Join our Email List
Series
Volume 4
Anthropology of Media
Email Newsletters
Sign up for our email newsletters to get customized updates on new Berghahn publications.
Theorising Media and Practice
Edited by Birgit Bräuchler and John Postill
352 pages, bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-84545-741-9 $145.00/£107.00 / Hb / Published (November 2010)
ISBN 978-1-84545-745-7 $34.95/£27.95 / Pb / Published (November 2010)
eISBN 978-1-84545-854-6 eBook
Reviews
“This book is extremely thought provoking and makes an important contribution to current debates about the nature and scope of media ethnography. It includes the work of some of the most outstanding scholars working at the intersection of media studies and media ethnography, and many of the individual chapters make important contributions to the field.” · Virginia Nightingale, University of Western Sydney
“This is a worthy, potentially important book, very likely to have a substantial influence in the growing interdisciplinary fields of media studies and media anthropology. It is a well conceived and timely contribution to a set of ongoing conceptual debates and is successful in both representing those debates and participating in them. It deserves to be widely read.” · Eric W. Rothenbuhler, Texas A&M University
Description
Although practice theory has been a mainstay of social theory for nearly three decades, so far it has had very limited impact on media studies. This book draws on the work of practice theorists such as Wittgenstein, Foucault, Bourdieu, Barth and Schatzki and rethinks the study of media from the perspective of practice theory. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from places such as Zambia, India, Hong Kong, the United States, Britain, Norway and Denmark, the contributors address a number of important themes: media as practice; the interlinkage between media, culture and practice; the contextual study of media practices; and new practices of digital production. Collectively, these chapters make a strong case for the importance of theorising the relationship between media and practice and thereby adding practice theory as a new strand to the study of anthropology of media.
Birgit Bräuchler is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She is author of Cyberidentities at War (2013, Berghahn), The Cultural Dimension of Peace (2015, Palgrave), editor of Reconciling Indonesia (2009, Routledge), co-editor of Theorising Media and Conflict (2020, Berghahn) with Philipp Budka and has published widely in peer-reviewed journals.
John Postill received his Ph.D. in anthropology from University College London. He is Senior Lecturer in Media at Sheffield Hallam University and the author of Media and Nation Building (Berghahn, 2006) and Localizing the Internet (Berghahn, forthcoming). He has published widely on the anthropology of media and is the founder of the EASA Media Anthropology Network.
Read John Postill's blog Media Anthropology
Subject: Media StudiesTheory and Methodology
Contents
Of Related Interest
The Categorical Impulse
Essays on the Anthropology of Classifying Behavior
Ethnographic Practice in the Present
Expert Knowledge
First World Peoples, Consultancy, and Anthropology
