17 Mass Communication in field research

Dr. Abhay Chawla

Contents

1. Introduction to Mass Communications
2. Mass Media and Anthropology
3. Objective of Anthropology of Media
4. Writings for Anthropology of Media Summary

Learning Outcomes

After studying this module you shall:

•  be able to understand the difference between mass communication and mass media;
•  learn various objectives of Anthropology of Media;
•  be able to identify the differences between the different writing styles in Anthropology when writing for Anthropology of Media; and
•  see how this interdisciplinary field is dynamic, what are the new terminologies being incorporated and why should any student of anthropology never ignore communication Media.

1. Introduction to Mass communication

Communication is a word used to refer to multitude of activities in which people engage such as talking, touching, writing, looking etc (Lederman, 1977). Communication study thus involves “who says what, through what channels (media) of communication, to whom, [and] what will be the results” (Smith, Lasswell & Casey, 1946). Littlejohn and Foss (2005) define mass communication as “the process whereby media organizations produce and transmit messages to large publics and the process by which those messages are sought, used, and consumed by audiences”. McQuail (1994) states that mass communication is, “only one of the processes of communication operating at the society-wide level, readily identified by its institutional characteristics”. Hence mass communication is “the process by which a person, group of people, or large organization creates a message and transmits it through some type of medium to a large, anonymous, heterogeneous audience.” (Pearce, 2009)

The term ‘mass communication’ was coined, along with that of ‘mass media’, early in the twentieth century to describe what was then a new social phenomenon and a key feature of the emerging modern world that was being built on the foundations of industrialism and popular democracy. The mass media (a plural form) refer to the organized means of communicating openly, at a distance, and too many in a short space of time. (McQuail, 2010).

2. Mass Media and Anthropology

Media anthropology is a new field of interdisciplinary studies and is the point of contact for the fields of anthropology and communications. It represents both the use of anthropological concepts and methods within media studies and the study of the media by anthropologists (Rothenbuhler, 2008)

Media has become ubiquitous worldwide and hence anthropologist encounters it in their work more often today. Arjun Appadurai invented the concept of “mediascapes” in his article in 1991, subtitled “Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology”. Ginsburg et. al. ( 2003) were of the opinion that for many years mass media was seen as almost a taboo topic for anthropology. Anthropologists have either not been interested in mass media or have reduced it to simple work tool for (what they thought it represented) an “accurate” recording of social facts or to an accessory in the study of other social and cultural phenomenon (Coman, 2005). Today anthropologist recognize the social cultural significance of Films, Television, Video, Radio and the New media as a part of everyday life in many parts of the world .

In fact new technologies have exacerbated what Toby Miller has termed “the new international division of cultural labor, the shift from the spatial sensitivity of electrics to the spatial insensitivity of the electronics” (1998:377). Research on video culture and other forms of decentralized small media suggests the emergence of a new media era that is more fragmented and diverse in its social and economic organization. (Larkin 2000) characteristically similar to the fluidity of capitalism.

Media Anthropology is defined as the application of instruments (theories, concepts, research methods)from the field of science , cultural anthropology onto an investigated object , in this case media i.e. communication mediated by technologies and institutions , be it mass or group, “big” or “small”(Spitulnik, 2002).

Three prominent scholars who have dealt with the question of the relationship between mass communication and anthropology are Dickey (1997), Spitulnik (1993) and Eiselein (1976).

Dickey defines mass media as communications media that are, or can be, widely distributed in virtually identical form, including not only film, video, television, radio, and print periodicals, but lithographic prints, advertising billboards, and the World Wide Web.

Eiselein’s definition of communication media is the mechanical amplification of communication to transcend geographic and/or temporal barriers. He thinks that among non-industrial societies, media are found in the form of petroglyphs, artwork, smoke signals, and signal drums.

Spitulnik argues that the mass media are at once artifacts, experiences, practices, and processes. They are economically-and-politically driven, linked to developments in science and technology, and bound up with the use of language. Because of these broad characteristics, she says, anthropology can approach mass media as institutions, workplaces, communicative practices, cultural products, social activities, aesthetic forms, and as historical developments.

From the above definitions it appears that mass communication did not appear after industrialization but was a part of the pre-industrialized society. Hence if Anthropology is the scientific study of humans, past and present that draws and builds upon knowledge from the social sciences, life sciences, and humanities, then isn’t it natural for anthropologist to also study mass communication?

Since the early 1980s new terms have been added to the lexicon of the anthropologist working in the field of media.

“Cultural activism” by Faye Ginsburg on how indigenous and minority peoples have begun to take up a range of media in order to “talk back” to structures of power that have erased or distorted their interests and realities. She is of the opinion that the activism is to underscore the sense of both political agency and cultural intervention that people bring to these efforts, part of a spectrum of practices of self-conscious mediation and mobilization of culture that took particular shape beginning in the late twentieth century (1993, 1997).

“The activist imaginary” coined by George Marcus is to describe how subaltern groups turn to film, video, and other media not only to “pursue traditional goals of broad-based social change through a politics of identity and representation” but also out of a utopian desire for “emancipator projects . . .

raising fresh issues about citizenship and the shape of public spheres within the frame and terms of traditional discourse on polity and civil society” (1996: 6).

Then there is the concept of “parallel maternities” of Brian Larkin, a trope used in his study of media in northern Nigeria to describe the worlds of those who are not mobile but who nonetheless, through media, “participate in the imagined realities of other cultures as part of their daily lives” through media.

Ethnographic studies of media can be best explained by the arguments of Giddens (and others) that one of the distinguishing characteristics of modernity is “the lifting out of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across infinite spans of time-space” (Giddens 1990: 21; Tomlinson 1999).

3. Objective of Anthropology of Media

As Ginsburg et. al. ( 2003) articulate, the anthropology of media emerged from a particular historical and theoretical conjuncture: the ruptures in anthropologies theory and methodology of the 1980’s and 1990’s and the development of an “anthropology of present” (Fox 1991) that engages and analyzes the transformations of the past half century in which media has played a prominent part.

For example Sara Dickey in her study on significance for the urban poor of Tamil popular cinema did ethnography of media to include producers and audiences as well as intertextual sources through which meaning was constituted. Tamil popular cinema is an industry that has a remarkable influence in the creation of political celebrity in South India, part of a “vast system of popular literature, greeting cards and posters, clothing, fashions, gossip, legends, memories, and activities supporting the stars” (1993: 41). Daniel Miller (1995: 18) was of the following opinion regarding the growing use of media more generally:

“These new technologies of objectification [such as film, video, and television] . . . create new possibilities of understanding at the same moment that they pose new threats of alienation and rupture. Yet our first concern is not to resolve these contradictions in theory but to observe how people sometimes resolve or more commonly live out these contradictions in local practice.”

Similarly Anderson’s (1991) perceives nations are “imagined communities,” then it is natural to recognize that media, from the novels and newspapers, television broadcasts and video cultures would play a crucial role in producing nations and shaping national imaginaries. For example (Spitulnik 2001) analyzes the ways that radio helped create the postcolonial nation in Zambia by formalizing language hierarchies in a multilingual state, influencing speech styles, signifying modernity itself, and even embodying the state. Similarly Mankekar (1999) talks about how a popular television serials “Ramayan” might have participated in reconfigurations of nation, culture, and community that overlapped with and reinforced Hindu nationalism in the early 1990’s.

Then there is the media circulation across national boundaries like the McLagan (1996,1997) study on the contemporary use of Western media for the representations of cultural differences meant to mobilize support for a political cause as in the case of the Tibetans.

Mark A. Peterson (2003: 3) has suggested that media anthropology has three main contributions to make:

• Thick ethnographies: In contrast to other media scholars, media anthropologists conduct relatively extended, open-ended fieldwork in which media artifacts and practices are but one part of the social worlds under study.
• Decentred West: Media anthropologists are as likely to work in remote corners of the global South as they are in metropolitan areas of Europe or North America. This wide geographical scope allows them to broaden the media research agenda from its traditional North Atlantic heartland.
• Alternative theories: Media anthropologists bring to the study of media a long disciplinary history of grappling with sociocultural complexity through theories of exchange, social formations and cultural forms. This theoretical expertise, argues Peterson, can help the field to finally leave behind the simple models of communication that dominated its earlier history.

Studying media for anthropologists is important because as Abu-Lughod has argued, “it forces us to represent people in distant villages as part of the same cultural worlds we inhabit—worlds of mass media, consumption, and dispersed communities of the imagination” (1997: 128). Anthropologists seek to grasp the ways media are integrated into communities that are parts of nations and states, as well as transnational networks and circuits produced in the worlds of late capitalism and postcolonial cultural politics. (Ginsburg et. al. 2003)

4. Writings for Anthropology of media

The parameters of an anthropologist’s key methodology are in-depth, intensive, and long-term ethnographic fieldwork (Abu-Lughod 1997; Gupta and Ferguson 1997a, 1997b; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Ortner 1999). Increasingly the anthropologists theory and practice are unbounded, multisited, traveling, or “itinerant” (Schein, 2002), a transformation that Ginsburg et. al. (2003) feel is particularly evident for those studying media.

The writing process remains the same as are the prevalent moves in anthropology. The students guide to reading and writing in Social Anthropology from Department of Anthropology, Harvard University states

“ When it comes to writing papers for social anthropology courses, the general principles of good expository writing — using and attributing sources appropriately, motivating and developing an argument, and crafting an effective organizational structure — still apply. Too often, however, student writers expend their writing energies on the conventional elements an essay is supposed to contain — introduction, thesis statement, body, and conclusion — and lose sight of what they intend these elements to do. In his helpful book entitled Rewriting, composition scholar Joseph Harris suggests paying attention to writing moves — textual strategies that authors employ to engage with ideas and to move them in new directions — as a way for students to improve their own reading and writing practices.”

It goes on to elucidate the characteristic writing moves in anthropology i.e.

•  Entering a Conversation: This is the term for the work of establishing a context and motivation for your ideas. More than simply a statement of your topic, entering a conversation entails letting the reader know which intellectual conversations you propose to join and what contribution you hope to make. For example in his paper Visual Media and the Primitivist Perplex: Colonial Fantasies, Indigenous Imagination and Advocacy in North America, Prins (1997b) writes:

Striking images of tawny humans collaged with soaring eagles or some other form of wildlife, aesthetically photographed against a backdrop of pristine wilderness—such imagery is standard fare in visual representations of indigenous peoples.

Beginning with Carpenter (1973), several anthropologists have recognized the destructive potential of such media “myths” on tribal communities (see also Biesele and Hitchcock 1999; Marshall 1993; Tomaselli 1996). More recently, some scholars have started to focus on the currency of such ideologically charged ideas in counter hegemonic strategies of indigenous self-representation (Conklin 1997; Ginsburg 1991, 1993; Prins 1989, 1997b; Turner 1992). In this essay about indigenous peoples and the politics of exotic imagery, I argue not only that indigenous person may recognize the primitivism formula, but also that some actively draw on it as a cross-cultural “structure of comprehension and imperatives for action” (Wolf 1999: 200). Having become a key element in their rhetoric of self-fashioning, it shows up in their “visual performatives” (ibid.: 56) and thus may serve as a persuasive device in their collective quest for biological and cultural survival. In previous writing I have referred to this dialectical complex as “the paradox of primitivism.”

Prins starts by readying his conceptual tool about the representation of indigenous people. He then enters into the conversation with his argument on the primivist formula and the paradox of primitivism.

•  Borrowing and Extending: Anthropologists often borrow and adapt key terms and concepts from a variety of disciplines and intellectual frameworks. For example Turner (1992) in his article Representation, Politics, and Cultural Imagination in Indigenous Video General Points and Kayapo Examples from Anthropology Today writes:

Faye Ginsburg has noted that the appropriation of visual media by indigenous peoples typically occurs in the context of movements for self determination and resistance, and that their use of video cameras tends to be “both assertive and conservative of identity,” focusing both on the documentation of conflicts with or claims against the national society and the recording of traditional culture (1991, 1995a, 1996). She makes the important point that indigenous cultural self-documentation tends to focus not on the retrieval of an idealized vision of precontact culture, but on “processes of identity construction” in the cultural present (1995a, 1995b).

The emphasis on processes of production and reception and on media as “mediation” provides a useful point of departure for my discussion of Kayapo video. “Mediation,” however, is a protean notion that can subsume many specific meanings. As most though not all anthropologists working with indigenous media have recognized, there are fundamental differences between the sorts of mediation going on in indigenous media and those involved in ethnographic film and video or in the circulation of mass-culture images and ideas by television (see, e.g., Ginsburg 1997; Hamilton 1997; Turner 1995, 1997; cf. Wiener 1997).

One major difference concerns the act of video-making itself. As video takes on political and social importance in an indigenous community, which member of the community assumes the role of video cameraperson and who makes the prestigious journey to the alien city where the editing facilities may be located become issues fraught with social and political significance, and consequently, social and political conflicts. These may seem petty issues with no connection to the grander issues of theory and politics normally addressed in the anthropological and media literature; but they are often the channels through which an indigenous community translates the wider political, cultural, and aesthetic meanings of media such as video into its own local personal and social terms. They can have cumulatively important effects on the internal politics of a community and the careers of individuals. It is especially important for non indigenous people working in the field to attend to the specific effects their projects or support may have in the communities where they work.

An outsider attempting to facilitate the use of video by a community, for either political or research purposes, by donating a camera or arranging access to editing facilities, in other words, does not escape the invidious implications and responsibilities of “intervention” simply through handing over the camera to “them.” To whom it is handed can become a very touchy issue, and may involve consequences for which the researcher bears inescapable responsibility.

Turner starts his argument by borrowing the concept from Ginsburg that in case of use of visual media by indigenous peoples more emphasis should be laid on cultural mediations that occur through film/video making rather than the formal qualities of the film/video text. He then enhances it by explaining to the readers understanding on the whole process of video making including editing by the indigenous tribe and how the act itself has an important effect on the internal politics of the community as well as on the individual involved with the video making.

•  Establishing Authority: Anthropologists employ a diverse range of textual strategies to establish themselves as credible authorities on their respective subjects. These strategies include displaying a command of the relevant scholarship, explaining one’s own positioning vis-à-vis the subjects of one’s research, or piggybacking upon another scholar’s previously established authority. But perhaps the most distinctively anthropological technique for establishing authority consists of describing and elaborating upon unique observations made in the field. For example in his paper Spectacles of Difference Cultural Activism and the Mass Mediation of Tibet, McLagan (2002) writes:

Recently a friend of mine gave me a photograph taken in the Sixty-sixth Street subway station on the West Side of Manhattan. Someone had spray painted “Free Derry” and below it “Free Tibet” on the wall, graphically linking these two modern-day anti colonial liberation struggles on different sides of the globe. At the same time, I remembered an advertisement I had seen around the city publicizing FreePhone.com’s “free long-distance calling over the Internet,” which contained the phrase “Free Tibet” in large white letters against a black background and the suggestion, “Call your best friend in Lhasa for free while he still has the oxygen to talk.” Above this, a cartoon of a multiply pierced hipster mouthing the word “Yak.” These two images reveal a movement pinned between two opposing, and at times complementary, processes—politicization and commodification.

The debates among and between Tibet activists and the public relations experts hired to help them illustrate some of the ways in which contemporary intercultural social movements have tried to negotiate a path between these two poles of mass-mediated activism. As the Tibet issue has expanded and become part of a much wider political imagination, this kind of symbolic work has become central to the Movement’s existence, but not without some concern about what effect the objectification of Tibetan culture in the mass media might have.

… The Tibet case rests on a century-long process in which democratic politics have been transformed by the emergence of mass communication, beginning with newspapers, then radio, and eventually television in the 1950s, which deepened and accelerated this trend. Since then, the political arena has been made over in light of the techniques and imperatives of this new medium, with images and spectacle becoming central to the definitions and meanings of legitimacy in politics, a fact well documented by a wide range of scholars (e.g., Boorstin 1961; Altschull 1995; Meyrowitz 1985; Marshall 1997).

McLagan establishing authority by describing and elaborating upon unique observations made in the field.

Countering: To counter is not only (or even necessarily) to criticize, although a well informed critique of another’s work may certainly form part of it. The true purpose of countering, however, is to enhance your readers’ understanding of a topic by identifying and addressing weaknesses in how it has been previously understood. For example from the author’s Ph.D thesis on Marginalization, Mobile Telephony and Consumption of New Media:

Herbert Marshall McLuhana Canadian philosopher of communication theory in his 1964 statement said “All technology is communication, an extension of ourselves that allows us to reach further through time and/or space. The sacrifice we make for this enhancement is an unnoticed auto-amputation that, combined with and Narcissistic desire and a bit of virtual phantom limb syndrome, forces us to both marvel at our feat and simultaneous experience strong senses of detachment and, eventually, conflict. Every new technology necessitates a new war,”

The above argument would mean that as any technology is a human extension all technologies should naturally be adopted and would succeed as they would be perceived as human extensions. Unfortunately through history we have seen that this does not happen. For every successful technology there are multiple ones who fail. The author borrows the concept “technology is communication” from the communication theory and goes on to argue against technology determinism to trace the causes of social changes in a society due to introduction of a new technology.

•  Stepping Back: This move entails just what its name suggests: stepping back from the particularities of a case study or research topic in order to establish its overall significance. This move is often (but by no means always) flagged by phrases such as “In sum, I argue that…” or “in this paper, I have examined…” For example, Wilk(2002) from his paper Television, Time, and the National Imaginary in Belize which is a revision of his two previously published papers (1993, 1994) notes:

If we liken Belizeans to voyeurs watching North America through an electronic peephole, we find they are united both by their common knowledge of what goes on in the United States and by their shared experience of voyeurism. So while Belizeans may make different moral judgments about what is good and bad on television, they share a common language when they debate those moral issues (Wilk 1995).

I do not want to overemphasize this unity. The country remains highly factionalized and divided by politics, ethnicity, and class. But television discourse and debate have changed existing social divisions and the alignment of factions. For example, religious organizations that used to have a very close relationship with political conservatives now find themselves sharing important common ground with the left. Both are concerned about the danger of foreign television. The Baptist minister and the nationalist student have a shared agenda, the control of foreign influence. The old nationalist program of building local cultural institutions now finds a much broader constituency and Belizean cultural production of all kinds (music, art, literature) receives broad support. Wilk qualifies his claim about social effects of foreign content being watched by Belizeans, that of bringing some sort of unity of a fractured society.

Summary

•  Communication study involves “who says what, through what channels (media) of communication, to whom, [and] what will be the results”.
•  The term ‘mass communication’ was coined, along with that of ‘mass media’, early in the twentieth century.
•  Mass media refers to the organized means of communicating openly, at a distance, and to many in a short space of time.
•  Media anthropology is a new field of interdisciplinary studies and is the point of contact for the fields of anthropology and communications.
•  Ginsburg et. al. ( 2003) was of the opinion that for many years mass media was seen as almost a taboo topic for anthropology.
•  Today anthropologist recognize the social cultural significance of Films, Television, Video, Radio and the New media as a part of everyday life in many parts of the world .
•  Media Anthropology is defined as the application of instruments (theories, concepts, research methods)from the field of science , cultural anthropology onto an investigated object , in this case media i.e. communication mediated by technologies and institutions , be it mass or group, “big” or “small”.(Spitulnik, 2002)
•  Studying media for anthropologists is important because as Abu-Lughod has argued, “it forces us to represent people in distant villages as part of the same cultural worlds we inhabit—worlds of mass media, consumption, and dispersed communities of the imagination”
•  Mark A. Peterson (2003: 3) has suggested that media anthropology has three main contributions to make: Thick ethnographies, Decentred West and Alternative theories.
•  The writing process remains the same as are the prevalent moves in anthropology.
•  Characteristic writing moves in anthropology are: Entering a Conversation, Borrowing and Extending, Establishing Authority, Countering and Stepping Back.