mediating culture

Lecture on May, 30th 2006

Literature: „Mediating Culture: Indigenous Media, Ethnographic Film, and the Production of Identity“

by Faye Ginsburg, 1995

In: “The Anthropology of Media. A Reader” edited by Kelly Askew and Richard R. Wilk, Blackwell Publishing, 2002

Focus of Essay

This essay by Faye Ginsburg focuses on indigenous media, especially those from Aboriginal Australians. For understanding the topic it is necessary to ackknowledge that indigenous people do have a sense of how their political, historical, and cultural situation differs from that of ethnic minorities and how that difference might shape their use of media.

Core Terms about

. Indigenous Media

Indigenous production is a seperate category from ethnographic film with different intentions and audiences. This work is not mainly intented to cross over cultural boundaries but is rather made for intracultural consumption and is directed to the mediation of ruptures of time and history within one culture. Therefore indigenous media should be seen as both, a cultural product and a social process.

. Mediating culture

Mediating culture is intented to communicate something about a social or collective identity (culture), in order to mediate this across gaps of space, time, knowledge, and prejudices. It is about the processes of identity construction. Mediating culture creates and asserts a position for the present that attempts to accomodate the inconsistencies and contradictions of contemporary life, which can be achieved through indigenous media.

. Development of Aboriginal Indigenous Media

The development of media in remote areas of Australia is one almost unique. Many remote living Aborigines have been producing their own radio programming since the 1970s to begin recording their languages, stories, music, and culture – which was long before they got in contact with media productions of Western cultures. In the 1980s several Aboriginal Media Association, for example Warlpiri Media Association (WMA), were established by Aborigines themselves.

The developments of their own media productions increased the self-consciousness and initiative on the part of those remote living Aborigines to develop their own technologies in ways appropriate to their traditional patterns of social organization. The ways in which the produced tapes are made, shown, and used, reflect Aboriginal understanding of kinship and group responsibilities for display and access to traditional knowledge.

For Aboriginal producers, the goal of their media work is not to maintain existing cultural identities. The production is also a means of cultural invention that refracts and recombines elements from both, dominant and minority societies.

Mediating culture – a global village?

Mass Mediation of indigenous culture can not only be seen as a ‘global village’, but when indigenous media is under local control, it may have a revitalizing potential. As its best, indigenous media is expressive of transformations in indigenous consciousness rooted in social movements for Aboriginal empowerment, cultural autonomy, and claims to land.

If Aboriginal programming wants to be effective, each community requirements of this diverse population should be addressed.

But is that possible at all?

Australia and especially their Aborigines seem to have an unique experience with the growing penetration of mass media. Unlike other ethnic minorities, Aborigines were first able to experiment with media productions and after that were introduced to media of Western Cultures. Yet they now have to deal with the impact of commercial and private television, which may influence their culture as well as the way they handle media. Aborigines struggle with keeping their culture on one hand and cooperating with the dominant culture on the other hand.
Does media help and maybe even produce benefits for this struggle or does it even have more or less negative effects on this development?