New publication: Medium, Medium: Elemente einer Anthropologie
On Pre-technological Media
by Erhard Schüttpelz (University of Siegen/CRC)
If we have always lived in a media society, what are media actually? Erhard Schüttpelz explores this question in his new book Medium, Medium: Elemente einer Anthropologie (Medium, Medium: Elements of an Anthropology).
About the Book
Nowadays, the term “medium” is often used in connection with technology, although media have long existed in other mediating roles between humans and non-humans. With this study, Schüttpelz shifts the perspective of media studies and asks the question of what media actually are.
Editoral text:
When we think of media, we usually have in mind its manifestation in technical devices, from the first telegraph to today’s communication and storage media. This ignores the fact that the term medium also has a meaning that existed before technology, in which it refers to those who can mediate between heaven and earth, between the living and the dead, between those present and those absent. If mediality can be understood over millennia as a practice that connects humans and non-humans, a rupture takes place in the modern age: Media fall into one with technology, and a diverse strangeness of media becomes an interplay of prosthesis and remote control.
In his groundbreaking study, Erhard Schüttpelz shifts the perspective of media studies: from weapon to container, from writing to language, from magic to ritual. And he poses the question of what media actually are if we have always lived in media societies.
About the Author
Erhard Schüttpelz has been Professor of Media Theory at the University of Siegen since 2005 after studying German, English and Ethnology in Hanover, Exeter and Bonn and conducting research in Oxford, Cologne, New York, Constance and Vienna. He is the principle investigator of the project P02 “Media of Praxeology II: Anthropology of Cooperation: Skill, Deixis, Interaction” at the CRC 1187.