From Filmmaker Warriors to Flash Drive Shamans: Indigenous Media Production and Engagement in Latin America ed. by Richard Pace (review)

© 2020 by the University of Texas Press T study of Indigenous media practices is a relatively new field that has gained relevance in recent years, as shown by the substantial academic work on Indigenous media that uses different approaches to examine works from various regions and in different formats. Among these works, it’s worth mentioning two collections of essays that have expanded and helped to build interest in the study of Indigenous media projects from around the world: Media Worlds (edited by Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin, 2002), and Global Indigenous Media (edited by Wilson and Stewart, 2008). In the Latin American context, there have also been groundbreaking research and media projects, such as the 1980s collaboration of anthropologist Terence Turner with the Kayapó community, which represents one of the first communities to use media as a tool for activism; the essay “Imperfect Media and the Poetics of Indigenous Video in Latin America” (2008) by Juan Francisco Salazar and Amalia Córdova; or Freya Schiwy’s book Indianizing Film: Decolonization, the Andes, and the Question of Technology (2009). But even though there exists an important body of work, From Filmmaker Warriors to Flash Drive Shamans: Indigenous Media Production and Engagement in Latin America is one of the first collections of essays dedicated exclusively to Indigenous media in Latin America, and is thus indispensable for approaching the Indigenous media landscape of the region. This volume is mainly composed of edited versions of papers presented at the InDigital Latin American Conference held in 2015 on the campus of Vanderbilt University in Nashville. The book, edited by anthropologist Richard Pace, presents a sample of Indigenous media practices and the ways academics, activists, curators, and media makers approach them. The essays not only show how widespread and diverse the creation, production, distribution, and consumption of different types of media among Indigenous communities in the region are, but also take important “steps in expanding the scope of Indigenous media studies From Filmmaker Warriors to Flash Drive Shamans: Indigenous Media Production and Engagement in Latin America