List of illustrations vii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
Disciplinary dilemmas: canons and orthodoxies 13
So-called cultural studies: dead ends and reinvented wheels 15
Cultural studies and media studies: contexts, boundaries and politics Johannes von Moltke 39
Methodological matters: interdisciplinary approaches 67
Methodological problems and research practices: opening up the 'black box' Claudio Flores 69
Visions of the real: the ethnographic arts 87
The geography of modernity and the orientation of the future 133
EurAm, modernity, reason and alterity: after the West? 135
Beyond global abstraction: regional theory and the spatialisation of history 157
Domesticity, mediation and the technologies of'newness' 197
Public issues and intimate histories: mediation, domestication and dislocation 199
Rhetorics of the technological sublime: the paradoxes of technical rationality 235
Techno-anthropology: icons, totems and fetishes 273
Television: not so much a visual medium, more a visible object 275
Magical technologies: the new, the shiny and the symbolic 293
Coda 311
Marvels and wonders: modernity, tradition and technology 313
Index 332