From Filmmaker Warriors to Flash Drive Shamans - (Vanderbilt Center for Latin American Studies) by Richard Pace (Paperback)

About the Book

A collection examining not only video production, but a variety of other ways that Indigenous peoples engage with media across Latin America

Book Synopsis

From Filmmaker Warriors to Flash Drive Shamans broadens the base of research on Indigenous media in Latin America through thirteen chapters that explore groups such as the Kayapó of Brazil, the Mapuche of Chile, the Kichwa of Ecuador, and the Ayuuk of Mexico, among others, as they engage video, DVDs, photography, television, radio, and the internet.

The authors cover a range of topics such as the prospects of collaborative film production, the complications of archiving materials, and the contrasting meanings of and even conflict over "embedded aesthetics" in media production--i.e., how media reflects in some fashion the ownership, authorship, and/or cultural sensibilities of its community of origin. Other topics include active audiences engaging television programming in unanticipated ways, philosophical ruminations about the voices of the dead captured on digital recorders, the innovative uses of digital platforms on the internet to connect across generations and even across cultures, and the overall challenges to obtaining media sovereignty in all manner of media production.

The book opens with contributions from the founders of Indigenous Media Studies, with an overview of global Indigenous media by Faye Ginsburg and an interview with Terence Turner that took place shortly before his death.

Review Quotes

"A splendidly edited volume of well-crafted essays that provides up-to-date and comprehensive coverage on a range of contemporary issues on Indigenous engagements with media in Latin America, particularly in Brazil, but also in Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Ecuador."
--Juan Francisco Salazar, co-editor of Anthropologies and Futures: Researching Emerging and Uncertain Worlds

About the Author

Richard Pace is a media anthropologist who works with the Kayapó and ribeirinhos (former rubber tappers) from the Brazilian Amazon. He is co-author of Amazon Town TV: An Audience Ethnography in Gurupá, Brazil and author of The Struggle for Amazon Town: Gurupá Revisited.