"Mottonyms are both inscriptions, based on people’s experiences, on Ghanaian commercial vehicles and ‘names’ by which drivers of such vehicles are called. Prior research on mottonyms implicitly affirms how these inscriptions are embedded in human interpersonal relationships and on careful refl ... ection, in personal social experience. Guided by a phenomenological perspective, I explore, through interviews with vehicle owners, the specific life experiences that spurred them to coin these mottonyms. Overall, I analyze two major themes about drivers’ incentives for their inscriptions: innuendo mottonyms and philosophical mottonyms. Through this research, I respond to recent calls for a phenomenological approach to investigate media uses in everyday life (Moores 2009). This approach provides a grounded understanding into “embodied sets of activities that humans perform with varying degrees of regularity, competence and flair” (Postill 2010: 1). Thus, it helps us understand how cultural forms are not just “mental, meaningful circulation of ideas” (Zito 2008: 71) but concrete mediated practices. Furthermore, the paper responds to scholars’ advocacy for a broader understanding of ‘media’ that transcend narrowly defined traditional mass media formats (Downing 1996), and novel ways of examining such formats (Moores, 2009; Meyer, 2009)." (Abstract) more

"In this paper I address the question of how to study media and social change ethnographically. To do so I draw from the relevant media anthropology literature, including my own research in Malaysia and Spain. I first sketch a history of media anthropology, identifying a number of key works and them ... es as well as two main phases of growth since the 1980s. I then argue that anthropologists are well positioned to contribute to the interdisciplinary study of media and social change. However, to do so we must first shift our current focus on media and ‘social changing’ (i.e. how things are changing) to the study of media in relation to actual social changes, e.g. the suburbanisation of Kuala Lumpur in the 1970s to 2000s, or the secularisation of morality in post-Franco Spain. This shift from the ethnographic present continuous to the ethnographic past simple (how things changed from A to B) – a move from potential to actual changes – does not require that we abandon our commitment to ethnography in favour of social history. Rather, it demands new forms of ‘diachronic ethnography’ that can handle the biographical logic of actual social changes." (Abstract) more