The Audience in Everyday Life argues that a media audience cannot be studied in front of the television alone - their interaction with media does not simply end when the set is turned off. Instead, we must study the daily lives of audiences to find the undercurrents of media influence in everyday life. S. Elizabeth Bird offers a series of empirically based audience studies of phenomena that include media scandals, fan culture, representations of race and ethnicity, tabloid journalism and runaway media hoaxes. Bird provides a host of useful tools and methods for scholars and students interested in the ways media is consumed in everyday life.

The Audience in Everyday Life argues that a media audience cannot be studied in front of the television alone - their interaction with media does not simply end when the set is turned off. Instead, we must study the daily lives of audiences to find the undercurrents of media influence in everyday life. Applying new developments in cultural anthropology and folklore to media studies, S.Elizabeth Bird offers a series of empirically based audience studies of phenomena that include media scandals, fan culture, representations of race and ethnicity, tabloid journalism, and runaway media hoaxes. Bird provides a range of useful tools and methods for scholars and students interested in the ways media is consumed in everyday life.

One hundred members of NatChat, an electronic mail discussion group concerned with Native American issues, responded to the recent Disney release "Pocahontas" by calling on parents to boycott the movie, citing its historical inaccuracies and saying that "Disney has let us down in a cruel, irresponsible manner." Their anger was rooted in the fact that, although Disney claimed that the film's portrayal of American Indians would be "authentic," the Pocahontas story their movie told was really white cultural myth. The actual histories of the characters were replaced by mythic narratives depicting the crucial moments when aid was given to the white settlers. As reconstructed, the story serves to reassert for whites their right to be here, easing any lingering guilt about the displacement of the native inhabitants.To understand current imagery, it is essential to understand the history of its making, and these essays mesh to create a powerful, interconnected account of image creation over the past 150 years. The contributors, who represent a range of disciplines and specialties, reveal the distortions and fabrications white culture has imposed on significant historical and current events, as represented by treasured artifacts, such as photographic images taken of Sitting Bull following his surrender, the national monument at the battlefield of Little Bighorn, nineteenth-century advertising, the television phenomenon "Northern Exposure, " and the film "Dances with Wolves."Well illustrated, this volume demonstrates the complacency of white culture in its representation of its troubled relationship with American Indians.

One hundred members of NatChat, an electronic mail discussion group concerned with Native American issues, responded to the recent Disney release Pocahontas by calling on parents to boycott the movie, citing its historical inaccuracies and saying that ?Disney has let us down in a cruel, irresponsible manner.? Their anger was rooted in the fact that

This first comprehensive study of the Nigeria-Biafra War (1967-1970) through the lens of gender explores the valiant and gallant ways women carried out old and new responsibilities in wartime and immediate postwar Nigeria. The book presents women as embodiments of vulnerability and agency, who demonstrated remarkable resilience and initiative, waging war on all fronts in the face of precarious conditions and scarcities, and maximizing opportunities occasioned by the hostilities. Women's experiences are highlighted through critical analyses of oral interviews, memoirs, life histories, fashion and material culture, international legal conventions, music, as well as governmental and non-governmental sources. The book fills the gap in the war scholarship that has minimized women's complex experiences fifty years after the hostilities ended. It highlights the cost of the conflict on Nigerian women, their participation in the hostilities, and their contributions to the survival of families, communities and the country. The chapters present counter-narratives to fictional and nonfictional accounts of the war, especially those written by men, which often peripheralize or stereotypically represent women as passive spectators or helpless victims of the conflict; and also highlight and exaggerate women's moral laxity and sensationalize their marital infidelities.

In October 1967, early in the Nigerian Civil War, government troops entered Asaba in pursuit of the retreating Biafran army, slaughtering thousands of civilians and leaving the town in ruins. News of the atrocity was suppressed by the Nigerian government, with the complicity of Britain, and its significance in the subsequent progress of that conflict was misunderstood. Drawing on archival sources on both sides of the Atlantic and interviews with survivors of the killing, pillaging and rape, as well as with high-ranking Nigerian military and political leaders, S. Elizabeth Bird and Fraser M. Ottanelli offer an interdisciplinary reconstruction of the history of the Asaba Massacre, redefining it as a pivotal point in the history of the war. Through this, they also explore the long afterlife of trauma, the reconstruction of memory and how it intersects with justice, and the task of reconciliation in a nation where a legacy of ethnic suspicion continues to reverberate.

In October 1967, early in the Nigerian Civil War, government troops entered Asaba in pursuit of the retreating Biafran army, slaughtering thousands of civilians and leaving the town in ruins. News of the atrocity was suppressed by the Nigerian government, with the complicity of Britain, and its significance in the subsequent progress of that conflict was misunderstood. Drawing on archival sources on both sides of the Atlantic and interviews with survivors of the killing, pillaging and rape, as well as with high-ranking Nigerian military and political leaders, S. Elizabeth Bird and Fraser M. Ottanelli offer an interdisciplinary reconstruction of the history of the Asaba Massacre, redefining it as a pivotal point in the history of the war. Through this, they also explore the long afterlife of trauma, the reconstruction of memory and how it intersects with justice, and the task of reconciliation in a nation where a legacy of ethnic suspicion continues to reverberate.

The Anthropology of News and Journalism is the first book to explore the role of news and journalism in contemporary culture from an anthropological perspective as a form of cultural meaning-making in its creation, content, and dissemination. Anthropology's global, comparative perspective and ethnographic methods provide powerful insights for analyzing case studies from around the world. Essays by leading scholars explore communities of professional and nonprofessional journalists. They describe news-making processes ranging from the local to the global digital environment, as well as how news is disseminated and received in a variety of cultural settings.

Contributors are S. Elizabeth Bird, Amahl Bishara, Dominic C. Boyer, Dorle Drackle, Zeynep Devrim Gursel, Jennifer Hasty, Joseph C. Manzella, Kerry McCallum, Mark Pedelty, Mark Allen Peterson, Ursula Rao, Adrienne Russell, Christina Schwenkel, Jonathan Skinner, Debra Spitulnik, Maria D. Vesperi, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, and Leon I. Yacher."

Coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky saga followed in a long trail of media exposures of the more personal details of the lives of public figures. Many commentators have seen stories like this, and TV shows like Jerry Springer's, as evidence of a decline in the standards of the mass media. This increasing interest in private lives and the falling off of coverage of serious news is often described as Otabloidization.O The essays in this book are the first serious scholarly studies of what is going on and what its implications are. Reality, it turns out, is much more complex than some of the laments suggest. As the contributors show, this is not just a U.S. problem but is repeated in country after country, and it is not certain that the media anywhere are getting more tabloid. What is more, there is no consensus about whether tabloidization is just Odumbing downO or whether it is a necessary tactic for the mass media to engage with new audiences who do not have the news habit. Tabloid Tales will be of interest to students and scholars in journalism, mass communication, political science, and cultural and media studies.

Reviewed in the United States on August 27, 2001 Bird is not a former tabloid "insider," but an academic: assistant professor of humanities and anthropology at the University of Minnesota. She discusses tabloid history, beginning as far back as oral "folklore" and urban legends. She interviewed tabloid editors, writers, and readers for this book, and analyzes tabloid stories within the context of folklore theory. She claims that tabloid readers are savvier and better-educated than is assumed, that they "interact and contribute" to with what they read (through gossip and fantasy), and that working class readers (as much as upper class readers) realize that many tabloid stories are false or exaggerated. Released in 1992, by the University of Tennessee Press. An easy read, despite its academic author and publisher.