Indigenous Peoples in Bolivia Depicted Negatively
One of the strengths of cultural anthropologists (as opposed to
political scientists or mass media researchers) conducting research in
the emerging field of media anthropology is that through their deep
relationship with a particular place, particular people, and particular
media, they are able to more holistically document the visible and
audible evidence of cultural production in all of its situated
complexity. Jeff Himpele, in Circuits of Culture: Media, Politics, and Indigenous Identity in the Andes,in
this way creates a comprehensive media ethnography of La Paz, Bolivia,
but he also goes beyond geographic constraints to look at the history
of media circulation and distribution in the country as its own unique
narrative and constitutive cultural process. Himpele performs an
ethnographic service to his readers by offering a focused perspective
of an emerging indigenous public media sphere, with increasing
political consequence, that largely has been unobserved, unnoticed,
unanalyzed, unarticulated, and thus unknown. At base this is a superb
example of an intimately engaged, meticulously researched longitudinal
ethnography.
Read more about Circuits of Culture: Media, Politics, and Indigenous Identity in the Andes here.