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Speaking of news: Press, democracy, and metapragmatics in a changing India
Author(s) -
PETERSON MARK ALLEN
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1111/amet.12163
Subject(s) - modernity , democracy , politics , commodity , liberalization , order (exchange) , period (music) , political economy , sociology , political science , media studies , law , economics , market economy , aesthetics , philosophy , finance
That the news matters is a fundamental postulate of modernity. Yet the ways people talk about the news varies across cultures and over time. In this article, I examine how such “metapragmatic” speech about the news changed across a 15‐year period, during which India underwent seismic shifts in its political and economic order. By unpacking and contextualizing five metapragmatic utterances collected between two fieldwork periods, 1992–93 and 2007–08, I examine how people used the tension between the concepts of “news as public good” and “news as commodity” to indexically position themselves as democratic citizens in a changing nation. Furthermore, I explore how and why these discursive practices changed during the Indian economy's so‐called liberalization.