ABSTRACT
Our study of Brazilian media began in the early 1980s when co-author Kottak directed a multinational team conducting year-long studies of television engagement in a series of Brazilian communities exposed to television at different times. Based on the ethnographic and quantitative data collected by the team, along with Kottak’s institutional analysis of Brazilian television and program content, the study documented an array of media engagements: including the delineation of a multi-stage model of television impact in Brazil; documentation of the influence of “liberal views” tied to televiewing; and even impact on family size and contraceptive use tied to viewing telenovelas. Over the following decades, co-author Pace continued the study in the sample’s Amazonian community. He examined how viewers heed, miss, ignore, and resist television’s interpellation and how this impacts behavior and perceptions as measured through ethnographic observations and surveys. Kottak and Pace’s joint research resumed in the mid-2010s with an analysis of the Mēbêngôkre-Kayapó’s (an Indigenous group in the Amazon) unique engagement with television and, more recently, an updated analysis (in progress) of the original communities studied, now focusing on the ways multiple types of media are engaged within a complex and intertwined media ecology.
