In recent years, anthropologists have begun to pay more attention to the importance of the mass media as cultural productions. Given the ever-increasing importance of such media as film, comic books, radio, the World Wide Web, and television in all forms, and their centrality in people"s lives all over the world, this is not surprising. The anthropological study of mass media can "go" in several different places, including studies of globalization, but we want to highlight the creativity of producers and consumers of media in the interpretation and incorporation of these art forms. This is, perhaps, the most important thing anthropology can add to the study of media: the fine-grained ethnographic assessment of the effects and impact of popular media among the people who watch, listen, read, and interpret (cf. Herzfeld 2001, 298) and some of whom also create those media.

In many nations in the world, soap operas, or television serials, are among the most popular mass entertainments, watched by millions. These programs are seen by their creators in some parts of the world not simply as entertainment but also as tools useful for teaching certain people in their societies what they need to learn to be modern citizens. But what the intended audience gets from the program is not always the message the creators thought they were transmitting. Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod (1999) studied an Egyptian television serial called Hilmiyya Nights that was broadcast during Ramadan (the Islamic holy month) over five successful years. The serial followed the fortunes and relationships of a group of characters from the traditional Cairo neighborhood of Hilmiyya, taking them from the late 1940s, when Egypt was under the rule of King Farouk and the British, up to the early 1990s, even incorporating Egyptian reaction to the first Gulf War.

The central action revolved around the rivalry, financial wheels and deals, and love interests of two wealthy men"in many ways it resembles an Egyptian version of Dallas. What separated Hilmiyya Nights from prime-time serials from the United States, however, was that the Egyptian program attempted to tie the lives of its characters to Egyptian national political events. Above all, it promoted the theme of national unity. With few exceptions, all the characters were shown to be basically good and patriotic.

Abu-Lughod studied two separate groups of Egyptians during the 1990s"poor working-class women in Cairo and villagers in Upper Egypt. When she asked poor women in Cairo what they liked about the show, they volunteered not the serious political or social messages but two women characters: the glamorous, aristocratic femme fatale and the arrogant belly dancer turned cabaret owner. Although these two characters were hardly respectable and their lives ended badly, these were nevertheless favorites because they defied the moral system that kept good women quiet. Indeed, Abu-Lughod found that both the urban women and the villagers accepted the moral stances presented in the program only when they resonated with their own worlds and ignored those aspects of the serial that were not part of their experience.

Most interestingly, she argues that television, especially for the villagers, created its own world, one that was part of, but only a small part of, the villagers" daily lives. "What they experienced through television added to, but did not displace, whatever else already existed. They treated the television world not as a fantasy escape but as a sphere unto itself with its familiar time slots and specific attitudes" (Abu-Lughod 1995, 203"04). Moreover, the villagers did not compartmentalize the "modernity" that television serials present in order to preserve a "traditional" community untouched by the outside world. On the contrary, these villagers are deeply affected in a wide variety of ways by the outside world, whether through local government policies or transnationally through the effect of advertising by multinational corporations. "Television is, in this village, one part of a complex jumble of life and the dramatic experiences and visions it offers are surprisingly easily incorporated as discrete"not overwhelming"elements in the jumble" (205).

Television in Egypt, she notes, has had measurable social effects: for example, families prefer to stay home to watch television rather than visit among households in the evenings. Television may also have increased the number of "experiences" shared across generation and gender, as young and old, men and women, now spend time together watching television.

The intended impact of Hilmiyya Nights was not undermined because nobody was watching television: both villagers and urban poor had their sets on almost constantly. Rather, the positive messages that the creators of Hilmiyya Nights and similar serials intended got lost because they are only part of the complex flow of programming in Egypt, which includes many kinds of other information, news, entertainment, advertising, and so on. More important, all these messages are evaluated in terms of the life experiences of the viewers and hence are often neutralized or contradicted by the powerful everyday realities within which poor Egyptian villagers and urban women move. Even soap operas are contested sites, open for multiple interpretations, not simply places for the transmission of messages from the elite to the masses.