Research Articles RICHARD PACE Television’s Interpellation: Heeding, Missing, Ignoring, and Resisting the Call for Pan-National Identity in the Brazilian Amazon ABSTRACT In this article, I focus on the ways in which audiences in the Amazonian community of Gurup ´ a respond to television’s interpellation for pan-national identity. I examine how viewers heed, miss, ignore, and resist the call for identity as well as how their various responses to this “call” shape their worldview and behavior and impact the process of nation building. Utilizing audience ethnography over a 25-year period, I show in this study how televisual messages are contextualized and localized, mitigating the forces of nationalistic homogenization. [Keywords: television, audience ethnography, national identity, Brazilian Amazon] A LTHOUGH ANTHROPOLOGY is a relative new- comer to the field of television studies, over the past few decades a small but growing number of researchers have been hard at work creating a theoretical and methodologi- cal niche for the discipline (see Ginsburg 2005; Osorio 2005; Peterson 2003). 1 Prominent among their contributions are ethnographies examining the scope and magnitude of tele- vision’s influence over audiences—particularly the extent to which viewers in different cultural settings accept, re- work, ignore, or subvert televisual messages and how this process might affect their worldview and behavior. These studies go to the heart of ongoing debates in media studies over the extent of viewer passivity and agency in response to television texts as well as the role of ethnography in un- derstanding media use and effect in everyday experience (see Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998; Bird 2003; Creeber 2006; Kitzinger 2004). Of particular interest to this work is viewer response to television’s interpellation for pan-national identity. 2 Ac- ceptance of and adherence to the ideals of pan-national identity, as a form of “imagined community,” are funda- mental to maintaining a relatively stable and presumably legitimate polity or regime, which is a common goal for nation states regardless of size, cultural diverseness, or po- litical system (Anderson 1991; Appadurai 1990). 3 Yet, there are many cases where the spread of pan-national identity fails to create solidarity, triggering unexpected responses ranging from indifference to resistance (Creed 2004). These AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 111, Issue 4, pp. 407–419, ISSN 0002-7294 online ISSN 1548-1433. C  2009 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01151.x alternative responses can challenge stability, nullify unity, and disrupt nation building. The research presented here is a case study examin- ing the ways televiewers heed, miss, ignore, and resist the call for pan-national identity as well as how their responses to this “call” influence their worldview and behavior and impact nation building. It is an audience ethnography of the agroextractivist community of Gurup´ a, located along the Amazon River in the state of Par´ a, Brazil. 4 The study spans 25 years and incorporates thousands of hours of be- havior observation and informal interviews as well as data from interviews schedules administered in 1986, 1999, and 2007. THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS Within television studies, there is a contentious rift be- tween researchers prioritizing media influence (e.g., the power of the text) and researchers emphasizing active audiences (e.g., viewers’ ability to mediate messages; see Corner 2000:383). The result is a paradigmatic impasse, fueling polemic critiques of opposing approaches (Kitzinger 2004:24; see also Rajagopal 2001:24–25). The research I present here will not escape these critiques, even though it attempts to bridge the gap by gauging the relative strength of television influence vis-` a-vis viewers’ ability to medi- ate it. The approach is a variation of what Jenny Kitzinger (2004:16, 192) calls “New Media Influence” research. Build- ing on cultivation analysis (Gerbner 1970), and in my