Radio Call-In Shows on Intimate Issues in Benin: “Crossroads of Sentiments”

Grätz, Tilo

doi:10.1017/asr.2014.4

Cited by 9 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 31 publications

(21 reference statements)

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“…The liberalization of the airwaves also boosted locally produced media texts. Recurrently, these locally produced texts -ranging from evangelizing television serials dealing with the search for marriage (Pype 2012), radio call-in shows in which listeners can ask for advice on sentimental issues (Grätz 2014), to pre-written SMS communication addressed to love interests (Archambault 2017;Gilbert 2018) -are produced for urban residents, and provide opportunities for debate and reflection on social anxieties triggered by the urban economy, anonymity, and multi-ethnic environments. Media brokers can also become matchmakers, but their appeal chiefly derives from the discursive arena they open up, in which moral dilemmas as well as explicit sexual content can be shared.…”

Section: Mediating Intimate Livesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anthropological Approaches to Media in Africa

Jedlowski¹,

Pype²

2019

A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa

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Anthropologists began to study media relatively late in the history of the discipline. Research on media -in particular, mass media -tended to be associated "with the societies most anthropologists came from, and thus with the self rather than the other" (Krings 2015, p. 5), and except for a few rare exceptions, "it was not until the late 1980s that anthropologists began to turn systematic attention to media as a social practice" (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002, p. 3, also Spitulnik 1993). This was true even for older media, such as songs, dance and theater, since those topics were associated with the other late research focus of urban anthropology. A similar situation can be observed in the context of African studies, where scholars began to concentrate consistently on the analysis of media only during the 1990s, in response not only to processes of "deterritorialization of culture" (Gupta and Ferguson 1992) -the challenge to the reified boundaries that characterized functionalist approaches -and to the ongoing disciplinary shift toward an anthropology of "the present" (Fox 1991), but also as a reaction to changing conditions in the field. As Tilo Grätz underscores, during the 1990s "the proliferation of new media institutions such as independent newspapers, radio and TV stations … brought about a new media landscape in many African countries" (2011, p. 152) and researchers were compelled to account for the transformations that were taking place in front of their eyes.

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Section: Mediating Intimate Livesmentioning

confidence: 99%