This article explores the labeling of the iPhone as the ‘Jesus phone’ in order to demonstrate how religious metaphors and myth can be appropriated into popular discourse and shape the reception of a technology. We consider the intertextual nature of the relationship between religious language, imagery and technology and demonstrate how this creates a unique interaction between technology fans and bloggers, news media and even corporate advertising. Our analysis of the ‘Jesus phone’ clarifies how different groups may appropriate the language and imagery of another to communicate very different meanings and intentions. Intertextuality serves as a framework to unpack the deployment of religion to frame technology and meanings communicated. We also reflect on how religious language may communicate both positive and negative aspects of a technology and instigate an unintentional trajectory in popular discourse as it is employed by different audiences, both online and offline.

How can a Mexican telenovela be more attractive to viewers in Brazil than a nationally produced telenovela? This seems to be the question posed by the increasing transnational flow of cultural products. Most of the data indicate that viewers prefer locally produced programs. Nevertheless, some of the transnational success of Latin American telenovelas abroad seems to question this truism. This article argues that audience preferences are formed within the overall trend toward cultural proximity within both national and cultural-linguistic boundaries. However, within this logic of cultural proximity, other forces also apply. It is important to understand cultural proximity working not only at the national and supranational levels but also at the subnational and regional spheres. With this in mind, the authors first examine the attraction or proximity of genres, from the virtually global attraction of melodrama, as a macro genre, to subgenres within the telenovela. Second, they discuss the sense of shared historical experience of specific groups within nations and how this particular form of proximity might operate at the reception level.

In The Cattle King, a Brazilian telenovela, melodramatic elements of class ascension, love and betrayal, adultery, and pre-marital sex played a central role in the lives of the main characters. This ethnographic study of viewers in Macambira, a small rural community in the backlands of northeast Brazil, discusses how these rural viewers appropriated telenovelas in their daily lives and how the meanings assigned to the texts were interpreted according to their own values and beliefs about gender roles, relationships, and sexuality. I argue that the geographical isolation and the local patriarchal culture mediated the process of reception, interpretation, and appropriation of telenovelas. The isolation in which Macambira is located in relation to the urban representations in the telenovela narratives intensified the perceived gap between the local patriarchal culture and the urban reality constructed in the television text.During my fieldwork in Macambira, 1 the small rural community at the center of this ethnographic account, a song from the previous carnival season was still popular among local residents who playfully danced the new steps learned from television shows. Na boquinha da garrafa (roughly translated as "on the mouth of the bottle") alluded to a bottle, typically beer, placed upright on the floor with a woman the anonymous reviewers and co-editors of CSMC who provided enlightening suggestions for revisions.

Brazilian telenovelas-popular prime-time serial melodramas-have traditionally used product placement to help finance production costs. In the last decade, this strategy has become a central force influencing narrative choices. This paper discusses product placement in Brazilian telenovelas through an in-depth analysis of a recent show, The Cattle King. Ethnographic data on its reception focuses on the role of gender, geographic location, and cultural capital in viewers' interpretations of textual inser- tions.Product placements are commercial insertions within a particular media program intended to heighten the visibility of a brand, type of product, or service. These insertions are not intended to break away from the narrative but to be an integral part of the text, attempting to create an organic relationship between the advertised product and the narrative, encouraging viewers to "read" the product as a quality of the characters using and approving it. This practice, widespread in the Hollywood film and television industries (see Fuller, 1997; Wasko, 1994, for a discussion of the phenomena in the U.S.), has been part of Brazilian television commercial strategy since the late 1960s, when telenovelashighly popular, prime-time, serial fictionbecame the main staple in the country's media environment.In this paper, I argue that the commercial nature of telenovela texts requires a certain exposure to and awareness of capitalistic culture if viewers are to engage in product placement readings that are favorable to producers and marketers of telenovelas. These texts are bounded by commercial breaks that target a particular segment of the viewing population, depending on the time, channel, and nature of Antonio C. La Pastina for their invaluable suggestions, Dale A. Rice for his expert editing, and the anonymous reviewers from JOBEM for their sage editorial comments.

This article discusses the implications of an ethnographer's sexuality with regard to his fieldwork. Adopting a self-reflexive stance, the author discusses how his queer identity and the fear of repercussions against his intellectual and physical body affected his fieldwork. As a native Brazilian, he was still an outsider in the rural community in which he did his fieldwork. But more than his outsider status, his memories of growing up in the closet in Brazil informed some of his research choices and shaped his reactions to the experience of returning to the closet to conduct research in a community where machista attitudes, notions of queerness, and his own internalized homophobia positioned his queer self as an outsider. L ess than 2 weeks into my fieldwork, Dona Maria, an older woman who lived a block away, asked me if I were dating Zelia. Some younger women, she added, were saying that I could not be dating her because she was too old and there were younger, better looking women after me.I felt jolts of panic run through my body as I realized that a gossip chain, which I had been oblivious to, was moving at full speed. I also realized at that moment that I would have to dance around my sexual status-sexual orientation, sexual practices, and sexual desires-in the community for the rest of my stay. But the long-term implications of my sexual identity were barely forming in my mind when I answered Dona Maria, a response that would trouble me for the rest of my fieldwork and still troubles me almost a decade later.The beginning of an ethnographic project is always fraught with conflicting emotions: the excitement of being in the field, anxiety of entering the site, establishing relationships with informants, developing friendships, gaining a sense of place within the local dynamics, preparing for the departure, and mourning the separation. It is nerve-racking. Will I make it? Will I be able to establish meaningful rapport fundamental to conducting good fieldwork? Will I be able to be truthful and committed to my fieldwork and