Circuits of Culture Media, Politics, and Indigenous Identity in the Andes Jeff D. Himpele Table of Contents		$25.00 paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-3919-9 ISBN-10: 0-8166-3919-1 $75.00 cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-3918-2 ISBN-10: 0-8166-3918-3
A surprising study of how images of Andean Indianness have been popularized in Bolivian media. Set against the background of Bolivia’s prominent urban festival parades and the country’s recent appearance on the front lines of antiglobalization movements, Circuits of Culture is the first social analysis of Bolivian film and television, their circulation through the social and national landscape, and the emergence of the country’s indigenous video movement. At the heart of Jeff D. Himpele’s examination is an ethnography of the popular television program The Open Tribunal of the People. The indigenous and underrepresented majorities in La Paz have used the talk show to publicize their social problems and seek medical and legal assistance from the show’s hosts and the political party they launched. Himpele studies the program in order to identify the possibilities of the mass media as a site for political discourse and as a means of social action. Charting as well the history of Bolivia’s media culture, Himpele perceptively investigates cinematic media as sites for understanding the modernization of Bolivia, its social movements, and the formation of indigenous identities, and in doing so provides a new framework for exploring the circulation of culture as a way of creating publics, political movements, and producing media. Jeff D. Himpele is assistant professor of anthropology at New York University. 240 pages | 27 b&w photos | 7 x 10 | 2007 Visible Evidence Series, volume 20 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments Preface Introduction: Arenas of Circulation and Ethnographic Circuits Part I. The Cinemascape and the Publics of Circulation 1. Film Distribution as Media: Mapping the Urban Imaginary 2. Assembling the Cinemascape: Tracking Circulation, Fixing Difference Part II. Cinema and the Social Imagination of Indigenism 3. The Visible Nation: Excavating the Past, Projecting the Future 4. Fantasies of Modernity: The Social Imaginaries of Revolutionary Films Part III. Popular Publics and the Televisual Public Sphere 5. Reality Affects: Cultural Strategies and the Televisual Public Sphere 6. Indexical Binds: The Televisual Production of Popular Publics Conclusion: Popularizing Indigenism, Indigenizing the Popular Notes Bibliography Index