Watching Navajos Watch Themselves

Amid the social, territorial, and cultural developments since the twentieth century, the landscapes of cultural identity around the world are no longer familiar anthropological objects, insofar as groups are no longer tightly territorialized or spatially bounded.¹ In this culture-play of diaspora, the familiar line of demarcation separating self and other has become increasingly blurred. As the world becomes progressively more mass mediated, a study of how native audiences manage contradictions between the specificities of their own lives and the generalities imposed upon them by the dominant culture becomes central. This article endeavors to contribute an understanding of how media are creatively interpreted by subaltern audiences to both construct and contest representations of self and other.

Until relatively recently, studies on audience reception among indigenous peoples have all but been ignored within anthropology.² Debra Spitulnik bemoaned the fact that there was no "anthropology of mass media," as anthropologists had largely managed to neglect the centrality of mass media in twentieth-century life.³ This absence was ironic in light of the often-quoted Malinowskian dictum that the goal of ethnography is "to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world."⁴ Anthropologists in industrial countries paid scant systematic attention to the production, distribution, and consumption of mass media in their own societies and even less attention to mass media in nonindustrial societies.⁵

The glaring lack of reception studies within anthropology reflects the unacknowledged assumption that all viewers process information in a similarly unproblematic manner. Studies have demonstrated, however, that there is an intrinsic link between culture and communication and that each culture socializes its members in their own viewing habits and interpretive strategies. Simply stated, the media does not affect all equally or in the same fashion.

What a picture means to the viewer is strongly dependent on past experience and knowledge. E. H. Gombrich, for example, called the contribution the viewer makes to representations from the stock of images stored in the mind the "beholder's share."⁶ People selectively perceive, incorporate, and act on mass communication information based on their existing knowledge and beliefs and based on their involvement with others. However, Victor Caldarola maintained that social experience alone cannot account for interpretive patterns and symbolic distinctions, because experiential domains are components of culture.⁷ Yet reception theories rarely address this cultural dimension.

Moreover, the majority of media impact studies have been generally limited to a target group (i.e., children) and range of effects (i.e., violence).⁸ Family dynamics, though, play a far greater role in the socialization process. Because television viewing, in particular, is an inherently social activity, it is important to look at audiences in their natural settings. The starting point for any such study is the household or the family, for it is here that the primary involvement with television is created and where the primary articulation of meanings is undertaken.⁹ Families are sites where lines of power and relationship are played out in everyday situations and activities.

By virtue of relying on self-fulfilling research designs, too many reception studies obscure the agency of their human "subjects." With their preconceived agendas in place, all they need to do is fill in the blanks. Indeed, anthropologists and other researchers have historically employed what I call a "ventriloquist approach" in their studies of indigenous peoples. By essentially speaking on their behalf, they have rendered their native subjects as little more than exotic puppets. In his article "Here Comes the Anthros," Cecil King expressed the frustration of being imprisoned by anthropologists' words:

We have been redefined so many times we no longer quite know who we are. Our original words are obscured by the layers upon layers of others' definitions laid on top of them. We want to come back to our own words, our own meanings, our own definitions of ourselves, and our own world . . . Most important, we want to appraise, critique and censure what they feel they have a right to say about us.¹⁰

Within anthropology in recent years, there has been interest in reversing...