Suchergebnisse

From vice to virtue : the state and filmmaking in India -- From slumdogs to millionaires : the gentrification of Hindi cinema -- Casting respectability -- A day in the life of a Hindi film set -- The structure, organization, and social relations of the Hindi film industry -- Sentiments of disdain and practices of distinction : the work culture of the Hindi film industry -- Risky business : managing uncertainty in the Hindi film industry -- Pleasing both aunties and servants : the Hindi film industry & its audience imaginaries -- The fear of large numbers : the gentrification of audience imaginaries

In this essay, I focus on what has been characterized as a perennial problem for the Hindi film industry—the inability to accurately measure commercial outcome. While commentators and industry personnel criticize and lament this inability as an impediment to the rational functioning of the Hindi film industry, I argue that rather than hindering the industry, the lack of accurate information is integral to its functioning. Relying on economic theory's definition of "ambiguity," which refers to missing information that could be known, I reveal how the Hindi film industry's inability to accurately measure box-office outcome produces an ambiguity about commercial transactions that is actually generative and productive, enabling the industry to function and reproduce itself. In large-scale media industries like Bollywood, I contend, the presence of ambiguity is necessary and actually critical for the long-term existence of such industries.

Neoliberalism has been a popular concept within anthropological scholarship over the past decade; this very popularity has also elicited a fair share of criticism. This review examines current anthropological engagements with neoliberalism and explains why the concept has been so attractive for anthropologists since the millennium. It briefly outlines the history of neoliberal thought and explains how neoliberalism is different from late capitalism. Although neoliberalism is a polysemic concept with multiple referents, anthropologists have most commonly understood neoliberalism in two main ways: as a structural force that affects people's life-chances and as an ideology of governance that shapes subjectivities. Neoliberalism frequently functions as an index of the global political-economic order and allows for a vast array of ethnographic sites and topics to be contained within the same frame. However, as an analytical framework, neoliberalism can also obscure ethnographic particularities and foreclose certain avenues of inquiry.

This article complicates the discussion of commercial mass media production and takes it beyond simplistic assertions of the "bottom-line" by focusing on a specific feature of the everyday life of film production in Mumbai, India, home to the Hindi-language film industry, and more commonly known as "Bollywood." It examines the inordinate amount of criticism and contempt expressed by Hindi filmmakers about the workings of the industry as well as filmmakers' efforts to assert their difference from a generic norm—ranging from discourses about behavior to a fetishization of technology. These sentiments and discourses operate as a form of "boundary-work," which serves to create alternate regimes of value and criteria of prestige that are independent of commercial outcome. The article also demonstrates how it is possible to carry out ethnographic research within large-scale media industries that addresses core anthropological concerns about subjectivity, social life, and social practice. It illustrates how the sites and processes of media production, and not simply the finished outcomes, are invested with social and cultural meaning.

This groundbreaking volume showcases the exciting work emerging from the ethnography of media, a burgeoning new area in anthropology that expands both social theory and ethnographic fieldwork to examine the way media—film, television, video—are used in societies around the globe, often in places that have been off the map of conventional media studies. The contributors, key figures in this new field, cover topics ranging from indigenous media projects around the world to the unexpected effects of state control of media to the local impact of film and television as they travel transnationally. Their essays, mostly new work produced for this volume, bring provocative new theoretical perspectives grounded in cross-cultural ethnographic realities to the study of media