From Filmmaker Warriors to Flash Drive Shamans broadens the base of research on Indigenous media in Latin America through thirteen chapters that explore groups such as the Kayapó of Brazil, the Mapuche of Chile, the Kichwa of Ecuador, and the Ayuuk of Mexico, among others, as they engage video, DVDs, photography, television, radio, and the internet. The authors cover a range of topics such as the prospects of collaborative film production, the complications of archiving materials, and the contrasting meanings of and even conflict over "embedded aesthetics" in media production—i.e., how media reflects in some fashion the ownership, authorship, and/or cultural sensibilities of its community of origin. Other topics include active audiences engaging television programming in unanticipated ways, philosophical ruminations about the voices of the dead captured on digital recorders, the innovative uses of digital platforms on the internet to connect across generations and even across cultures, and the overall challenges to obtaining media sovereignty in all manner of media production. The book opens with contributions from the founders of Indigenous Media Studies, with an overview of global Indigenous media by Faye Ginsburg and an interview with Terence Turner that took place shortly before his death.

Flash Flaherty, the much-anticipated follow-up volume to The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema, offers a people's history of the world-renowned Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, an annual event where participants confront and reimagine the creative process surrounding multiple document/documentary forms and modes of the moving image. This collection, which includes a mosaic of personal recollections from attendees of the Flaherty Seminar over a span of more than 60 years, highlights many facets of the "Flaherty experience." The memories of the seminarians reveal how this independent film and media seminar has created a lively and sometimes cantankerous community within and beyond the institutionalized realm of American media culture. Editors Scott MacDonald and Patricia R. Zimmermann have curated a collective polyphonic account that moves freely between funny anecdotes, poetic impressions, critical considerations, poignant recollections, scholarly observations, and artistic insights. Together, the contributors to Flash Flaherty exemplify how the Flaherty Seminar propels shared insights, challenging debates, and actual change in the world of independent media.

The 2021 volume of the benchmark bibliography of Latin American Studies.

Breaking new ground as the first transdisciplinary reader in this field, Video Theories is a resource that will form the basis for further research and teaching. While theories of video have not yet formed an academic discipline comparable to the more canonized theories of photography, film, and television, the reader offers a major step toward bridging this “video gap” in media theory, which is remarkable considering today's omnipresence of the medium through online video portals and social media. Consisting of a selection of eighty-three annotated source texts and twelve chapter introductions written by the editors, this book considers fifty years of scholarly and artistic reflections on the topic, representing an intergenerational and international set of voices. This transdisciplinary reader offers a conceptual framework for diverging and contradictory viewpoints, following the continuous transformations of what video was, is, and will be.

This book examines the emergence of small cinemas of the Andes, covering digital peripheries in Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru and Colombia. The volume critically assesses heterogeneous audiovisual practices and subaltern agents, elucidating existing tensions, contradictions and resistances with respect to established cinematic norms. The reason these small cinematic sectors are of interest is twofold: first, the film markets of the aforementioned countries are often eclipsed by the filmmaking giants of Mexico, Brazil and Argentina; second, within the Andean countries these small cinemas are overshadowed by film board-backed cinemas whose products are largely designed for international film festivals.

The Lowland South American World showcases cutting-edge research on the anthropology of Lowland South America, providing both an in-depth knowledge of Lowland South American life ways and engaging readers in urgent social, environmental, and political issues in the contemporary world. Covering the vast expanse of a region that includes all of South America except for the Andes, its 40 chapters engage with questions of what “Lowland South America” means as a geographical designation, both in studies of Indigenous Amazonian peoples and other lowland areas of the continent. They emphasize the multiple ways that local practices and cosmologies challenge conventional Western ideas about nature, culture, personhood, sociality, community, and Indigenous people. Some of the region’s well-known contributions to anthropology, such as animism, perspectivism, and novel approaches to the body are updated here with new ethnography and in light of the varying political situations in which the region’s peoples find themselves. With contributions by authors from 15 different countries, including a number of Indigenous anthropologists and activists, this book will set the agenda for future research in the continent. The Lowland South American World is a valuable resource for scholars and students of anthropology, Latin American studies and Indigenous studies, as well as history, geography and other social sciences.