The Mass Media and Their Role in Social Life

The last several decades of the 20th century have been marked by the significant development of mass communications — the propagation of information (knowledge, spiritual values, moral and legal norms, etc.) by technological media (the press, radio, movies, television) to numerically large and spatially dispersed audiences. Within the life span of a single generation, this process has come, by one means or another, to encompass the entire globe. The technological media for the spread of information have penetrated into places where for centuries the only source of information about the world beyond the confines of the patriarchal community had been the spoken word. This penetration, aided by the spread of literacy, has brought about far-reaching changes in people's consciousness and in their attitudes toward objective facts and toward themselves. These changes have created the preconditions for drawing into political life and struggle masses of new people who had formerly lived in conformity to only the interests of their own economically closed and culturally isolated little worlds. The political and ideological cleavages of today's world have caused these preconditions to bear real fruit.     

More Tweets,More Votes: Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior

Is social media a valid indicator of political behavior? There is considerable debate about the validity of data extracted from social media for studying offline behavior. To address this issue, we show that there is a statistically significant association between tweets that mention a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives and his or her subsequent electoral performance. We demonstrate this result with an analysis of 542,969 tweets mentioning candidates selected from a random sample of 3,570,054,618, as well as Federal Election Commission data from 795 competitive races in the 2010 and 2012 U.S. congressional elections. This finding persists even when controlling for incumbency, district partisanship, media coverage of the race, time, and demographic variables such as the district''s racial and gender composition. Our findings show that reliable data about political behavior can be extracted from social media.     

<Emphasis Type="Bold">Intersex Activists in Israel: Their Achievements and the Obstacles They Face</Emphasis>

This article focuses on the dynamic between the medical policy on intersex bodies and intersex activists in Israel. Recently, in many countries changes have taken place in medical guidelines regarding intersex patients and laws that regulate medical practices and prohibit irreversible surgeries for intersex babies for cosmetic reasons and without the patient’s consent. In Israel, intersex activists are limited by several factors. On the one hand, they are influenced by the achievements of intersex activism around the world but on the other, the pathologizing medical discourse and socio-medical practices, which include early diagnosis, early irreversible surgeries, and secrecy surrounding intersexed bodies, present obstacles to achieving bodily autonomy for intersex individuals and social recognition of different sex development. Nevertheless, intersex activists are attempting to find different social and media spaces in which to achieve public acknowledgement and future bodily autonomy for intersexed people and seeking medical professionals’ cooperation. Recently, the Israeli Ministry of Health published a new circular for intersex/DSD patients, and while it does not clearly forbid irreversible surgeries, it provides information about the complexities of intersex people and their experience.     

Medical Humanitarianism Under Atmospheric Violence: Health Professionals in the 2013 Gezi Protests in Turkey

During the 2013 Gezi protests in Turkey, volunteering health professionals provided on-site medical assistance to protesters faced with police violence characterized by the extensive use of riot control agents. This led to a government crackdown on the medical community and the criminalization of “unauthorized” first aid amidst international criticisms over violations of medical neutrality. Drawing from ethnographic observations, in-depth interviews with health care professionals, and archival research, this article ethnographically analyzes the polarized encounter between the Turkish government and medical professionals aligned with social protest. I demonstrate how the context of “atmospheric violence”—the extensive use of riot control agents like tear gas—brings about new politico-ethical spaces and dilemmas for healthcare professionals. I then analyze how Turkish health professionals framed their provision of health services to protestors in the language of medical humanitarianism, and how the state dismissed their claims to humanitarian neutrality by criminalizing emergency care. Exploring the vexed role that health workers and medical organizations played in the Gezi protests and the consequent political contestations over doctors’ ethical, professional, and political responsibilities, this article examines challenges to medical humanitarianism and neutrality at times of social protest in and beyond the Middle East.     

Of Trees and People: The Changing Entanglement in the Israeli Desert

This article portrays the shift experienced in the role of acacia trees during environmental–political struggles as the entanglement of trees and people. Drawing on a four-year ethnographic study around Israel’s Arava desert valley, the article narrates human interactions with these trees amid an environmental conflict fraught with personal and political conflict, opposing perspectives on natural preservation and scientific debate, as well as disputes among environmental organisations. Contrary to current approaches in anthropology that –theoretically at least – confer agency on the non-human, I refocus on the human practices that weave the non-human into the social fabric. In this article, I argue that the trees – not actors in their own right, yet inhabiting a tapestry of people and other elements – are essential to understanding a variety of social processes.     

Power and Control in Interactions Between Journalists and Health-Related Industries: The View From Industry

The mass media is a major source of health information for the public, and as such the quality and independence of health news reporting is an important concern. Concerns have been expressed that journalists reporting on health are increasingly dependent on their sources—including representatives of industries responsible for manufacturing health-related products—for story ideas and content. Many critics perceive an imbalance of power between journalists and industry sources, with industry being in a position of relative power, however the empirical evidence to support this view is limited. The analysis presented here—which is part of a larger study of industry-journalist relationships—draws on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with representatives of health-related industries in Australia to inductively examine their perceptions of power relations between industry and journalists. Participants painted a picture in which journalists, rather than themselves, were in a position to control the nature, extent, and outcome of their interactions with industry sources. Our results resonate with the concept of “mediatisation” as it has been applied in the domain of political reporting. It appears that, from the perspective of industry representatives, the imposition of media logic on health-related industries may inappropriately influence the information that the public receives about health-related products.     

Women’s empowerment and rural revolution: rethinking “failed development”

One of the most frequently advanced explanations of the Maoists’ popularity in rural Nepal links dissatisfaction with the State to forms of consciousness and changes in expectations that are products and processes of development. Such theories often attribute popular support for the insurrection to frustrated desires stemming from “failed” or “incomplete” development. Against this, others suggest that it was the very “success” of empowerment programs which aimed to raise participants’ consciousness of oppression and its roots that inspired villagers to embrace revolutionary action. This paper argues that, despite their differences, both hypotheses reflect assumptions about gendered selfhood and political action that limit their recognition of what motivates Maoist sympathies. Extended research with women in Gorkha—a district where female support for the rebels is said to be especially strong—reveals that Gorkhali women’s support for the rebels is not inspired primarily by the desire for greater autonomy, choice or absolute liberation from social constraints, all of which ideals valorize a culturally specific vision of individual agency. Rather, women there report a sense of self that defines itself through social relations and commitments and which values the common good over individual self-interest, which they associate with an unjust state. The disjuncture between Gorkhali women’s own understandings of self and society and prevailing theories of what motivates people to rebel highlights the modernist assumptions that underlie—and potentially distort—otherwise diverse scholarly perspectives. Likewise, it implies that rebellions may be less about consciousness and more about morality than either “failed” or “successful” theories presume.     

Jointly They Edit: Examining the Impact of Community Identification on Political Interaction in Wikipedia

Background

In their 2005 study, Adamic and Glance coined the memorable phrase ‘divided they blog’, referring to a trend of cyberbalkanization in the political blogosphere, with liberal and conservative blogs tending to link to other blogs with a similar political slant, and not to one another. As political discussion and activity increasingly moves online, the power of framing political discourses is shifting from mass media to social media.

Methodology/Principal Findings

Continued examination of political interactions online is critical, and we extend this line of research by examining the activities of political users within the Wikipedia community. First, we examined how users in Wikipedia choose to display their political affiliation. Next, we analyzed the patterns of cross-party interaction and community participation among those users proclaiming a political affiliation. In contrast to previous analyses of other social media, we did not find strong trends indicating a preference to interact with members of the same political party within the Wikipedia community.

Conclusions/Significance

Our results indicate that users who proclaim their political affiliation within the community tend to proclaim their identity as a ‘Wikipedian’ even more loudly. It seems that the shared identity of ‘being Wikipedian’ may be strong enough to triumph over other potentially divisive facets of personal identity, such as political affiliation.     

A Mutual Interest? Ethnography in Anthropology and Cultural Studies

Anthropology and cultural studies share a concern with ethnographic method. Cultural studies increasingly uses ethnography in its analyses of popular culture as it seeks to balance earlier preoccupations with text. Where cultural studies diverges from anthropology is in its encompassment within an oppositional paradigm which embeds a political agenda deep in its ethnographic work. This paper uses the area of media to explore the ways in which ethnography has been adopted and developed in cultural studies. Ethnographic focus has shifted interest in media from the text to the reception of media products. At the same time, the oppositional legacy from cultural studies' earliest days has tended to produce rather romanticised findings of a subaltern audience using media products to resist dominant cultural and political structures. It is suggested that anthropology should pay attention to cultural studies use of ethnographic method, first taking seriously the ground of popular culture as a challenge for anthropologists' more extended use of ethnography. But second, we should pay attention to the problem silences in cultural studies' ethnographies—silences like racism in audiences—since these may well have at least part of their basis in the method itself.     

Too much common sense,not enough critical thinking!

This paper explores two different views about common sense—those of Clifford Geertz and Antonio Gramsci. It examines their presuppositions, assesses their utility for archaeologists, and considers the implications of current common-sense explanations of the past. It points out that common sense is both historical. Yesterday’s common sense sometimes morphs into today’s good sense or scientific truth. Today’s common sense or scientific truth often becomes tomorrow’s false consciousness or folklore. Common sense is also relational. Groups with different positionalities in hierarchically organized societies may have widely divergent views about what is common sense. Finally, it raises the question of why particular “common sense” explanations of the present—buttressed with claims that they are rooted historically in a fixed, unchanging human nature and morality—are repeatedly resurrected by fundamentalists and conservatives in both hemispheres to justify political arguments and to reassert or impose or particular power relations.     

Towards a redefinition of Jewish nationalism in Israel? The enigma of Shas

The electoral success of Shas, a mizrahi, religious political party in Israel is analysed with the help of the cultural division of labour model. Mizrahim (Jews originating in Muslim countries) are a semi-peripheral ethnic group in Israel, located between the dominant ashkenazim (Jews of European origin) and the Palestinians. While most mizrahim have been voting Likud for the past twenty-five years, increasingly the poorer among them have been shifting their vote to Shas. The key to Shas's success, where other efforts to organize mizrahi political parties have failed, is its integrative, rather than separatist, ideology. Shas seeks to replace secular Zionism with religious Judaism as the hegemonic ideology in Israeli society, and presents this as the remedy for both the socio-economic and the cultural grievances of its constituency. This integrative message, emphasizing the commonalities between mizrahim and ashkenazim, rather than their differences, is attractive to mizrahim because of their semi-peripheral position in the society.     

The development of a “privileged underclass,” locating undocumented migrant women and their children in the political economy of Tel Aviv, Israel

In 1991, the Israeli government responded to severe shortages in the low-wage labour force by developing a Foreign Worker Program. Over the next two decades, hundreds of thousands of labour migrants from the Global South were issued work visas that would allow them to live temporarily in Israel. Migrants have since settled, primarily in Tel Aviv, where some have also overstayed their visas, given birth to children, and established ways of living as undocumented residents of Israel’s largest urban centre. In this article, I describe how undocumented migrant women and their Israeli-born children have had a particularly significant impact on the social and political context in which they live. Specifically, I explore how they have come to constitute a “privileged underclass” within the ethnically, geographically, and socio-economically stratified population of the city. While they share dilapidated public spaces and conditions of poverty with their historically marginalized Mizrahi neighbours in the southern part of the city, undocumented women and their children share special events, interpersonal engagements, and processes of “sentimental civics” with the largely wealthy and politically enfranchised Ashkenazi residents of Tel Aviv’s north who are their employers, financial patrons, and supporters of their campaign for citizenship. The development of a “privileged underclass” has thus exacerbated class conflict in Tel Aviv, bringing to the surface the well-established, but long-ignored Mizrahi struggles for recognition, and sowing the seeds for a sometimes violent, yet politically nuanced, anti-migrant mobilization.     

Contesting the value of household property

Working households have never owned so much, but the value of their property—especially in the wake of the recent economic crisis, which has priced people out of their homes and devalued their pension savings—is unstable. Liberal economic thought promotes private property as a self-evident vehicle of investment for the future. In contrast, anthropology highlights the social foundations of property, while value theory foregrounds the exigencies of accumulation. Drawing on the latters’ sensitivities and on my fieldwork in Israel on property divisions upon divorce, I examine contested meanings and uses of household property to argue that financialization, a new regime of accumulation that places property values in flux, amplifies tensions in economic liberalism, thereby exposing its ideological underpinnings.     

Perceived threat and exclusionary attitudes towards foreign workers in Israel

The present article focuses on determinants of attitudes towards granting social rights to overseas labour migrants in Israeli society. The analysis is based on a national representative sample of the adult population in Israel. The findings reveal that a substantial number of respondents (both Jews and Arabs) oppose granting equal social rights (i.e. education, welfare, health, housing) to foreign workers. These attitudes can partially be explained as resulting from perceived threat to social and economic well-being of individuals as well as threat to national identity and Jewish character of the state. Part of the exclusionary attitudes that cannot be attributed to threats, are explained by individuals’ socio-economic characteristics, ethnicity and political orientation. The findings are discussed within the context of Israel as an ethno-national state.     

Culture,Conflict, and Translocal Communication: Mobile Technology and Politics in Rural West Bengal,India

As media reports of political movements from various locations have shown, mobile technology can be a powerful political instrument. This paper examines how political activists in West Bengal, India use mobile phones for their daily political work. I seek ways to recognize the disruptive and political potential of mobile technology without ignoring its social and cultural rootedness. I illustrate how riots and protests relate to the increase in translocal communication enabled by phones. I also demonstrate how the political use of mobile technology for extra ordinary events is grounded in the social and political processes of ordinary everyday life and draws from the local understanding of politics by emphasizing certain aspects of it. My article confirms the cultural continuity amidst the increase in translocal relationships but it also pinpoints how cultures harbour conflicts and alternative discourses which translocal communication helps to amplify.     

Cinema Itself: Cinephobia,Filmic Anxieties,and Ontologies of the Moving Image in Pakistan

Anxieties over the particular ontology and materiality of the film image—rather than moral concerns over the co-mingling of bodies in the built and social space of the cinema—have been addressed by two formative figures in the philosophy of Pakistan as a political and religious idea: Muhammad Iqbal and Syed Abul A'la Maududi. Their arguments provide two divergent examples of the ways in which the permissibility of film in Pakistan has been expressed. This essay is driven by such instances in which the epistemology—and in some cases permissibility—of technological objects is negotiated via their very ontology.     

‘You have to call the right name' – Operation Joshua meets Cosmology and Catholicism at Lake Chambri in Papua New Guinea

In the Sepik, names feature centrally in political and religious contexts. Esoteric knowledge about totemic names enables Nyaura men to achieve status and power and can set them in contact with spirits. A recently arrived Pentecostal/evangelical movement—Operation Joshua—claims to have found the true name of God, whom it presents as being radically different to the beings people's ancestors have known. At Lake Chambri, however, the Nyaura (West Iatmul) community Timbunmeli had accommodated Catholicism to their culture long before Operation Joshua came to their village. While Operation Joshua demonizes Nyaura spirits, the Catholic community understands God to be an ancestral being for whom different clans know different names. Taking a political ontology perspective, I analyze the encounter of Operation Joshua and Nyaura Catholicism in Timbunmeli in relation to cosmo‐ontological politics pursued by ambitious Nyaura men and different denominations. I suggest that denominational pluralism creates ontological pluralism in Timbunmeli, where different actors engage different truth claims concerning the being and reality of central Christian figures in their world‐making practices.     

Ferguson and the death of Michael Brown on Twitter: #BlackLivesMatter, #TCOT,and the evolution of collective identities

Recent events related to police brutality and the evolution of #BlackLivesMatter provides an empirical case to explore the vitality of social media data for social movements and the evolution of collective identities. Social media data provide a portal into how organizing and communicating generate narratives that survive over time. We analyse 31.65 million tweets about Ferguson across four meaningful time periods: the death of Michael Brown, the non-indictment of police officer Darren Wilson, the Department of Justice report on Ferguson, and the one year aftermath of Brown’s death. Our analysis shows that #BlackLivesMatter evolved in concert with protests opposing police brutality occurring on the ground. We also show how #TCOT (Top Conservatives on Twitter) has operated as the primary counter narrative to #BlackLivesMatter. We conclude by discussing the implications our research has for the #BlackLivesMatter movement and increased political polarization following the election of Donald Trump.     

Authoritarianism among Afrikaners

In this paper we contrast two opposing theoretical views in the sociology of sport. The first sees sport as a field that brings together different groups and bridges social divides. In this view, minority sport stars serve both as role models and as a mouthpiece voicing the feelings and needs of their ethnic groups. The opposing view holds that the sport field reflects the tendencies of the larger society, helping to maintain the social dominance of hegemonic groups. In this view sport stars serve mostly as tokens and have no real influence on the social order. Our systematic analysis of Israeli media between the years 2002 and 2007 lends support to the latter view. We show that the expressions and behaviours of Israeli Palestinian soccer players are consistently policed and silenced by the Jewish-dominated media discourse, effectively blocking one of the few channels of expression for the Arab public in Israel.     

Two states for three peoples: the ‘Palestinian-Israeli’ in the Future Vision Documents of the Palestinians in Israel

This article focuses on the Vision Documents of the Arab civil society organizations in Israel as an act of citizenship and an expression of the politics of contention used by the Palestinians in Israel. We argue that these documents challenge both the political inclusiveness of the identity of Israel as a ‘Jewish and democratic’ state, and the political continuity of collective identity of the Palestinian people. With these documents, the Arab civil society organizations reclaim responsibility over their political future by clinging to the Israeli citizenship framework, but at the same time attempt to change its nature from within, by re-associating the Palestinians in Israel with the core issues of the stumbling peace process, especially in regard to the ‘Right of Return’. The paper contends that for the Palestinians in Israel, the national and the civic frameworks do not circulate in separate orbits, but constitute and reframe each other.