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Worlds Collide
The Meeting of Mass Media and Anthropology

It might be said that the field of anthropology and the technologies of mass media arose, more or less simultaneously, as consequences of global modernity. And yet, until relatively recently, anthropologists had very little to say about the media. Mass media researchers seemed equally uninterested in the field of anthropology. In more recent years – roughly since the beginning of the twenty-first century – anthropologists and media specialists alike have reversed this mutual disinterest. A flourishing crossover of research and media-making brings together the traditionally anthropological interests in human diversity and culture, and the technologies and future-oriented possibilities of media practice and media scholarship. With the advent of the digital era, the anthropology of media and communication has boomed, and the methods and theories of anthropology have acquired a significance in media scholarship that was not previously the case. The purpose of this book, then, is to chart the mutual disinterest and subsequent love affair that has taken place between the fields of anthropology and media studies, and to understand how and why such a transformation has taken place.

The Birth of Anthropology and the Search for the Exotic

Social anthropology, a discipline which arose from a desire to explore and understand the widest global variations of human culture, began to flourish in the late nineteenth century, riding the waves of colonial expansion in which Europeans and North Americans (artists, merchants, farmers, soldiers and the occasional anthropologist) came increasingly into contact with an ever-greater diversity of societies around the world. When James George Frazer published his famously hefty comparative study of world religions The Golden Bough in 1890, anthropology was still largely a field of research to be theorized from armchairs in Cambridge. But during the following decades, anthropology developed a definitive methodological approach based on extensive field research, and a deep commitment to immersing researchers (and their readers) in other ways of life. By the middle of the twentieth century, social anthropology had established itself as a field of the social sciences to be found in universities across the United Kingdom and Western Europe, as well as in growing numbers of Commonwealth countries, including South Africa and Australia. In the United States, a slightly different trajectory also established anthropology as a four-field discipline, with most universities offering teaching across the four fields of cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, linguistics and archaeology. Of these fields, cultural anthropology was particularly dedicated to understanding the patterns, systems and lifestyles of diverse peoples.1

Whether in the North American or British traditions, the core of twentieth-century anthropology was based upon a history of researching radically different societies to unpack the underlying principles that make them tick; the anthropological tradition of long-term fieldwork could perhaps be most classically exemplified by the image of Bronislaw Malinowski, a British-trained Pole, living on the Trobriand Islands of Melanesia, studying the lives and beliefs of Trobriand Islanders and explaining how practices that seemed illogical and mysterious to a person thinking from the Western tradition could ‘make sense’ when placed within their local framework. While aspects of Malinowski's work, his methods and aspects of his personal engagement with Trobrianders have been criticized in subsequent decades, his contribution to the myths and the methods of anthropology endure. His image is often invoked as a stereotype of how anthropologists were (and sometimes still are) imagined: that of a white man in a faraway place, surrounded by exotic Others, spending years learning their ways and then writing up his findings for an academic audience assumed to be ‘back home’ in Europe. In the North American tradition, and also in places like Australia, many anthropologists may not have left their homelands to find the people they wanted to study, but in the study of Native American or Australian Aboriginal communities, scholars working in settler societies were also focused on understanding the radically different forms of life that lay within their national borders.

It is important to understand how deeply anthropology as a discipline was rooted in this tradition of researchers looking for forms of society radically different from their own from which to theorize the social world, because the starting point of this chapter is to argue that anthropologists’ focus on looking for the most exotic, the most faraway, the most tribal or traditional or esoteric forms of life explained their general reluctance to engage with the topic of media for quite a long time. Many anthropologists have long worked across a full range of societies and communities, so that doing work ‘in the field’ could mean doing research anywhere from remote tribes to industrial mines, from suburban neighbourhoods to scientific laboratories. But traditional, classical anthropology was developed with the assumption of a radical difference between the anthropologist, usually imagined as white or European, and the subjects they study. It was an image in which shared practices of modernity, such as listening to the radio or watching a television broadcast, did not sit easily. Anthropological theories were directed to other topics, such as the practice of rituals or the belief in supernatural forces. In seeking to uncover some universal rules of human existence, evidence was sought in the most seemingly esoteric examples of human diversity.

As a result, anthropology's earliest attempts to study the presence of media tended to emphasize what a shift this was from their discipline's most typical mode of enquiry. One pioneer, American anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, published a study of Hollywood in the 1940s, which opened with an illustration of just such a leap, as she considered what might happen when ‘An Anthropologist Looks at the Movies’:

Powdermaker contended that anthropologists ‘can use the same general premises and point of view in the study of motion pictures as an institution of contemporary society’. While her work was rooted in the language and theories of its time, the core of Powdermaker's approach in this study was about forty years ahead of mainstream anthropology. Here she drew from the tradition of a discipline that developed with reference to non-Western ways of living, and tried to turn that traditional approach on to the structures and practices of her own society. Comparing Hollywood to the Kwakiutl of North America (among other classic anthropological subjects), Powdermaker considered how films convey essential values of American society by producing and reproducing myths. Recurrent themes found in films, particularly themes of romantic love, indicate the organizing principles through which modern Americans are expected to live their lives. As Powdermaker emphasized, such myths may focus on values far removed from the experiences of everyday life. While Americans may talk and think about love in their films, other priorities such as work and money inevitably would come into play in their actual engagement with twentieth-century capitalism.

An Anthropologist Goes to the Movies

Hortense Powdermaker

Hortense Powdermaker (1900–70) was a teacher, trade-union organiser and anthropologist. From a German-Jewish middle-class family in Baltimore, Powdermaker studied anthropology at the London School of Economics, where she received her PhD. Her first book, entitled Life in Lesu (1933), documented Powdermaker's ten months of fieldwork as the first anthropologist in the village of Lesu in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. But in her subsequent career Hortense Powdermaker worked on topics closer to home, including race relations in the Southern United States, and the Hollywood film industry, with Hollywood: The Dream Factory (1950). Although her work has rarely been cited in histories of anthropology and is thought to have made little theoretical impact, in many respects Powdermaker's approach to anthropology was ahead of its time. For one thing, Powdermaker thought about both the production and the consumption of Hollywood movies; when writing of Hollywood producers, she was extremely critical of the politics of representation and the harsh realities of Hollywood as an industry, and anticipated many of the concerns of critical and cultural studies since raised by scholars:

In writing about consumers, Powdermaker wanted to understand the particular allure of...