Anna Cristina Pertierra – författare

Media Cultures in Latin America updates and expands contemporary global understandings of the region’s media and cultural research. Drawing on forty years of contributions made by Latin American cultural studies to the global media research, the book connects this history to newly developing work that has yet to be given deep consideration in anglophone scholarship.

The authors emphasise themes that are key to media and cultural scholarship: distinctive from other world regions, these intellectual debates have been central to how media and communication is studied and produced in Latin America. This approach provides students and scholars with a better framework for engaging with Latin American research beyond the specificities of just one place or one kind of cultural product or technology.

The book is an essential read for upper level undergraduate and postgraduate students of media studies, anthropology, cultural studies, communication studies, and Latin American studies. It will also be of interest to students and scholars learning about human rights, environmental, indigenous and political activism.

Media Cultures in Latin America updates and expands contemporary global understandings of the region’s media and cultural research. Drawing on forty years of contributions made by Latin American cultural studies to the global media research, the book connects this history to newly developing work that has yet to be given deep consideration in anglophone scholarship.

The authors emphasise themes that are key to media and cultural scholarship: distinctive from other world regions, these intellectual debates have been central to how media and communication is studied and produced in Latin America. This approach provides students and scholars with a better framework for engaging with Latin American research beyond the specificities of just one place or one kind of cultural product or technology.

The book is an essential read for upper level undergraduate and postgraduate students of media studies, anthropology, cultural studies, communication studies, and Latin American studies. It will also be of interest to students and scholars learning about human rights, environmental, indigenous and political activism.

Locating Television: Zones of Consumption takes an important next step for television studies: it acknowledges the growing diversity of the international experience of television today in order to address the question of ‘what is television now?’

The book addresses this question in two interrelated ways:

This approach, involving collaboration between authors from cultural studies and cultural anthropology, offers new ways of studying the consumption of television – in particular, the use of the notion of ‘zones of consumption’ as a new means of locating television within the full range of its spatial, temporal, cultural, political and industrial contexts.

Although the study draws its examples from a wide range of locations (the US, the UK, Australia, Malaysia, Cuba, and the Chinese language markets in Asia - -Hong Kong, Singapore, China and Taiwan), its argument is strongly informed by the evidence and the insights which emerged from ethnographic research in Mexico. This research site serves a strategic purpose: by working on a location with a highly developed and commercially successful transnational television industry, but which is not among the locations usually considered by television studies written in English, the limitations to some of the assumptions underlying the orthodoxies in Anglo-American television studies are highlighted.

Suitable for both upper level students and researchers, this book is a valuable and original contribution to television, media and cultural studies, and anthropology, presenting approaches and evidence that are new to the field.

Locating Television: Zones of Consumption takes an important next step for television studies: it acknowledges the growing diversity of the international experience of television today in order to address the question of ‘what is television now?’

The book addresses this question in two interrelated ways:

This approach, involving collaboration between authors from cultural studies and cultural anthropology, offers new ways of studying the consumption of television – in particular, the use of the notion of ‘zones of consumption’ as a new means of locating television within the full range of its spatial, temporal, cultural, political and industrial contexts.

Although the study draws its examples from a wide range of locations (the US, the UK, Australia, Malaysia, Cuba, and the Chinese language markets in Asia - -Hong Kong, Singapore, China and Taiwan), its argument is strongly informed by the evidence and the insights which emerged from ethnographic research in Mexico. This research site serves a strategic purpose: by working on a location with a highly developed and commercially successful transnational television industry, but which is not among the locations usually considered by television studies written in English, the limitations to some of the assumptions underlying the orthodoxies in Anglo-American television studies are highlighted.

Suitable for both upper level students and researchers, this book is a valuable and original contribution to television, media and cultural studies, and anthropology, presenting approaches and evidence that are new to the field.

The field of anthropology took a long time to discover the significance of media in modern culture. In this important new book, Anna Pertierra tells the story of how a field - once firmly associated with the study of esoteric cultures - became a central part of the global study of media and communication. She recounts the rise of anthropological studies of media, the discovery of digital cultures, and the embrace of ethnographic methods by media scholars around the world. Bringing together longstanding debates in sociocultural anthropology with recent innovations in digital cultural research, this book explains how anthropology fits into the story and study of media in the contemporary world. It charts the mutual disinterest and subsequent love affair that has taken place between the fields of anthropology and media studies in order to understand how and why such a transformation has taken place. Moreover, the book shows how the theories and methods of anthropology offer valuable ways to study media from a ground-level perspective and to understand the human experience of media in the digital age. Media Anthropology for the Digital Age will be of interest to students and scholars of media and communication, anthropology, and cultural studies, as well as anyone wanting to understand the use of anthropology across wider cultural debates.