The Interpretation of Culture(s) After Television

[Terrance]

Lila Abu-Lughod, 1997 


As I have argued elsewhere, television's messages are deflected by the
way people
frame their television experiences and by the way powerful everyday
realities inflect and offset those messages.(18) Roger Silverstone's
image of the television audience as
positioned in multiple spaces and times suggests how daunting the task
of fully
contextualizing television is. He notes that people "live in different
overlapping but not always overdetermining spaces and times: domestic
spaces; national spaces;
broadcasting and narrowcasting spaces; biographical times; daily times;
scheduled,
spontaneous but also socio-geological times."(19) Which means we should
somehow
try to include these various spaces and times in our thick descriptions
of people who
watch television.(20)

Television makes obvious the fact that the same cultural texts have
different imports in
different contexts. When Zaynab interprets a scene like the marriage of
a sixty-year-old
as a matter of cultural difference – linked to region, way of life, and
morality – this is because she is so disadvantaged in terms of class and
education that she fails to grasp the intentions of the more privileged
creator of the program. For al-'Assal – working as an oppositional
politician within the national context of a postcolonial state and
arguing with fellow intellectuals, critics, and politicians in Cairo and
across the Arab world while trying to reform the public – this episode
was meant to represent a revolutionary and enlightened feminist option.
Only a mobile ethnography can do justice to the ways these different
worlds intersect. And this intersection must be part of any thick
description of television.

What is critical is that television's meanings are produced somewhere –
for most
viewers, somewhere else – and consumed locally in a variety of
localities. Even if it
ultimately helps create something of a "national habitus," or hints of a
transnational
habitus, television is most interesting because of the way it provides
material which is
then inserted into, interpreted with, and mixed up with local but
themselves socially
differentiated knowledges, discourses, and meaning systems.(41)
Television, in short,
renders more and more problematic a concept of cultures as localized
communities of
people suspended in shared webs of meaning.


http://www.haussite.net/haus.0/SCRIPT/txt2001/01/lughod.HTML