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Book reviewed in this article:From Blessing to Violence: History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina of Madagascar. Maurice Bloch.Qui a Obstrué la Cascade?: Analyse Sémantique du Rituel de la Circoncision chez les Komo du Zaïre. Wauthier de Mahieu.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part One From Category to Institution -- 1 The Politics of Culture I: Limits of Possibilities, 1945–1968 -- 2 The Politics of Culture II: Tensions of Continuity, 1790–1968 -- Part Two From Alliance to Bandwagon -- 3 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies I -- 4 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies II -- 5 A Rose by Any Other Name? The Wide World and Many Modes of Cultural Studies -- Part Three From Resistance to Transition -- 6 Conjunctural Knowledge I: Structures of Order, 1945–1968 -- 7 Conjunctural Knowledge II: Patterns of Disarray, 1968 and After -- 8 The Near Future of the Long Term: A Bricoleur's World -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index

Studies of the media in Africa, incorporating both African and international perspectives, are few. The thirty papers collected here were presented at a seminar organised and hosted by the Kenya-based Twaweza Communications and the International African Institute in Nairobi in 2004. They demonstrate how media outlets are used to perpetuate, question or modify the unequal power relations between the North and the South. Focusing on east Africa, the papers include discussions of the construction of old and new social entities, as defined by class, gender, ethnicity, political and economic differences, wealth, poverty, cultural behaviour, language and religion. The authors illustrate how there is increasing control by local people of traditional and modern forms of media. Globalization is being countered by local responses, within the context of social and cultural identities. Essentially, the book describes the tensions between the global and the local, tensions not often discussed in media studies, thus pioneering new debates