of the medium

• Transparency vs. mystification• The mirror vs. plexiglass• Rather than to hide, deny or naturalise the

medium, the medium is here revealed for what it is, in all of its human-made, technically-put-together manner – calling attention to the technology of the mediation process, and thus to the inescapable human involvement in all forms of mediation. (Van De Port, 2011, 84) – media pilgrimages, “the making” photos

• Plexiglass aesthetics – the idea that fronts are all about make-belief, and that one has to move to the back-stage to encounter the real thing.

• This revelation only adds to the wonder.... (Van De Port, 2011, 85) Revealing the medium is not to opt for the real of mediation practices (“mediation is all we have”) but to enhance the mystery of the immediate, to produce a sense of its superior power and truth. It promises transparency of the mediation process yet only moves the mystery of its workings to another level. (Van De Port, 2011, 85)

The cultural production of the real, the fantasies of immediacy

and real-life experiences

• The cultural production of the real is to ask how people seek to uphold (or impose) the truth of their beliefs in a situation, characterized by a plurality of truths and beliefs; how they seek to maintain (or impose) the incontestability of their certainties in a situation of heterogeneity that thretens to degrade all certainties to the status of mere “opinions”.

• The fantasies of immediacy that are centered around the “vanished medium” produce sensations of the real by fostering the notion that cultural meanings are “immanent” to the world. These fantasy scripts enlist “the world” (or the “natural” body) as an agent that brings the believers convictions and beliefs back to him. (Van De Port, 2011, 87)

• Real-life experiences shape notions as to what is convincing and persuasive, which also translates in the aesthetic preferences that make up a style. But styles also direct and orient the perception of real-life experiences, and ultimately make these experiences. (Van De Port, 2011, 88)

The anthropology of media and the question of

ethnic and religious pluralism

Patrick Eisenlohr (2011)

Main Theoretical Inquiry

• This essay examines and interrogates the ways in which technological mediation contributes to the reshaping and reworking of religious and ethnic discourse.

• It postulates and problematizes the disappearance of the medium in mediation, and the various media that constitute and serve to validate religious authenticity in diaspora.

• “As uses of media technologies become imbedded in different cultural and historical contexts, the promises and dangers associated with them change, they become subject to different ideas and expectations with respect to their functioning.” (Eisenlohr, 2011, 53)

• “Media not only signify, but also generate and convey experiences and sensations. Signification and sensation are closely intertwined in uses of media, and it is important to realise that both are constitutive of media ideologies and theologies.” (Eisenlohr, 2011, 53)

Main Points

• “New media can open up new spheres of public participation and political mobilisation as they create new kinds of media producers and consumers. These are considered to have a fundamentally democratising character in transparency, access, and use.” (Eisenlohr, 2011, 42)

• “Media change what they mediate in a qualitative sense, while at the same time disappearing in the act of mediation.” (Eisenlohr, 2011, 42)

• “While new media may be viewed as simply more efficient and faster channels of dissemination, they become part of the cultural setting.” (Eisenlohr, 2011, 42-43)

• “Media audiences are active producers of media messages and their meanings, and can sometimes drastically transform media texts and messages by relating them to local entertainment genres and sociocultural values.” (Eisenlohr, 2011, 43)

• “Media authenticates religious experience and authority. The tensions between different forms of mediation in contemporary religious practice, such as scripture vs. the attractions of audiovisual media or electronic sound reproduction.” (Eisenlohr, 2011, 43)

• “Media and uses of media have been credited with extraordinary powers in not just shaping and mediating, but even producing many of the social and political processes, formations and institutions that anthropologists are grappling with today.” (Eisenlohr, 2011, 44)

• “Media and media practices are widely held to create or co-create new subjectivities and identities, the nation, the public sphere, globalization, the so-called ‘revival’ of religion, as well as transnational connections and flows of different kinds.’(Eisenlohr, 2011, 44)

• “Media takes on the power of religion to both destroy and remake individual sensibilities and create anew the grounds for communal belonging.” (Eisenlohr, 2011, 44)

• “Media has the tendency to disappear in the act of mediation.” (Eisenlohr, 2011, 44)

• “Media can only function as such if in the act of conveying something they are also capable of drawing attention away from their own materiality and technicality in order to redirect attention to what is being mediated.” (Eisenlohr, 2011, 44)

• “This capability of media to at least momentarily ‘stand back’ and withdraw from perception seems to be the very condition of their functioning, and is indeed central to the definition of what constitutes a medium.” (Eisenlohr, 2011, 44)

• “Aristotle’s transparent media: a medium of perception that only becomes an object of perception itself if it ceases to function in the expected way.” (blurring our vision, disabling hearing). (Eisenlohr, 2011, 44)

• “As long as these media appear to be operating properly, for their habitual users they recede in the background, to the point of vanishing almost entirely in the face of what they mediate. That is, in the successful acts of mediation what is being mediated appears to be fully and solely present, while the mediating apparatus with the social relations and institutions it is embedded in withdraws into absence.” (Eisenlohr, 2011, 44)

• “The withdrawing and disappearing medium paradoxically accounts for the very creation and production of political and cultural processes and institutions.” (Eisenlohr, 2011, 44)

• “Politics of immediation – a strategy of power and authority. That is, a denial of mediation and the accompanying illusion of pure immediate access to political and spiritual sources, personalities, and centres mobilise a capacity inherent in media for political effect. This illusion of immediate and transparent access in turn accounts for the power of media to bring about political mobilisation, and to rally and shape ethnic and religious identities, while at the same time denying and dissimulating its profoundly political character.” (Eisenlohr, 2011, 45)

• “Followers of the most diverse religious traditions have adopted the use of modern media technologies such as audiovisual technologies and sound reproduction in their religious practices.” (Eisenlohr, 2011, 45)

• “Contemporary media uses in the field of religion to connect to processes of imagining national and religious communities, and the dynamics of transnationalism and globalisation, and have provided important insights into how religious media become part of public spheres in which they blend with the realms of consumption, advertisement and entertainment.” (Eisenlohr, 2011, 45)

• “Religion often provides resources for the moral arrangements and underpinnings of ethnic pluralism, which especially in the contemporary world is inseparable from the circulation of various forms of religious media.” (Eisenlohr, 2011, 45)

Religious Media

• Statues and Icons• Bible, print media (magazines, newsletters,

comics)• Religious radio programs• Religious films, shows, animation• TV masses, television evangelist shows• Religious websites• Catholic Confession App

http://www.littleiapps.com/confession/

• “Religious practitioners often recast older claims for a more direct or ‘immediate’ access to supernatural forces through their deployment of contemporary media technologies, which may go hand in hand with radicalisation or maximisation of religious claims in social and political worlds.”

• “The sources of conflict in which religion and religious difference plays a major role can thus at least partly be located in the religious processes of mediated interaction themselves, and they appear to be integral to the reproduction and transformation fo religious traditions.” (Eisenlohr, 2011, 46)

• “It did so by insinuating itself into the rhythms of everyday life of its viewers, who came to include the broadcasting schedule into their everyday planning and routines, and turned viewing into a regular social activity with its sidespins and local metacommentary. “(Eisenlohr, 2011, 48)

• “Politics of diaspora are above all concerned with authenticating certain cultural forms and practices through minimising the temporal and spatial remove that separates the disapora from a place identified as the faraway ancestral homeland.” (Eisenlohr, 2011, 48)

Implications in Philippine Cases

For “The Anthropology of Media” and “(Not) Made By The Human Hand”

• Judiel Nieva: miracle or hoax?• Iglesia ni Cristo Arena• Philippine televangelists• TV mass• Reality TV: Pinoy Big Brother

Of ghosts and gangsters: Capitalist cultural production and

the Hong Kong film industry

Sylvia J. Martin (2012)

Main Theoretical Inquiry

• “Ghosts and gangsters are not merely popular genres in the Hong Kong film industry; they are also legitimate participants in the film production process itself, influencing financial, creative, and logistical resources and decisions – revealing the diverse risks and cultural practices in film production.” (Martin, 2012, 32)

• “Despite the rationalization of commercial filmmaking, ‘enchantments’ in the form of religion and feudalistic crime linger within capitalist production.” (Martin, 2012, 32)

Main Points

• “By situating media production processes in their broader cultural context, we see how sociocultural forces that are generally considered beyond the scope of Western media industry or institutional studies play several salient roles in the production process. These underworlds constitute material forces that have created conditions and contingencies in the filmmaking process. (Martin, 2012, 33)

• In the Hong Kong industry, members from the two underworlds also collaborate with and constrain film personnel in the production process in ways not addressed in a literature focused on conventional political-economies and industry terms.

• The author examines practices within a particular spaces (the industry as a space, the spaces as locations) that are shaped by beliefs and forces of their occupants and participants.

• Capital wealth is generated through an industry that revolve around practices shaped by the two underworlds (ghosts and gangsters) – practices that benefit both.

• Hong Kong film production demonstrates how sacred and feudalistic dynamics remain in the form of ghosts and imperial-era fraternal and clan associations disrupting the bureaucratic hierarchies and task specializations that capitalist modernity initiated.

• Ghosts and gangsters both collaborate with and constrain participants in the production of films.

Ghosts

• Morally ambiguous forces that may interfere with film production

• Are the unsettled spirits of generally disreputable individuals who met unsavory deaths or are people who died far from home.

• Linger near businesses where socially ambiguous behaviors are enacted (bars, massage parlors, performance sites)

• Appeasement rituals, amusement for the ghosts• Inclusion in film budget

Ghosts

• Ghosts constrain film personnel in multiple ways, and avoidance and appeasement tactics are incorporated into film production processes as rituals including burning incense and paper money. (Martin, 2012, 38)

• Local folk beliefs about social spaces such as cemeteries intersect with the risks of a production process that frequently continues around the clock. (Martin, 2012, 38)

• Accountability is another feature of cultural production with which film personnel must contend. (Martin, 2012, 39)

Gangsters

• Morally ambiguous characters that may interfere with film production

• Control many of the bars, discos, drug dealerships, and prostitution rings

• Palpable socioeconomic force• Inclusion in film budget

Gangsters

• The immediate public space in which filming occurs – and its inseparability from the social landscape of the territory – largely determines the terms of filming. (Martin, 2012, 41)

• The film industry as a laundering site for “black money” (Martin, 2012, 42)

• The gangster as boon and bane of the film industry (Martin, 2012, 42)

• Gangsterism vs. unionism (Martin, 2012, 43)

Reciprocity and Self-Censorship• In a reciprocal manner, gangsters propitiate ghosts and

ghosts protect gangsters, and this interconnectivity comes to be expressed within the workings of the film industry as the two underworlds reinforce one another. (Martin, 2012, 43)

• Gangster can expect to receive the protection of ghosts because they are amoral (unlike Gods) and desperate for worship. (Martin, 2012, 43)

• Since many of the ghosts were themselves involved in illicit dealings in their earthly lifetimes, they are considered particularly receptive to the please of gangsters.

• Both are attracted to the “slanted door” business and enjoy popular entertainment.

• Ghosts and gangsters remind us that production is full of pitfalls and the laboring body can be possessed in unexpected ways. (Martin, 2012, 44)

• Censorship is another area in which entities from supernatural and illegal activity intersect with film production. (Martin, 2012, 44) – negotiation of censorship, two endings for a movie

Ghosts and gangsters in film and their broader significance:

• “It is to interrogate the production in imaginative and material practice, of those compound political, economic and cultural forms... By means of which space and time are made and remade, and the boundaries of the local and the global are actualized.” (Martin, 2012, 45)

• Film after all is a construct that manipulates the coordinates of time and space, and ghosts and gangsters have endured through the colonial and postcolonial eras; indeed they both emerge from an earlier past – ghosts haunt us from a prior time and gangs are remnants of a feudal era. They haunt contemporary capitalist production. Thus we witness another iteration of capitalism – enchantments at work to procure profit and propitiation.

• Commercial film production constitutes a violent buisness that entangles the living and the dead, the legal and the illegal.

Networks of terror: Theoretical assumptions and

pragmatic consequences

Cynthia Stohl and Michael Stohl (2007)

Main Theoretical Inquiry

• The identification of the critical disjunctures between the assumptions of contemporary communication network theory and the assumptions and appropriation of network concepts by the current (2007) US Administration in discussion of terrorism networks. (Stohl and Stohl, 2007, 93)

• Analysis of the US administration’s conceptions of terror networks, its shortcomings and failings

Main Points

• “The war metaphor is a counterproductive rhetorical and tactical strategy... [that has] undermined the ability of the United States to manage the problem of terrorism.” (Stohl and Stohl, 2007, 93) The long term problem is as much diplomatic, as much as economic – in fact, more diplomatic, more economic, more political, than it is military.” (Schmitt and Shanker, 2005, in Stohl and Stohl, 2007, 93)

• “We identify critical disjunctures between what communication scholars know about organizational network dynamics and the appropriation of network concepts by the US Administration to devise strategies and tactics for addressing terrorism. (Stohl and Stohl, 2007, 94)

• “We suggest that a policy approach consistent with theoretical network assumptions creates the conditions for redefining the scale of the problem [to enable]... small wins: a concrete, complete, implemented outcome of moderate importance.” (Stohl and Stohl, 2007, 94)

Two Central Problems in the use of the term terror network

• Public policy makers viewed terrorist networks as hierarchically organized and centralized bureaucracies. (Stohl and Stohl, 2007, 95)

• The clandestine nature of terrorist networks enabled political opportunism to compromise the reliability and validity of boundary specifications, reports of linkages, and subsequent conclusions. (Stohl and Stohl, 2007, 95)

The New Network Paradigm: Five interrelated reasons that have radically changed the

assumptions of and possibilities for network theory and analysis and have important implications for the understanding of terrorist networks:

1. “Networks as the quintessential organizational form of the postindustrial information society – require organizational responsiveness, adaptation and efficiency in communication systems that are not found in traditional hierarchical organizations but are made possible in global network forms... With complex network dynamics that integrate multiple relations and contexts.” (Stohl and Stohl, 2007, 96)

2. “[The] move from static positions to the emergence and evolution of networks... [enabled] network analyses [to] no longer assume that roles are fixed structures that people already occupy in an already overdetermined network structure.” (Stohl and Stohl, 2007, 97) “A prescribed organizational network provides pegs from which emergent networks hang.” (Stohl and Stohl, 2007, 97)

3. “Multiple type of linkages within a social system... go beyond information sharing. Communication and information sharing are no longer treated as equivalent processes. Actor-actor, actor-attribute, and actor-event networks are built upon cognitive, semantic, cultural, behavioral and attitudinal linkages, each of which provides unique contributions to the network. (Stohl and Stohl, 2007, 97-98)

4. “A new science of networks... within the biological and phsical sciences.... Researchers uncovered an underlying mathematical dynamic of interconnectedness, a common architecture of shared deep structural properties that strongly influence who we are, how we think, how we make sense of the world, how we interpret messages, and how we organize.” (Stohl and Stohl, 2007, 98)

5. “Small-world architecture” (Kevin Bacon and the six degrees of separation) (Stohl and Stohl, 2007, 98, 119)

Operational Assumptions Regarding Networks

Assumptions of US Administration

• Networks are information system (sic)– Traditional mechanistic view

of organizations– Concept of “one mastermind”– Solution: elimination of

specific information links and the consequent interruption of information transmission (100)

Assumptions of Network Theory

• Networks are multifunctional communication systems.– Latent relationships, closing of

social distances, building of social capital

– Not only sites of information transmission but also sites of sense-making and socialization that reinforce ways of seeing the world and provide sources of role models and inspiration

– Socialization mechanisms for emotional support, reinforcing ideological frameworks, generating trust, granting legitimacy for action (99)

– Solidarity, sympathy for a particular cause (100)

– Sustained ability to mobilize and animate (101)

Assumptions of US Administration

• Network links embody uniplex ahistoric relations.– Links are uniplex and considered

only as conduits for information transfer.

– Typically addresses how to destroy a network through the elimination of specific links that can be found in particular locations rather than by addressing the underlying sociocultural dynamics of network emergence. (102)

– Results in policies that not only are short sighted and ineffective but also ironically create the very conditions that are associated with the generation and maintenance of terror networks. (103)

Assumptions of Network Theory

• Network links embody multiplex historically constructed relations operating at multiple levels.– Contrary to public opinion,

terrorists are not recruited... [but] instead typically first meet through social circles – friendship or kinship.

– Often, the importance of links is not the information they broker but rather in the social history they embody. (101)

– The most efficient and least costly way of mobilizing people is to transform the functionality of preexisting communicative infrastructures. (101)

Assumptions of US Administration

• Networks are hierarchically organized, top-down command and control structures.– Network identity roles are

fixed and constant– Networks operate according

to formal and unambiguous rules

– These rules constrain how members of the network act, defining and limiting what is acceptable and unacceptable action. (105)

Assumptions of Network Theory

• Networks are temporary, dynamic, emergent, adaptive, flexible structures.– A hierarchical mode of thinking tends

to ignore the potential and real influence of formal and informal ties among actors that cut across social categories and group boundaries. It ignores other forms of informal everyday social relations that affect actors’ identities, attitudes and behaviors. (105)

– Terrorists may perform operations spontaneously, and independently even as they identify with, but are not part of, the organization. (105)

– Network organizations are created out of complex webs of exchange and dependency relations among multiple organizations. (106)

Assumptions of US Administration • Network boundary

specification is a political tool.– Shows little concern for the

problem of specifying the inclusion rules in defining the membership of actors in particular networks and in identifying the types of social relationships to be analyzed. (107)

– Often appears based on political rather than analytic concerns. (108)

Assumptions of Network Theory

• Network boundary specification is an analytic tool.– Boundary specification is important

because it allows us to distinguish between an organization and a movement of which it may be part. We must be able to recognize that individuals may be in contact but not comprise an operational network and that different organizations may share some particular bits of useful information – arms, arms merchants, travel documents, transit routes, and so on- but are not therefore one and the same. (110)

– Need to be able to distinguish between the ability “to network) and the ability to mobilize, control, and coordinate members for specific planned acts.

– Connections do not equal coordination, temporary exchange relationships do not equal control, and identification of an agreed enemy does not equal the emergence of an organization. (110)

Assumptions of US Administration • Networks are globalized and

homophilous.– Relational homophily – family,

friends, and identity– The GW Bush

Administration’s “terror network” does not distinguish among groups. It is globalized and nonspecific.

– “They hate our freedoms.”– Every time there is a terrorist

event anywhere in the world, a victory is handed to Osama bin Laden. (113-114)

Assumptions of Network Theory

• Networks may be local, global, or global and heterogenous.– Finer distinctions– Coercive bargaining paradigm – they

have not sought to destroy their adversaries but to inflict enough damage to force them to bargain and grant concessions. (111)

– War-inducing paradigm – allows and justifies the targetting and killing of large numbers... in which there is o clear bargaining point. (111)

– Ethnically based terrorist organizations, multiethnic terrorist groups

– May be built upon relational homophily or homophily of a particular value and like-mindedness

Mediation as Flauntingly Revealed

The Cast of “The Walking Dead”

In between fight scenes: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Behind the scenes: Star Wars

The Lannister Siblings, Arya and the Hound

VideosThe body and possession:• short scene from "The Conjuring“: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hCLWs7obwk

Calling attention to media and the mediation process, as in a media pilgrimage: • Sex and the City" Tour http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyJst8imx1s

The divine medium • The TV and Sadako in "The Ring“ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJn5Y65GAkA• The video contents in "The Ring“ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkVlC2WgEwc

“Mediation as flauntingly revealed“• Lily Allen's "Somewhere Only We Know“ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mer6X7nOY_o

The disappearance of the medium / the medium as out of place-• Priest Movie trailer (the scene from the movie is timestamped 7:23)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stAfEDSosXc

Breakdown in media visibility with the introduction of a new and superior medium AND the vanishing medium

• Black Mirror: Episode “Be Right Back” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld9m8Xrpko0• Black Mirror: Episode “The Entire History of You” (scene) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkSkfYX6kzc• “The Change in My Life” from “Leap of Faith” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_lVfBwmNjM• Samsung Curved TV http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK7xNsHDVpk

Bibliography• Eisenlohr, P. (2011). The anthropology of media and the question of

ethnic and religious pluralism. Social Anthropology 19(1), 40-55.

• Martin, S.J. (2012). Of ghosts and gangsters: Capitalist cultural production and the Hong Kong film industry. Visual Anthropology Review, 28(1), 32-49.

• Stohl, C. & Stohl, M. (2007). Networks of terror: theoretical assumptions and pragmatic consequences. Communication Theory 17, 93-124.

• Van de Port, M. (2011) (Not) Made by the human hand: media consciousness and immediacy in the cultural production of the real. Social Anthropology, 19(1), 74-89.