Tv Countryside: The Social Transformation Of The Mass Media And Ethnic Minority Communities - Dulongjiang Case Ethnographic Interpretation

In this research the methodologies of ethnography are tried in the study of communication sociology. Based on related data and a half-year field-work in the Drung River reach in the northwest of Yunnan province of China, a settlement of the minority Drung People, the article depicts from.one aspect the roles of mass media in the social transform in the minority region.The article is made up of three parts. The first part mainly replies to some primary questions, i.e. what issues will be resolved, and why the field-work site is chosen. This part also introduces the location and background of the region.The second part, the core of the article, centers on the operational concept of "media-network of power". First I relate the formation of the network and how this network alters the community social relationship. In this section I make use of the concept "symbolic capital" used by the France sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and analyze thoroughly the social relationship in the countryside constructed by mass media (mostly TV). Secondly, I set up the analytic concept sympathy of appropinquity to analyze from the audience side the following aspects: watch or not watch, understand or not understand, identify with or not identify with, and so on. Then I try to conclude some decoding models the local people hold when watching TV There is a tension in the community between the modern media culture and the local cultures (mainly the traditional folk culture and the half-set Western religious culture). In my viewpoint this tension is a symbolized conflict, and I explain it from language and space-time perspective.The third part further summarizes what has been analyzed and is a voice-over of this article. This part also discusses the new relationship of "center and rim" or "ego, nation and state" being restructured by mass media ingress, which is altering the local daily life in the mean time. There are also some relations about the discourse of communication sociology in which all the analysis of the article are carried out.As is shown in the title, this article is an interpretation rather than a validation, so there is much descriptive content intended to achieve the effects of "thick description" that the American sociologist Clifford Geertz used.