What role does media play in society? And what is it exactly that we study when we attempt to study mass media? Do we focus on the aesthetics of films or other media forms? Or do we focus on cultural, political, and economic contexts within which media industries are situated? This course centers ethnography as method and examines anthropology’s contributions to the study of media. We begin by surveying canonical texts that have been foundational to the emergence of media anthropology before reading contemporary monographs written by anthropologists working in different cultural and political contexts.