In 1983, anthropologist Richard Pace began his fieldwork in the Amazonian community of Gurupá one year after the first few television sets arrived. On a nightly basis, as the community’s electricity was turned on, he observed crowds of people lining up outside open windows or doors of the few homes possessing TV sets, intent on catching a glimpse of this fascinating novelty. Stoic, mute, and completely absorbed, they stood for hours contemplating every message and image presented. So begins the cultural turning point that is the basis of Amazon Town TV, a rich analysis of Gurupá in the decades during and following the spread of television.

Pace worked with sociologist Brian Hinote to explore the sociocultural implications of television’s introduction in this community long isolated by geographic and communication barriers. They explore how viewers change their daily routines to watch the medium; how viewers accept, miss, ignore, negotiate, and resist media messages; and how television’s influence works within the local cultural context to modify social identities, consumption patterns, and worldviews.

From Filmmaker Warriors to Flash Drive Shamans broadens the base of research on Indigenous media in Latin America through thirteen chapters that explore groups such as the Kayapó of Brazil, the Mapuche of Chile, the Kichwa of Ecuador, and the Ayuuk of Mexico, among others, as they engage video, DVDs, photography, television, radio, and the internet.

The authors cover a range of topics such as the prospects of collaborative film production, the complications of archiving materials, and the contrasting meanings of and even conflict over "embedded aesthetics" in media production—i.e., how media reflects in some fashion the ownership, authorship, and/or cultural sensibilities of its community of origin. Other topics include active audiences engaging television programming in unanticipated ways, philosophical ruminations about the voices of the dead captured on digital recorders, the innovative uses of digital platforms on the internet to connect across generations and even across cultures, and the overall challenges to obtaining media sovereignty in all manner of media production.

The book opens with contributions from the founders of Indigenous Media Studies, with an overview of global Indigenous media by Faye Ginsburg and an interview with Terence Turner that took place shortly before his death.