week 1: blogging task

'SCAPES

image by chalo84 http://www.flickr.com/photos/chalo84/

In this week's reading we focus on Rantanen's (2005) proposal of an ethnographic investigation of globalisation using the methodology of global mediagraphy. His approach seeks to analyse how the lives of individuals in different locations have changed over some 100 years from 1890 to 2003.

Much influenced by Appadurai’s (1990) theory of scapes in the formation of globalisation, Rantanen develops part of global mediagraphy through Appadurai’s (1998: 33-6) display of what globalisation consists of the junctures and disjunctures of five scapes: ethnoscape, mediascape, technoscape, financescape, and ideoscape.

The suffix -scape allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes, shapes that characterise international capital as deeply as they do international clothing styles. These terms, with the common suffix -scape, also indicate that these are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision but, rather, that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors: nation-states, multinationals, diasporic communities, as well as sub-national groupings and movements (whether religious, political, or economic) and even intimate face-to-face groups, such as villages, neighbourhoods and families. Indeed, the individual actor is the last locus of this perspectival set of landscapes, for these landscapes are eventually navigated by agents who both experience and constitute larger formations, in part from their own sense of what these landscapes can offer (Rantanen 2005:13).

Pivotal to the idea of these scapes involve the evolution of meanings, identity, community and cultures that have been influenced by the effects of globalisation. This means that they are no longer considered to be products of singular contained places, processes or phenomena, but generated and experienced “translocally” (Rockefeller, 560).

Rantanen (2005) suggests that global mediagraphy will incorporate individuals and their media use in a structured way into a phenomenon mediated globalisation, to analyse the individual life histories of 4 generations of families in different locations that previously conceptualised primarily either nationally or individually. He employs a range of materials, including oral histories, written accounts (autobiographical diaries or letters), behaviour observation and photographs, and methods including historical research and interviews, reflexive ethnography and comparative reflection to produce a global ethnography of the scapes across time and space

References:

Appadurai, A 1990, 'Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy', Public Culture, vol. 2, pp. 1-24.

Iza, G 2007, ‘Gonzalo iza’ retrieved 6 August 2013, <http://www.flickr.com/photos/chalo84/>

Rantanen, T 2005, 'Theorizing media globalization', The media and globalization, Sage, London.

Rockefeller, S 2001, "Flow", Current Anthropology, vol 52, no. 4, pp. 557-578.