Amazon Town TV: An Audience Ethnography in Gurupá, Brazil

Notes

Notes Chapter 1 1. In this book we use the first-person-singular pronoun I to refer to Richard Pace—who has been conducting ethnographic research in the community of Gurup á for nearly three decades. The first-person-plural pronoun we refers to the coauthors Richard Pace and Brian Hinote jointly—the latter of whom began research in Gurupá in 2009. When referring to the administration of the interview schedules, “we” is also used to include the two research assistants from Gurupá, Edson Palheta Texeira and Milton Dias. 2. We use only the first names of our consultants in this work, in part due to the local tradition wherein everyone is on a first-name basis and in part to conceal identities. We use first and last names when referring to other researchers and the priest. All the place-names and names of rivers are real. 3. Until the beginning of the 1990s there were very few ethnographically based cross-cultural studies of television. A few exceptions were Granzberg and Steinbring 1980; Williams 1986; Murray and Kippax 1978; and Kottak [1990] 2009. There has been, by contrast, a significant body of cross-cultural literature in mass communication research, such as Leibes and Katz 1991; Lull 1988, 1990. These studies, however, use methodologies developed in the cultural context of Europe and North America, particularly in terms of discourse styles and social interactions such as formal interviews and surveys. According to some scholars, these methods can distort and invalidate findings (Ginsburg 2005: 19–20; Peterson 2003: 10). 4. Parts of Amazon Town TV incorporate previously published material by Pace: Chapter 1 uses sections of the theoretical discussion from Pace 2009; Chapter 3 includes material adapted from Pace 1998; Chapter 4 uses sections published in Pace 1993; and Chapters 5 and 6 contain material published in Pace 2009. All these texts are reproduced here with permission of the original publishers (Lynne Rienner, Wiley-Blackwell, and the University of Pittsburgh Press). 192 Notes to Pages 38–146 Chapter 2 1. For Tables 2.1, 5.5, 5.10, 5.11, 5.21, and 5.23 the data do not sum to 100.0% because not all categories are reported (e.g., “Don’t know,” “Neither,” “Other,” etc.). For Tables 4.1, 4.2, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, and 5.18 the data do not sum to 100.0% due to rounding. Chapter 3 1. Extreme poverty occurs for families with total income that is less than the cost of a basic food basket—which is equivalent to the FAO minimum daily caloric intake of 2,288 per household member. Chapter 4 1. These estimates were based on a nighttime walk-by survey in which I looked for, or listened for, television broadcasts. Since most homes had their sets in the front rooms, often visible through windows and doors opening onto the street, I was able to get a good glimpse of who had and who did not have television. Since people could be out of the house or a set could have been located in a room not visible or audible from the street, I may have undercounted the number of sets. 2. During the research period there were no glass windows or screens used in homes. Wooden shutters covered window openings. Chapter 5 1. This is a behavior Straubhaar (2007: 222, 230) labels “multilayered cultural identification,” through which viewers may shift from local, subnational, regional, national, supranational, or transnational levels of identification. 2. For most of these categories listed there is no significant difference in the responses between men and women—except for the categories of small business owner and driver, which, interestingly, women rank as more appropriate for men than the sample average. 3. Peterson (2003) refers to this type of thinking as the bifocal principle. He writes that bifocality is “the ability to move back and forth between the local world of everyday experience and the larger world of virtual experience represented to us by various media. It further assumes that we relate these two dimensions of experience to one another. We understand the wider world presented to us in terms of our local worlds, and we understand our local worlds as shaped by forces in the wider world” (264). In the current case of crime perception in Gurupá, however, people occasionally look through the wrong lens, resulting in a blurry take on the world. Notes to...