TV Globalization: MacGyver in the field

While rereading Wilk's essay for today's class, I was reminded of what has become one of my favorite "scene setting" moments in an ethnography. The passage below comes from the preface of Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld's 1999 ethnography The Native Leisure Class: Consumption and Cultural Creativity in the Andes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press):

“Mingachiway,” I called out.

It was early November 1994, and I was heralding my arrival at a weaver’s house in the upper part of Ariasucu. The household had participated in my time-allocation study since the project’s inception the previous February. Used to my unplanned visits, the weaver no longer rose from his loom to greet me and instead beckoned me into the interior where he worked. I stepped over the threshold and waited briefly, giving my eyes a chance to adjust to the dimness of this cluttered, windowless space. Holding his shuttle and resting his feet on the pedals of the loom, the weaver also paused. He then broke the silence with a question that the had evidently been waiting a long time to ask of me: “Whay Macgyverca na armasta mihishtin. Nachu?”

He wanted to know whether MacGyver, the lead character in the eponymous television drama from the United States, ever needs to use weapons to get out of the predicament she got into each afternoon. I told him I did not think so. I could not be sure, though, as the only time I had really watched the show was with him and other weavers whom I had visited while the show was on. In some houses, this U.S. production had become quite popular. In others, artisans tuned into Japanese cartoons. Still other weavers had no real interest in what was on, they just liked the dialogue and images as distractions from a long day at the loom. While the weavers may not have had the same tastes in programs, they did share the same routines. In 1994, the most commonly used object in an Ariasucu home was a loom, the second most common thing was a television.

The ubiquity of television sets that Colloredo-Mansfeld suggests here was one of the unifying threads of the Wilk and Schwoch readings today. First, there is the sense of media "lag" that Wilk describes--that is, gradually compressed as satellites simultaneously shows around a region (broadly defined). One might imagine that the media lag of 1994 has been compressed in 2007, that the discussion is more about American Idol or shows from Univision than it would be about early 2000s shows. Second, embedded in this statement is ubiquity: its the loom and the television that are the household objects of importance that mutually reinforce each other. The loom makes possible the purchase of the television; the television makes long hours at the loom possible (in the eyes of the people he worked with). Finally, the television structures the time of day: MacGyver and/or cartoons are broadcast at certain times, leading to certain activities (not) being performed at certain times.

This last point reminds me of descriptions of the television broadcast of the Ramayana and Mahabharata in India. The Lonely Planet guide, among others, has suggested that the streets were empty, markets closed during the broadcast, leading to a high number of shop burglaries. Here, the structuration of time isn't necessarily a good thing.