Media Anthropology

Eric W. (Walter) Rothenbuhler, Mihai Coman

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781506319704
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Media Anthropology represents a convergence of issues and interests on anthropological approaches to the study of media. The purpose of this reader is to promote the identity of the field of study; identify its major concepts, methods, and bibliography; comment on the state of the art; and provide examples of current research. Based on original articles by leading scholars from several countries and academic disciplines, Media Anthropology provides essays introducing the issues, reviewing the field, forging new conceptual syntheses.

1

THE PROMISE OF MEDIA ANTHROPOLOGY

MIHAI COMAN AND ERIC W. ROTHENBUHLER

Media anthropology grows out of the anthropology of modern societies, on one hand, and the cultural turn in media studies, on the other. It turns its attention from “exotic” to mundane and from “indigenous” to manufactured culture but preserves the methodological and conceptual assets of earlier anthropological tradition. It prepares media studies for more complete engagement with the symbolic construction of reality and the fundamental importance of symbolic structures, myth, and ritual in everyday life.

Even though it does not have to invent new theories and methods, media anthropology is not a mere exercise of mechanically applying anthropologists’ concepts and techniques to media phenomena. The identity of anthropology among the disciplines is based on the development of a distinct conceptual sphere with its own debates, on the more frequent use of those ideas and methods, and hence on the capacity to explain their objects of study according to that specific conceptual lexicon. In taking concepts and methods developed in the specific intellectual community of cultural anthropology (applied and fashioned on specific fields and on specific cultural forms and thus tuned to their traditional objects of study and their traditional debates) into media studies, we face a dilemma common to all interdisciplinary fields of study, as well as to the growth and change of any of the human sciences in this globalizing world: how “universal” or “local” are those concepts and methods—and in how many different modalities, geographically, culturally, logically, empirically, historically? How should they be adapted to their new objects of study and intellectual fields? How much loyalty or fundamentalism to their original forms and fields is appropriate?

In this chapter, we will address these questions in regard to ethnography as method and idea, ritual, myth, and religion as widely used concepts of media anthropology and in terms of levels of generality. The chapter closes with a brief discussion of the promise of media anthropology and of our perspective on the potential contributions of this field of inquiry to its home disciplines of communication and anthropology and to larger currents of intellectual life.

METHOD

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One important debate is about whether classical ethnography is necessary to everything called anthropological, or is the adaptation of the spirit of ethnography in media and cultural studies legitimately anthropological? Applying ethnographic methods to modern societies had already produced a dispute regarding methodological purity within anthropology, even before ethnographic ideas were widely adopted in neighboring fields. Where is the dividing line between doing an ethnography in the classic sense and doing research that is ethnographic in some aspects? How important is that line? The questions become more intransigent in regard to the specific study of media audiences, as illustrated by these two contrasting quotations from the debate.

Most of this work is based on interviewing audiences in their homes, and critics have argued that the label “ethnography” is misleading, because detailed participant observation is minimal and actual immersion in the daily practices and social worlds of the people studied is almost inexistent. (Spitulnik, 1993, p. 298)

My own feeling is that despite these clear differences, reception studies can still properly be called ethnographic. It is true that they are not based on extensive fieldwork in distant lands, but they do share some of the same general intentions as anthropological research. . . . If the means of investigation are not always identical, then the aims of inquiry can be. (Moores, 1993, p. 4)

La Pastina (chapter 14, this volume) argues for anchoring media studies research in the traditions of cultural anthropology:

Audience ethnography needs to be repositioned as a fieldwork-based, long-term practice of data collection and analysis. This practice allows researchers to attain a greater level of understanding of the community studied and maintain self-reflexivity and respect toward those they are attempting to understand within the everyday life of the community.

Placing his reflections in the context of discussions of intertextuality, Peterson (chapter 13, this volume) maintains that ethnographic investigation is two headed, like Janus: It tries to understand and re-present the phenomena of society and culture, as well as its own discourse, in a permanent effort of reflexivity and self-reflexivity. Thus media anthropology has, in some sense, to expand ethnography.

To the study of media, ethnography brings an attention to cultural difference, a commitment to close observation and recording, the provision of “thick” descriptive detail designed to reveal the contexts that give actions meanings to a community, reflexive engagement with the voices of one’s hosts, and attention to the contiguity of what is being described to broader aspects of social process. Media ethnography attempts to tease out layers of meaning through observation of and engagement with the everyday situations in which media are consumed, the practices by which media are interpreted, and the uses to which media are put (see Peterson, chapter 13; La Pastina, chapter 14; and Murdock and Pink, chapter 15).

Participant observation, qualitative methods, and open-ended interviewing appeared as methods and terms of debate in communication and media studies before ethnography and ethnographic became common. There has been a tendency to lump them all together, blurring the distinctiveness of the anthropological method. Debates about phenomenology and hermeneutics were prevalent at the time (early 1980s). Although those philosophical debates have faded to the background, there still tends to be something vaguely, even romantically, phenomenological and hermeneutic about ethnography and ethnographic as those terms are used in the communication literature. The investigator’s intention to achieve a deeper understanding of other people’s life experiences thus counts for as much as the actual details of research procedures. If, in a given cultural context, these goals can be achieved without extended residential immersion in a foreign culture, then by the standards of most media scholars the process can still be called ethnography.

Our three Internet chapters present a useful contrast and illustrate some of these tendencies. None is a classic ethnography; each has some claim to the ethnographic tradition. Danet’s participant observation and interviewing could be called an online ethnography, focused on a symbol world that exists in the flow of image, text, and interactive turns on an Internet server. Hoover and Parks’ work depends on qualitative analysis of transcripts from extensive open-ended. interviews. it can be labeled ethnographic in its efforts to understand participants’ own experiences in their own terms, contextualized by the researcher’s analysis of the situation. Hammer stretches the spirit of ethnography the farthest, although still falling within the grand tradition of the human sciences that it represents. She makes reference to her time as a participant in the online groups she is discussing, but reporting of the observed details of a social world plays a relatively minor role; use of the analytic concepts built up in a century of such work is relatively larger. However, it is still at least philosophically ethnographic to the extent that those concepts and her orientation to her materials address lived experience.

The two of us, Coman and Rothenbuhler, have a pragmatic attitude toward method in research and a disdain for territorial debates between disciplines. Whatever well-applied method produces useful answers to interesting questions is fine. That is why ethnography came to be classic in anthropology, because it produced useful answers to interesting questions. Most certainly, the value of the classic method to classic research should continue to be taught in anthropology. Scholars from other fields, too, can learn much from that work; neither of us could have done any of our own work without a deep appreciation of that tradition and much reading of its literature. Due respect should be paid, and there is no better place to look for guidance than to the classic exponents. Yet the tradition will change, and good ideas will be imitated and adapted to new uses in new circumstances.

A key difference with the classic anthropological ethnographies is that media ethnography does not, usually, take place fully outside the researcher’s culture. When researchers turn their attention to their own cultures, even some of the more distinct corners of them, some of the—shall we say—sacred characteristics of the classical ethnographic experience are missing. One does not travel far to be there, the journey and the life is not strenuous, one does not need to learn a new language or wholly unfamiliar customs, values, and modes of behavior; the researcher is not fully isolated from home, in all its senses. These characteristics, very real, have generated a mystique for ethnography, but there is no need to transform a mystique into a dogma. Even short periods spent in field, allied with previous knowledge that the researcher brings to the field, can produce partial, yet focused, knowledge of aspects of group life. Valuable interpretive accounts can be based on relatively small periods of observation, focusing on media texts as much as people and activities. If the ethnographic goals are achieved, the research activity is itself legitimately ethnographic—whether or not it fulfills all the requirements of the classical ethnographic field experience. Finally, in purely pragmatic terms, media ethnography has been worth the risk. These studies have yielded a lot of new and exciting information on the media, putting the “classical” assumptions of media studies, as well as ethnography, into new light.

CONCEPTS

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In the anthropological approach to mass media, several established concepts are finding relatively new uses: culture (and acculturation, cultural change, cultural diffusion, assimilation, globalization), religion (cult, sacred and profane, transcendence, belief, cosmology, liturgical order, themes and motifs), ritual (ceremony, magic, commemoration, celebration, liminality), myth, narrative, performance, representation, and symbol can all be found in this book and the larger literature. Here in the introduction, we single out ritual, religion, and myth for more discussion.

Ritual

The concept that has received the most numerous applications and the most interesting developments in media anthropology has been ritual. Many of these references to the ceremonial universe can be surprising to scholars more familiar with the anthropological definitions and uses. At one end, we find a reductive interpretation of the concept: the ritual is a sum of formalized, repetitive, stereotypical acts. In this line, Tuchman (1978) launched the phrase “strategic rituals” to name the standardized working procedures of journalists. In the same line, other scholars have considered the regular consumption of television programs or the periodic reading of newspapers or romance novels as ritual behaviors (Goethals, 1981; Lull, 1988; Morley, 1992). At the other end stands the expansive, metaphoric interpretation of the concept as the ritual perspective of communication proposed by Carey (1988); ritual appears as a form of realization and expression of social communication, as a “model for” communication processes centered not on the transfer of information, but on the sharing of a common culture. In consensus with this perspective, even though inspired from another paradigm (associated with Victor Turner), Dov Shinar (chapter 25) builds a complex interpretative system centering on sociocultural change and the functions of communication in these processes. In his conception, ritual is the instrument through which society manages change; the anthropological theories and concepts offer a scientific lexicon to name and interpret the actors’ behavior, the institutional destructuring and restructuring processes, and the dialectic of values and symbols that support these transformations.

From another perspective, at one end, we find the creation of new concepts of ritual to account for new phenomena in the mass communication universe and, at the other end, the often mechanical, blind application of established terminology from cultural anthropology. The latter situation is evident in the use of the notion of liminality as a universal key that explains at the same time the consuming behavior of the public, the journalists’ reactions in the newsroom, the global functioning of television, and the experiences lived by participants in a media event. All this without taking into consideration the “liminoid” concept through which Turner (1982) was adapting the initial concept from the explanation of phenomena in nonmodern societies to the explanation of phenomena of the modern world. In the same way, the term magic is sometimes evoked metaphorically to explain television’s power of attraction, without any connection with the rich conceptualizations of magic in the anthropological literature (cf., later, the same point in regard to myth).

As an example of work that borrowed from anthropology to create a new approach to explain ritual phenomena in the mass communication universe, the best known approach is the one built by Dayan and Katz (1992) around the concept of media event. The theoretical vision of their book has inspired numerous studies, which have broadened the sphere of phenomena that could be integrated in this new ritual category: highly mediated marriages and funerals of representative personalities, political or religious visits, sporting events, festivals, pilgrimages, music concerts, and political celebrations and confrontations. In all these cases, the mediation, even to the point of remaking, of already accepted prestigious ceremonies leads to amplification of the ritual in regard to the number of participants, the area of geographic distribution, the magnitude of experiences, as well as to the modification of ceremonial elements—the ritual script, the form of public speeches, the role of the masters of ceremony, the interpretations, and the attributed significations (see Coman, chapter 5, this volume).

Starting from this model, other scholars have launched different conceptual constructs: media rituals (Couldry), “ceremonial television” (Dayan), disaster marathon (Liebes). In these cases, we are not talking of identifying social manifestations that could be labeled as media events but of new concepts of media anthropology. “Media rituals (in the sense in which I am using the term) are actions that are capable of standing in for wider values and frameworks of understanding connected with the media” (Couldry, chapter 6, this volume). The disaster marathon contradicts the classic scheme of media events because “whereas the success of media events is due to the union of establishment and broadcasters, disaster marathons, brought about by an outside power (natural or human), surprise establishment and media alike, sometimes paralyzing the establishment, leaving media in charge of lost and horrified viewers” (Liebes & Blondheim, chapter 18, this volume). Dayan’s. work has shown a trajectory within and yet independent of his collaboration with Katz. Dayan and Katz used the term media events to describe their work across the 1980s and to title their book in 1992. The French translation in 1996 was actually a reworking in important ways, and its title in English would be “ceremonial television.” This is not exactly “media events,” and in interesting ways. It narrows the focus to television, shifts the emphasis from event to process, and draws attention to the markers that distinguish this kind of television, the ceremonial, from ordinary television.

All these new categories, far from being simple scholastic exercises, show that at the interface between the ritual universe and mass communication, syncretic manifestations of a great variety appear, based in both media and ceremony. Their identification, analysis, and conceptualization represent a possibility for a more subtle understanding of the complex transformations of modernity affecting mass media, public spheres, and imaginaire social.

The ritualistic approaches to mass communication stem from the conceptions of Durkheim and Turner. The differences between the two schools of thought are not as great as they may look at a superficial glance—see Dayan and Couldry (chapters 16 and 6, respectively, this volume) and Rothenbuhler (1988, 1998). In the first perspective, the ritual produces and maintains social integration; in the second, it contributes to the management of social change (generated by social conflicts, power relations, personal affliction, social dramas, natural disasters) and, implicitly, to the restoration of social order and integration. Because media anthropologists do not mechanically take over these theoretical models, it would be more adequate to talk of neo-Durkheimian and neo-Turnerian approaches. Thus, Couldry (chapter 6) argues for rethinking media ritu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Promise of Media Anthropology
• Part I: Histories and Debates
• Part II: Concepts and Methods
• Part III: Events, Stories, Activities
• Part IV: Theory into Practice
• Index
• About the Editors
• About the Authors