This study explores how women in two devout religious communities cope with the Internet and its apparent incompatibility with their communities’ values and practices. Questionnaires containing both closed and open-ended questions were completed by 82 participants, approximately half from each community. While their discourses included similar f…[Read more]

Users of contemporary media technology in religious settings often oscillate between immediacy in spiritual interaction and the increasing complexity and visibility of media technology as human artifacts. Drawing on approaches to mediation from philosophy and media theory, I examine Mauritian Muslims’ uses of sound reproduction in performing a d…[Read more]

This essay discusses anthropological approaches to the study of media interacting with contexts of ethnic and religious diversity. The main argument is that not only issues of access to and exclusion from public spheres are relevant for an understanding of media and pluralism. Background assumptions and ideologies about media technologies and…[Read more]

In this article I suggest that the rapidly growing interest in the intersection of linguistic anthropology and media needs to be accompanied by a deeper investigation of the mediality of language. Discussing Mauritian Muslims’ uses of sound reproduction in religious events revolving around the recitation of devotional poetry, this paper explores h…[Read more]

This review addresses recent work on media practices in situations of religious diversity. I hereby distinguish three approaches in this literature: the media politics of diversity, religious diversity and the public sphere, and the diversity of religious mediations. Whereas the first focuses on the control of representations of religious…[Read more]

Die massenmediale Durchdringung des Alltagslebens ist ein globales Phänomen und stellt die sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung vor wichtige Fragen. Wie beeinflussen Technologien von Film und Fernsehen die Wahrnehmung der uns umgebenden Welt? Oder bestimmt umgekehrt unsere soziokulturelle Wirklichkeit diese Technologien? Welche Akteure sind bei der…[Read more]

Introductory article to a section on changing media and religious renegotiations

In this contribution, I critically engage with the notion of the postsecular through the lens of religious mobilizations among Muslims in Mauritius and in Mumbai. Religious activism among Sunnis in Mauritius and Shi‘ites in Mumbai conforms to a trend of increasingly salient public religion in the world today that has led to widespread doubting o…[Read more]

In this article, I approach regimes of time as a medial question, examining the interplay of different temporalities in ritual and media practices among Hindus in Mauritius and Twelver Shi’ite Muslims in Mumbai. These interactions consist of fluctuations between modernist linear modes of time and suspensions of the distinctions of past, present, a…[Read more]

This paper develops an analysis of documentary sources of chilean’s Public Health Policy of Indigenous Peoples from a critical medical anthropology standpoint. Understanding public policy as ideological productions, it analyses the axis of interculturality, equity and participation in the context of Chile’s governmental “Neoliberal multi…[Read more]

Launched in June 2007, the Honesty Box was a Facebook application that allows people
to write anonymously to a Facebook profile. The Honesty Box was a fad,
popular among some groups at the time of my research in 2007–2008, but
which is no longer available. At the time that some IU students were adopting
the Honesty Box with a degree of e…[Read more]

The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between dwelling size, household structure and social status in urban Babylonia during the first millennium BC.

This paper focuses on the possibilities and limitations of the contemporary dérive as a form of ethnography in contemporary Delhi. The dérive, which originated as the Surrealist déambulation and subsequently became the Situationist dérive in the late 1950s, has now been re-imagined by walking artists and practitioners. In seeking to locate the Sit…[Read more]

‘There is an economy of narrative, it will be said, an economy of memory. One cannot recount everything,’ wrote Jean-François Augoyard. ‘What can be known about what occurred during a walk?’ (2007: 68) Over the last decade, explorations on foot of New Delhi have erupted as urban practices indicative of global tourism. These range from middle-c…[Read more]

In the 1960s, the descent versus alliance debate dominated kinship studies-anthropologists wanted to determine
what relationship offered the best analytic lens for understanding how social groups were formed.
Those who favored descent felt that the most relevant question to ask was how groups constituted and reconstituted
themselves across…[Read more]

In the 1960s, the descent versus alliance debate dominated kinship studies-anthropologists wanted to determine
what relationship offered the best analytic lens for understanding how social groups were formed.
Those who favored descent felt that the most relevant question to ask was how groups constituted and reconstituted
themselves across…[Read more]

In the 1960s, the descent versus alliance debate dominated kinship studies-anthropologists wanted to determine
what relationship offered the best analytic lens for understanding how social groups were formed.
Those who favored descent felt that the most relevant question to ask was how groups constituted and reconstituted
themselves across…[Read more]

In the contemporary U.S. workplace, corporate personhood is increasingly becoming
the metaphor structuring how job seekers are supposed to present themselves as
employable. If one takes oneself to be a business, one should also take oneself to
be an entity that requires a brand. Some ethnographic questions arise when job
seekers try to embody…[Read more]

This volume began with the question: what analytical possibilities can scholarly
work on language ideologies offer the study of media? Studying media ideologies
is not new, but calling the metalanguage that emphasizes the technology or bodies
through which we communicate a “media ideology” is. By examining media ideologies,
the authors in thi…[Read more]

Exhibition, World Fairs, Harvard Art Museum, November 16, 2014 – May 10, 2015.