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Europe Un-Imagined: Nation and Culture at a French-German Television Channel

By Damien Stankiewicz

© 2017

Europe Un-Imagined examines one of the world’s first and only trans nationally produced television channels, Association relative à la télévision européenne (ARTE). ARTE calls itself the "European culture channel" and was launched in 1991 with a French-German intergovernmental mandate to produce television and other media that promoted pan-European community and culture.

Damien Stankiewicz’s ground-breaking ethnographic study of the various contexts of media production work at ARTE (the newsroom, the editing studio, the screening room), reveals how ideas about French, German, and European culture coalesce and circulate at the channel. He argues that the reproduction of nationalism often goes unacknowledged and unremarked upon, and questions whether something like a European "imagination" can be produced. Stankiewicz describes the challenges that ARTE staff face, including rapidly changing media technologies and audiences, unreflective national stereotyping, and unwieldy bureaucratic infrastructure, which ultimately limit the channel’s abilities to cultivate a transnational, "European" public. Europe Un-Imagined challenges its readers to find new ways of thinking about how people belong in the world beyond the problematic logics of national categorization.

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Product Details

  • Series: Anthropological Horizons
  • World Rights
  • Page Count: 304 pages
  • Dimensions: 6.1in x 0.8in x 9.0in
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SKU# SP004154

  • PUBLISHED AUG 2017

    From: $29.96

    Regular Price: $39.95

    ISBN 9781442628793
  • PUBLISHED AUG 2017

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    Regular Price: $98.00

    ISBN 9781442637160
  • PUBLISHED SEP 2017

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    Regular Price: $39.95

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Quick Overview

Damien Stankiewicz’s ground-breaking ethnographic study of the various contexts of media production work at ARTE (the newsroom, the editing studio, the screening room), reveals how ideas about French, German, and European culture coalesce and circulate at the channel.

Europe Un-Imagined: Nation and Culture at a French-German Television Channel

By Damien Stankiewicz

© 2017

Europe Un-Imagined examines one of the world’s first and only trans nationally produced television channels, Association relative à la télévision européenne (ARTE). ARTE calls itself the "European culture channel" and was launched in 1991 with a French-German intergovernmental mandate to produce television and other media that promoted pan-European community and culture.

Damien Stankiewicz’s ground-breaking ethnographic study of the various contexts of media production work at ARTE (the newsroom, the editing studio, the screening room), reveals how ideas about French, German, and European culture coalesce and circulate at the channel. He argues that the reproduction of nationalism often goes unacknowledged and unremarked upon, and questions whether something like a European "imagination" can be produced. Stankiewicz describes the challenges that ARTE staff face, including rapidly changing media technologies and audiences, unreflective national stereotyping, and unwieldy bureaucratic infrastructure, which ultimately limit the channel’s abilities to cultivate a transnational, "European" public. Europe Un-Imagined challenges its readers to find new ways of thinking about how people belong in the world beyond the problematic logics of national categorization.

Continue Reading Read Less

Product Details

  • Series: Anthropological Horizons
  • World Rights
  • Page Count: 304 pages
  • Dimensions: 6.1in x 0.8in x 9.0in

  • Reviews

    "Stankiewicz’s work is provocative, and it should be taught in all courses in media studies and on the anthropology of the media because it will provide fodder for lively discussions about the role of television in crafting shared cultural and national identities."


    Kristen Ghodsee
    H-Net Reviews, June 2018

    "Europe Un-Imagined is a major contribution to European studies. With ​a combination of sophisticated theory and rich ethnography, it advances understandings of the relationship between media and both national and supranational projects."


    Deborah Reed-Danahay, Department of Anthropology, SUNY Buffalo

    "Damien Stankiewicz has written an exciting, theoretically innovative, and accessiblee work that tackles some of the important topics in anthropology."


    Jillian Cavanaugh, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, Brooklyn College, and Anthropology Program, CUNYGraduate Center

    "Damien Stankiewicz offers us a rich ethnographic plunge into ARTE, a cross-national French-German television (and now multi-platform) channel. Europe Un-Imagined is especially timely, coming out just as the EU is re-examining the future of its own fracturing "imagined community." It is essential reading in contemporary media anthropology."


    Faye Ginsburg, Department of Anthropology, and Director, Center for Media, Culture and History, New York University

  • Author Information

    Damien Stankiewicz is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Temple University.

  • Table of contents

    Introduction

    Chapter 1: Bienvenue à ARTE / Wilkommen bei ARTE

    Chapter 2: Producing trans/national media

    Chapter 3: Trans/national belonging

    Chapter 4: Re-presenting history on and at ARTE

    Chapter 5: culture, "culture," Culture

    Chapter 6: Trans/national audiences

    Conclusions and Provocations

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