Harold A. Innis: Empire & Communications (1950/1986)

It’s been said that without Harold A. Innis there could have been no Marshall McLuhan. Empire and Communications is one of Innis’s most important contributions to the debate about how media influence the development of consciousness and societies. In this seminal text, he traces humanity’s movement from the oral tradition of preliterate cultures to the electronic media of recent times. Along the way, he presents his own influential concepts of oral communication, time and space bias, and monopolies of knowledge.

Keywords and phrases
Babylonia, monopoly of knowledge, papyrus, Hittites, Egypt, Byzantine empire, Persian empire, Sumerian, oral tradition, Hyksos, Dionysus, Assyrian, Kassites, Orphism, monasticism, Roman law, Mitanni, Werner Jaeger, Aramaic, Athens

Edited by Dave Godfrey
Publisher Press Porcépic, 1986
ISBN 0888782446, 9780888782441
Length 184 pages

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David Graeber: Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (2001)

“This innovative book is the first comprehensive synthesis of economic, political, and cultural theories of value. David Graeber reexamines a century of anthropological thought about value and exchange, in large measure to find a way out of quandaries in current social theory, which have become critical at the present moment of ideological collapse in the face of neoliberalism. Rooted in an engaged, dynamic realism, Graeber argues that projects of cultural comparison are in a sense necessarily revolutionary projects: He attempts to synthesize the best insights of Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss, arguing that these figures represent two extreme, but ultimately complementary, possibilities in the shape such a project might take. Graeber breathes new life into the classic anthropological texts on exchange, value, and economy. He rethinks the cases of Iroquois wampum, Pacific kula exchanges, and the Kwakiutl potlatch within the flow of world historical processes, and recasts value as a model of human meaning-making, which far exceeds rationalist/reductive economist paradigms.”

Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2001
ISBN 0312240457, 9780312240455
337 pages

Review: Sutton (Anthropological Theory, 2004).

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Dan Laughey: Key Themes in Media Theory (2007)

Key Themes in Media Theory provides a thorough and critical introduction to the key theories of media studies. It is unique in bringing together different schools of media theory into a single, comprehensive text, examining in depth the ideas of key media theorists such as Lasswell, McLuhan, Hall, Williams, Barthes, Adorno, Baudrillard and Bourdieu.

Using up-to-date case studies the book embraces media in their everyday cultural forms – music, internet, film, television, radio, newspapers and magazines – to enable a clearer view of the ‘big picture’ of media theory.

In ten succinct chapters Dan Laughey discusses a broad range of themes, issues and perspectives that inform our contemporary understanding of media production and consumption. These include:

* Behaviourism and media effects
* Feminist media theory
* Postmodernity and information society
* Political economy
* Media consumerism

Publisher Open University Press, McGraw-Hill, 2007
ISBN 0335218148, 9780335218141
Length 248 pages

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