Book chapter
Engaging Alterity Through New Media: Contextualizing New Technologies within a Longstanding A'uwẽ (Xavante) Tradition
The Lowland South American World, pp.501-514
Routledge worlds, Routledge
2025
DOI: 10.4324/9781003005124-35
Abstract
Over the last several decades Native Amazonians, like many Indigenous peoples across the globe (Wilson and Stewart 2008), have enthusiastically embraced new audio-visual technologies and, in many cases, gained international recognition for their work. Without succumbing to an "inevitable" Faustian bargain with modernity (Ginsburg 1991) or inescapably losing their "authenticity" (Weiner 1997) as some initially predicted, Native Amazonians have become both eager consumers as well as prolific producers of their own media products. Following in the footsteps of the A'uwẽ (Xavante) leader Mario Juruna who, with his Panasonic cassette tape-recorder in the 1970s, pioneered native Brazilians' ingenious use of new media technologies in struggles for land and rights (see Juruna, Hohlfeldt, and Hoffman 1982), Native Amazonian media makers avidly took up video cameras in the late 1980s and 1990s as these became more affordable. Like Juruna, they have applied new media technologies to advance local interests and agendas, fortify campaigns for rights, territory, and autonomy, and preserve and revitalize their languages and cultural traditions. Cameras and recording devices-and, most recently, cell phones and social media-are powerful tools that contemporary Native Amazonians now also deploy to resist and decolonize historically hegemonic representational practices, narratives, and regimes (e.g., Turner 1991; Graham 2016; Bermúdez and Uzendoski 2018; Pace 2019). Today they wield cameras in multiple ways to "shoot back," as Ginsburg (1999) aptly put it.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Engaging Alterity Through New Media: Contextualizing New Technologies within a Longstanding A'uwẽ (Xavante) Tradition
- Creators
- Laura R. Graham
- Contributors
- Casey High (Editor)Luiz Costa (Editor)
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Publication Details
- The Lowland South American World, pp.501-514
- Series
- Routledge worlds
- DOI
- 10.4324/9781003005124-35
- Publisher
- Routledge; New York, NY
- Alternative title
- Engaging Alterity through Media
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 2025
- Academic Unit
- Anthropology
- Record Identifier
- 9984742660102771
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