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Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin (eds.). Berkeley, CA, and London, UK: University of California Press, 2002. xvii + 413 pp. (Cloth US$60.00; Paper US$24.95)

This distinctive collection comprises twenty diverse texts that highlight current research trends in an emerging anthropology of media, while illuminating the broader discipline's intellectual legacies. Relocating anthropological theories and methods from the conventional sites of ethnographic inquiry to novel sites, the collection investigates how mass media are integrated within the textures of everyday life and how communication technologies affect culture.

The volume developed out of the editors' participation in a collaborative project at New York University's Graduate Program in Culture and Media. According to Faye Ginsburg, David Kriser Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Media, Culture, and History, a background in visual anthropology and interest in the place of media in social movements shaped her work on the ethnography of media. Lila AbuLughod, Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies at Columbia University, previously taught anthropology at New York University. Teaching experience and work with film festivals through the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, Abu-Lughod notes, prompted her efforts to understand media issues and theory. Brian Larkin, Assistant Professor at Columbia University's Barnard College, has a background in British cultural studies and studied with Ginsburg and Abu-Lughod at NYU. Research on media and popular culture in Nigeria led Larkin to explore the materiality of media technologies and the disciplinary power of technology within local cultural logics.

Although the volume's twenty essays reflect highly diverse ethnographic themes and interests, the editors usefully group...