Television and Social Change in Post-Colonial West Africa
This paper is based on qualitative ethnographical data collected during a study about how Senegale people, especially women, receive and appropriate Latin-American televisual programmes called telenovelas. The fieldwork was conducted in 2002 in the surburbs of Dakar, the capital of Senegal. The reception of telenovelas occurs inside the households, thus reordering the balance between public and private spheres and obliging the spectators to re-organize their time schedules. As a result, the appropriation of telenovelas appears to be a collective and active process through which women pick up symbolic resources to make things change gradually in the realm of genders and parents-children relationships. Furthermore, in order to get over the methodological bias introduced by a narrow micro-sociological approach, the author describes how the construction of local telenovelas publics is a socio-historical process and why television images are indebted with a power of truth by spectators. In conclusion, the author admits that it is impossible to evaluate precisely the role television might be playing in social change because of the muliple factors which take place between the televisual products and the spectators. In order to find a way out of this methodological deadlock, he proposes to investigate what people do with televisual programmes rather than the opposite. In conclusion, he calls for the development of an Anthropology of the visual able to merge the study of the conditions of production of visual media with that of the social construction of collective imaginations.