This course introduces the media as an arena for anthropology by exploring how media texts and technologies are embedded in social forces and cultural values. The course reveals the assumptions about reality that frame representations of cultural difference and social inequality in documentary films, track the global circulation of mass media, and examines how indigenous societies have taken up media-making as a means of cultural production and politics. By studying media from anthropology’s comparative and ethnographic perspectives, students learn to identify and describe the diverse and potent relationships between media and social life.
