Course Description
Consider this bit of common sense: Our world is saturated by mass media, and these media powerfully shape how we perceive and interact with our surroundings.
This claim has great relevance for cultural anthropology because of its suggestion that a distinct new force shapes the most basic aspects of daily life in our society and others around the world. It affects how we as humans come to know things, how we communicate those things with others, how and why we organize ourselves into social groups, and so on. It leads us to ask: what are these new forces, institutions, technologies, and processes reshaping culture and social relationships? What is so new, different, and powerful about them? How do these media transform existing social formations?
Now consider this. Anthropological research has shown time and again that our “common sense” is neither common nor necessarily even sensical. In fact, on closer inspection, claims about media such as the one above are often made on the basis of surprisingly little research on the actual relationships between media and the complex socio-cultural worlds in which people live and work. This in turn leads us to ask: how do people rooted in their complex lived worlds constitute and shape these forces, institutions, technologies, and processes? How do people produce, distribute, and consume media in culturally-specific ways?
In recent years, anthropologists have been exploring ethnographically and cross-culturally both the power of mass media and the power of people to shape media. This work sometimes confirms our common sense, in other instances contradicts it, but almost always complicates our understanding of media. There are, as we will see in this course, rich worldwide subtleties and diversity in media production, circulation, and consumption that betray any easy universalisms about the relationship between media, culture, and society.
This course has two major goals. One of these is to introduce you to the vibrant field of media anthropology, which is at the cutting edge of anthropology’s dedication to understanding contemporary cultural and global transformations. This field studies the social contexts, interactions, and uses of diverse kinds of media technologies and expressive cultures, including bodies, voices, sounds, music, photography, television, cinema, radio, cassette tapes, podcasts, videotapes, newspapers, advertising, the World Wide Web, blogs, wiki sites, etc. It focuses on issues like the role of media technologies and content in the production of subjectivities, cultural similarity and difference, globalization, and space-time relations. It also focuses on the social worlds and logics of media institutions and sites of production. We will examine the field’s major analytical frameworks, theoretical debates, and methodological tools, with a goal of helping you develop an anthropologically-informed and cross-culturally sophisticated perspective on media.
The second major goal is to provide you with critical viewing and producing skills required of citizens in a society where the primary aspiration of multi-media, advertising, information, and spin producers is to permeate, inform, and shape the contours of your daily existence in order to get you to think in certain ways and do certain things, especially buy stuff and hold certain political ideas. Through many hands-on activities and media production experiences, we will also reflect critically on the distinct opportunities and dilemmas of communicating through distinct kinds of technologies of mediation.
The following required texts are available for purchase at the University Store:
1. Askew, K. and R. Wilk, eds. (2002) The Anthropology of Media: A Reader. Blackwell.
2. Chris, Cynthia. (2006) Watching Wildlife. University of Minnesota Press.
3. Lutz, C. and J. Collins. (1993) Reading National Geographic. University of Chicago Press.
4. Rushkoff, D. (1999) Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say. Riverhead Books.