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Media and Nation Building: How the Iban Became Malaysian
.John Postill. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006. 231 pp.
Review by Gordon T. Gray (Temple University)Published in American Anthropologist, June 14, 2007
Media and Nation Building
is an intellectually engaging and thought-provokingbook, and is a rich contribution to several arenas within anthropology.
Mediaand Nation Building
provides an analysis of the processes by which the Iban(one of the ethnic groups in Sarawak often referred to as Dayak) have beenincorporated into the modern Malaysian state. In their nation building projectthe Malaysian state has controlled and employed various media, which Postillproductively takes to include not only television, radio and newspapers, butclock and calendar time. That inclusive definition of media leads to a breadthof analysis in
Media and Nation Building
that researchers and teachers of media anthropology, as well as those interested in nationalism or politicalanthropology, should find useful. This inclusive definition of media combineswith an ethnological approach (one that crosses boundaries of time, spaceand culture) that Postill suggests is also a strategy to move the mediaanthropology discourse out of the theoretical dichotomy of the productionmodel of the Frankfurt School/ early communication studies versus thereception model of British cultural studies.Postill's take on nation/state creation is likewise intriguing and provocative.Building from a discussion of the relative merits of primordialist versuscontructivist (what the author refers to as ethno-symbolist versus modernist)notions of the nation, Postill argues that the Malaysian case (as with much of Southeast Asia) requires a more "state-led" understanding of nation or statecreation, summed up by his choice of the phrase
nation building
. Postillactively engages with other theoretical conceptualizations and ethnographicexamples of state and nation formation, and in particular areas where theseformations and media have overlapped as they have in Malaysia. Due to thehistorical specifics of the Malaysian state history and the larger global forcesat play in the late 20th/early 21st century the "imagined community"approach to nationalism does not work. The author posits that an ethnologicalrather than strictly ethnographic (bound in time and space to one group)approach to this analysis is particularly informative. What Postill argues in
Media and Nation Building
is that the Malaysian state's nation buildingprogram has been overwhelmingly successful. The state's Malaysianizationpropaganda became "sustainable propaganda" (analogous to sustainabledevelopment), which in turn became an
ideolect 
, an Iban remaking of thestate ideology though which they make sense of the various media andultimately their world.
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