Transnational Television, Cultural Identity, and Change:

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Transnational Television, Cultural Identity, and Change: When STAR Came to India byMelissa ButcherReview by: Sara DickeyThe Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Aug., 2005), pp. 774-776Published by: Association for Asian StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25075871 .

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insults; and stories of employers using threats of deportation "to discipline the workersand obtain docility and compliance" (p. 125).Based on these analyses and historical accounts, the text offers an important cri

tique of present-day normative discourses and media practices that discriminateagainst Sikhs in Canada by portraying them as lacking "normal" families or asperpetually playing out fundamentalist politics of the "home country." Against theseportrayals, the book argues that, rather than being natural forms of identity againstwhich a postcolonial community may be judged, both the "normal" family and the"homeland" are themselves products of colonialism that "correspond to historicalchanges in immigration policy as well as changes in the socio-economic characteristicsof community" (p. 193).

Demonstrating the enduring significance of colonialism within postcoloniality,The Sikhs in Canada, despite its deceptively reductive title, presents a highly nuancedand critical analysis of the historical and social forces that have grounded the subjectification of contemporary Sikh Canadian citizens. The text should prove of interestto both sociologists of international migration (whom the authors envision as thebook's target audience) and scholars of diaspora studies more generally. It, concurrently, provides a welcome corrective to standard accounts within Sikh studies thatresist rigorous theorization and critique of colonialism, the modern nation-state, andneoliberal categories of identity. Brian Keith Axel

Swarthmore College

Transnational Television, Cultural Identity, and Change: When STAR Came toIndia. By MELISSA BUTCHER. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2003. 321 pp.$54.95 (cloth).

Melissa Butcher examines the impact of transnational television imagery on thechanging identities of urban and rural youth in postliberalization India. She placesvisual representations in the context of "strategies of cultural identity production"employed by the state, the market, Hindu nationalist organizations, and televisionaudiences, all of which she sees shaping television content through production of and/or critical responses to content. The study draws from qualitative research with youthsaged fifteen to twenty-five, adults of their parents' and grandparents' generation, andmedia industry personnel.

Ultimately Butcher concludes that transnational television has a "reinforcing butnot deterministic role" in "the shifting of cultural boundaries" (p. 266). This limitedimpact derives from television's "space-binding" and "dislocating" properties?thatis, the power of images (and reactions to them) to serve as inclusive and exclusivemarkers of community identity as well as to help alter identities by introducing andsupporting new values and forms of relationships. Butcher found that an emphasis onfamily ties "appears as the quintessential marker of Indianness, with the body of thewoman its most adherent representation" (p. 144), thus setting the boundaries of apositive Indian identity against the immoral West. At the same time, commercialtelevision dislocates other values with its "syncretic use of representations, re-orientingthe media landscape from the official state and religio-cultural discourse of ancientregime,

to amoreyouthful nation" (p. 235). These syncretic representations, alongwith a "fusion" style combining Western aesthetics and images with Indian content


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parallels and resonates with the "in-between" identity of many contemporary youth(e.g., p. 194), although such fusion creates distressing ambiguity for their elders (pp.272-73).

Although these larger conclusions do not push the analysis of media consumptionor contemporary identities in India terribly far, Butcher's analysis nonetheless offersinsights on recent discussions about the agency of audiences. In particular, Butcherdisproves those popular and academic critics who, usually without benefit of ethnographic evidence, find transnational media both homogenized and homogenizing.Instead, she demonstrates how even transnational television has been "localized," withaudiences preferring languages and content that are culturally familiar and "comfortable," packaged in an attractively "global" aesthetic. Her analysis of both audiencereactions and television content goes a long way toward debunking simplisticarguments about media imperialism. Butcher simultaneously possesses a subtle senseof the limits on viewers' power to shape programming, and in the end she seeslocalization as part of amarket strategy. She argues, "the local appears to have becomean aspect of economic organisation, underpinned by a homogenous [sic] set ofcommercial strategies and practices" (p. 161).Another strength of Butcher's analysis is the diversity that she reveals in audiencecomposition and response. A laudable research design undergirds this nuancedportrayal. Using focus groups and interviews with television viewers, Butchercompares perspectives of people from different regions and of different ages, socioeconomic categories, and genders. Especially unusual in studies of India are hercomparisons across north/south India and urban/rural areas. The focus groups elicitedimpressively detailed and often contradictory views among respondents, and thesesupport Butcher's argument that no subgroup of viewers?let alone an entire "massmedia audience"?responds to images uniformly and that young people form not onlya differentiated but also a discerning audience. In portraying youths as unexpectedlycritical, informed, and sometimes conservative consumers of new ideas and values,Butcher's work contradicts the stereotypes that she heard from older viewers,

marketing executives, cultural critics, and politicians.Yet, there is much more that we could learn from these quotations and fromButcher's analysis itself. There is little close examination of often fascinating excerpts

or of contradictions among respondents' views, and indeed the excerpts sometimescontradict Butcher's own point or seem irrelevant to it. (On a related note, while theintroduction discusses the advantages of narrative analysis, there are virtually nonarratives among the brief excerpts and no narrative analysis presented in the book.)

Oddly there is also no discussion of the now numerous ethnographic monographs onSouth Asian media consumption, which could have provided fruitful models for amore detailed analysis of viewer responses. In contrast, the book is filled with anextended and able review of literature related to identity, postmodernity, and mediaconsumption?but so much so that it detracts from the author's own analysis. Thewriting overall can be less than lucid, making this book difficult to assign as anundergraduate text.

Nonetheless, there are intriguing lessons to be gained from Butcher's extensiveresearch. In addition to her perceptive discussion of the complexities of localization,one of her most striking points is that "the liberalisation of India is a generationalexperience" (p. 230). Although the point is explored only briefly, the text providesan unusual opportunity to examine the interplay of economic liberalization with thepractices of everyday life and identity construction. Portraying

liberalization as asource of shifting identities and a challenge to old orders, Butcher explores how new


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media and other consumer products are used to explore new identities and to dealwith the discomfort that arises from what she argues has been a period of unusuallyrapid social change. Sara Dickey

Bowdoin College

Uncommons in the Commons: Community Initiated Forest ResourceManagement. ByRucha Ghate, with Alka Chaturvedi. New Delhi: ConceptPublishing, 2004. 206 pp. Rs 350 (cloth).

From the beginning decades of the nineteenth century until independence in themid-twentieth, forest use and harvest in central India was based in large part on theblend of a colonial administration defining state needs and the localized tradition ofthose living in itsmidst. What was "common" between these two in their perspectivesabout this enormous, diverse environment which covered most of the subcontinent'smidsection was that the forest was a resource. What was "uncommon" was how thoseresources were managed depending on concepts of ownership, control, and hereditaryrights. In Uncommons in the Commons: Community Initiated Forest Resource Management,Rucha Ghate uses the implications of these historical and cultural themes as the

moorings of her study of five habitats in eastern Maharastra. She looks closely at thevery different struggles to come to terms with issues of change, identity, tradition,leadership, and especially the concept of nistar rights.Of the five sites that Ghate chose for her work, the best known from previousstudies and the longtime work ofNGOs is the village of Mendha (Lekha). It is a smallvillage with a homogeneous Gond population of about seventy-five households.Almost the entire defined village area of over four thousand acres is forested, and thepeople of Mendha traditionally exercised their customary nistar rights to collect theforest produce. This included not the timber that was (is) so valued by the government,but annually renewable products such as the flowers and seeds of the mahua tree, tenduleaves, amia and sitaphal fruit, lac, and various medicinal plants. It is here that thethemes of history and culture collided in the 1990s, when access and control of forestresources became a flashpoint.Land and resource issues in India have a long history of association with zamindari.

However, the Gond view of human and natural ecology never recognized any proprietary title to the soil on the part of the zamindars, so for a long time there has beenamuted grievance about forest resources. By the early twentieth century, the Britishgovernment administratively restricted nistar rights in an economic decision to gainhuge revenues, mostly from the sale of timber and grazing fees. As a result, the centraland state governments considered the village's forest as a part of the protected resourceowned and controlled by zamindars up to the early 1950s.

Following the abolition of zamindari soon after independence, much of the centralIndian forests were "transferred" to the forest department, again to enforce the pointthat in the absence of formal title to land, these were state resources which needed tobe "protected." In 1963 forest-settlement officers were sent to these forests in easternMaharastra with the specific task of determining proprietary rights. It took twelveyears, but in 1975 350,000 acres of forest were determined to be "reserved" and weretransferred to the control of the state government.For the people of Mendha, after uncountable generations of living in and off theforest and adjusting to conflicting concepts of ownership, control, cultural affiliation,

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