Abstract
Ingrid Kummels’s book Transborder Media Spaces: Ayuujk Videomaking between Mexico and the US explores the production and consumption of a range of media – photography, video, radio, television and the Internet by the Mexican ‘indigenous’ community Tama. The reason she puts the word indigenous in inverted commas is because she argues that it is not such a homogenizing category as its use by nation-states suggests. Her anthropological study is focused on ‘the mediatization of Tamazulapam Mixe and its transnationalization between the hometown in Oaxaca and the satellite communities’ in Los Angeles. The research questions Kummels poses are as follows: What needs and desires inspire village actors to use and shape mass media? Which practices and media representations do they resort to? How do the latter influence ongoing relations between indigenous peoples and the Mexican nation? How and in what direction do media actors forge a specific sense of collective identity and belonging? How and to what extent can they (re)position themselves and their demands through media with respect to relevant contexts in the community (the hometown and satellite community), the officially defined multicultural Mexican nation, and, finally, the United States as the target destination of migration? (p. 7)
The book explores six audiovisual genres: videos documenting celebrations in honour of the patron saint of the village; family rite-of-passage videos – christenings, weddings and so on; videos commissioned by the civil-religious cargo system; land dispute documentaries; experimental artistic photographs and videos and cultural and political documentaries. Chapter 1, ‘Tamazulapam – Los Angeles: Media Fields of a Transnational Ayuujk Village’, explores ‘the mediatized social life of the transnationally extended community of Tamazulapam-Los Angeles’ (p. 38). Chapter 2, ‘Ayuujk Audiovisuality Today: Generating Media Spaces through Practices’, focuses on the audiovisual theories developed by the village actors themselves, discussing concepts such as holy space and convivial space. Chapter 3, ‘Mediatization and “Our Own” Spaces for Development’, explores Tama’s migration patterns and the nature of mediatized community politics. Chapter 4, ‘Communal and Commercial Audiovisuality and Their Transnational Expansion’, examines the communal and commercial videography in Tama and its consumption locally, nationally and internationally. Chapter 5, ‘Tama’s Media Fields and the Pan-American Indigenous Movement’, analyses ‘Tama’s village media from the perspective of a specific section of their transnational audience: the Pan-American indigenous and alternative media movement’ (p. 41). The book would most certainly be of interest to anthropologists working on media practices in indigenous communities, but scholars outside of this tradition might find it a difficult read at times.