Media Culture in Nomadic Communities

Media Culture in Nomadic Communities examines the ways that new technologies and ICT infrastructures have changed the communicative norms and patterns that regulate mobile and nomadic communities' engagement in local and international deliberative decision making. Each chapter examines a unique communicative event, such has how the Maasai of Tanzania have used online petitions to demand government action. How Mongolians in northern China have used micro blogs to record and debate land tenure. And how herding communities from around the world have supported the Lakota Sioux protests at Standing Rock. Through these case studies, Hahn argues that mobile and nomadic communities are creating and utilizing new communicative networks that are radically changing local, national, and international deliberations.

Process as Product

A central goal of filmmaking is to produce content to share with audiences. However important “film as a product” may be, the process of creating a film holds great potential for individual and community empowerment and expression, particularly within Native American communities. This chapter explores Lakota Sioux approaches to process and storytelling and asks, What can be learned from Lakota-based approaches to storytelling that can recast contemporary practices of filmmaking? How can a heightened attention to processes open up new spaces of possibility for filmmaking? By looking at Lakota approaches to constructing tipis, popular evaluation of films, Indigenous approaches to storytelling, and Indigenous storytelling as a form of decolonial resistance, it suggests that Indigenous-inspired approaches to processes hold significant potential for reorienting popular understandings of filmmaking. The chapter calls for the elevation of process to the level of product.

“A First-Class Attraction on Any Stage”

This chapter examines the 1890 Ghost Dance, a nonviolent religious practice among the Lakota Sioux. In covering the Ghost Dance, daily newspaper editors Joseph Pulitzer (the New York World) and William Randolph Hearst (the San Francisco Examiner), along with the New York Herald and ChicagoTribune, experimented with the limits of news illustration. Their images mischaracterized the dance as a declaration of war, contributing to events leading to the massacre at Wounded Knee. Their quest for illustrations that were both “authentic” (photograph-based) and dramatic led editors to appropriate images from the entertainment marketplace (photographs of Sitting Bull, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show), for political and commercial benefit. The Lakota’s efforts had limited power to correct misrepresentations of the dance and its aftermath.

Divination and the ‘Real Presence’ of the Divine in Ancient Greece

This chapter applies Robert Orsi’s concepts of ‘real presence’ and ‘abundant history’ to the study of ancient Greek religion, using divination as a case study. It proposes that we should take real presence seriously as something that most Greeks took for granted. Although investigating religious experience is extraordinarily difficult, one of the best places to look is in the ubiquitous practice of divination. For it is in the context of the divinatory ritual that the real presence of the divine was commonly to be experienced. Case studies include the epiphany of Asklepios to Isyllos of Epidauros, the lead oracular tablets from Dodona, and the role of divination in the Athenian expedition to Sicily in 415 BCE. The latter event is compared to the belief of the Lakota Sioux that their ghost shirts would protect them from bullets at the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890. In both cases, a collective belief in prophecy and in the real presence of supernatural forces instilled an assurance of victory, and this assurance was then followed by a rejection of the religious specialists who had promoted a positive interpretation of the message and the outcome.