Reflecting on the Anthropology of Media

This class in the Anthropology of Media has opened my critical mindset towards the media, and how pervasive its messages can be. The impact that radio can have on the community it serves – CBQM, Israeli and Australian radio stations – has been more far reaching than I had once thought. However, it is the reproduction of A. R. Rahman’s “Jai Ho” that was most interesting to me. This post looks at two other contributions to the topic written by Emily Hitz and Eli Chamberlain that discuss new remediations of “Jai Ho” and their wider implications.

            Emily Hitz’s blog post “The Homeland is Partly Invented” creatively juxtaposes two remediations of “Jai Ho,” one made into a music video and popularized by the Pussycat Dolls (insert hyperlink here) and the other by a Tampa, Florida Tamil Sneham group as a means of celebrating their disconnectedness together. She discusses if either video can truly be seen as “authentic,” seeing the Pussycat Dolls’ video as a “poor imitation” (Hitz 2011) devoid of any true genuine value, whereas despite fitting the mold of Walter Benjamin’s criteria of including the “existence in time and space,” the Tampa Tamil group’s video is still a reproduction that that is being reproduced yet another time on YouTube. Emily’s first comment suggests that it is almost too late to talk about what constitutes an “authentic” identity, as an individual’s identity is tied to one geographic region, cultural pathway, or religious belief. However, as globalization has flattened the world, the lines that have constructed our identity are blurred (Friedman 2005). Canada is seen as a cultural mosaic, where each distinct ethnicity or culture is seen as a small piece of the bigger picture, and therefore our image should reflect this. Authenticity may not be the focus of the analysis. Maybe, as Appadurai sees it, the spotlight should be on an ethnoscape where “genealogy and history confront each other, leaving the terrain open for interpretations of the ways in which local historical trajectories flow into complicated transnational structures” (Appadurai 1996:65). This relationship of genealogy and history could form the basis of the emerging global ethnoscapes on which these global cultural processes can be analyzed.

            Eli Chamberlain’s blog post Slumdog Million’where’? identifies the same two videos in a different vein. Eli sees the Tamil Sneham’s reproduction as a moment of, as Appadurai terms, “transnational irony” (1996:57), that “many threads of international culture that are interwoven to create such a globalized product are too complex to undo in this brief context” (Chamberlain 2011).  In turn, Eli agrees with Walter Benjamin’s argument, consenting that “repetition and reproduction of an art-piece results in a kind of cheapening is quite agreeable” (Chamberlain 2011). Reproduction for profit, as seen in the Pussycat Dolls’ video, is shameless and in a way disrespectful, as they play off their fame to make profits from large cell phone and headphone companies, a “distracted reception” (1936) as Benjamin deems it. Finally, Eli questions the evolution of film and technology, and how it has led to the progression of YouTube performances that cause a negative connection with the original. Since it has blurred the lines between author and audience, maybe, Eli suggests, society should not recreate this information even though we have the means to do so. However, I feel that YouTube recreations have not in fact caused a negative connection to the original, as Eli argues it does. Although Benjamin values the “aura” that is associated with each original work, I see it the aura as changing, not a quality that “withers in the age of mechanical reproduction” (Benjamin 1936). Although there are both great and terrible contributions to social media outlets like YouTube, these outlets ultimately serve to facilitate (re)creativity itself, which would not occur if the original copies did not exist. Rather than creating a negative connection, as Eli suggests, I see it as a positive and mutually reinforcing relationship that changes with the ebb and flow of society; these recreations reflect and are a part of the society in which they are created, constructing a new aura tempered to the present time.

            These blog posts have merited informed theoretical discussions on the reuse and reproduction of media in an ever-increasing transnational community, and have contributed to the discourse of anthropology and media. It has been an invigorating experience as I have interacted with new media with interesting theoretical concerns that peek my interest. Never again will I look at the Pussycat Dolls video with a critical eye without thinking of Walter Benjamin’s work on reproductive technologies, as this blog post drew my attention to the theoretical qualities of the video. Well, that may be a lie…

References

Appadurai, Arjun

1996  Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology. In Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Pp. 48-65. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Benjamin, Walter

1936  The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press.

Chamberlain, Eli

2011  Slumdog Million’where’? Medianth Blog: Case Studies in the Anthropology of Media. http://medianth.blogspot.com/2011/02/t-he-international-cinematic-success-of.html, accessed April 2^nd 2011.

Friedman, Thomas L.

2005  The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Hitz, Emily

2011  “The Homeland is Partly Invented” (Blog 3). Can’t Stop the Press Blog. http://cantstopthepress.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/“the-homeland-is-partly-invented”-blog-4/, accessed April 2^nd 2011.