Paper short abstract:

Media anthropology’s future should be based around the playfulness of media and media production. Drawing on the media practices of Turkish diaspora football fans, I argue for a conception of play as a disposition, and point to the power of such an analytic stance for anthropological questions more broadly.

Paper long abstract:

My paper argues that media anthropology's future should, in part, be based around the playfulness of media and media production. From video games to memes, contemporary media practices are frequently the best place to capture the increasing 'ludification' of social and cultural production (Frissen et al. 2015). Yet the playfulness with which we all - interlocutors and anthropologists - engage with 'media' frequently becomes buried under the gravity with which, naturally, we hold our research subjects and questions.

Drawing on the media practices of Turkish diaspora football fans, I argue the importance of play as an analytic category - not as a realm of experience dialectically opposed to 'work' but as a disposition, discernible and researchable in experience more broadly. Thinking in this fashion does not obviate enquiries into issues of power and inequality, questions which, as noted, have been central to much work within the media anthropology subdiscipline. Rather, the task at hand becomes tracking how the disposition of play has been turned into an 'object of institutional desire', how attitudes of indeterminacy, affective power and improvisation become coopted or denied, commodified and utilised in the media nexus by individuals and organisations alike (Malaby 2009, 216).

Not so much an 'anthropology of play' to accompany an 'anthropology of media', then, but a playful anthropology that diffuses and shapes both. When assessing media anthropology's 'impact', arguably this playful disposition has much (the most?) to offer anthropology more widely, not least in giving knowledge's intrinsic indeterminacy and contingency the space to breathe.