SESSION ORGANIZERS:

Merry Bruns

The Center For Anthropology and Science Communications, Dir.
Washington, DC
mbruns@nasw.org

 

Mark Allen Peterson

Asst. Professor of Anthropology
The American University in Cairo
PO Box 2511, Cairo 11511 EGYPT
peterson@aucegypt.edu

 

AAA1999-2000 THEME

 

This symposium seeks to bring together professional anthropologists who have worked with and through the mass media with media professionals who have had anthropological training.

The purpose of these encounters is to examine the public face of anthropology:

• critical commentary on the place of anthropology in the public sphere,
  
• visions of sites anthropology might occupy in civil society
  
• reflections on the transformations of practice that would be required to make those visions a reality.

 

Early communication efforts
In the first decades of the twentieth century, anthropology offered an authoritative site from which to address social ills like race, to educate the public about the world from a comparative stance and to offer new perspectives on issues of social justice.

The media of the time was well situated to welcome anthropologists. The declining cost in newsprint and the increasing efficiency of printing technology had led to the proliferation at the turn of the century of as many as a dozen daily newspapers in a given metropolis as well as hundreds of niche publications.

As the century passed, both institutions increasingly specialized and professionalized. Today, anthropology and the mass media industries represent two distinct modes of knowledge production, embedded in quite different webs of social relations.

While anthropology and mass media both produce factual accounts of the world, each is bound by its own professional methodologies, specialized languages, epistemologies and interpretive frameworks.

Encounters between the two are fraught with risk:

• anthropologists rightly fear a loss of control over their work and words
  
• journalists and other media producers rightly fear irrelevance and incomprehensibility for their audiences.

Does anthropology, particularly cultural anthropology, have a part in the public sphere beyond the education of undergraduate students?

The stakes are high: do the mass media have roles to play in the anthropological understanding of the human condition?

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Email: Merry Bruns, Dir.