# Anthropology of Media

## Putting the Mass into Media

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Define the basic function of media.
2. Distinguish basic media from mass media.
3. Describe the social phenomenon of technophilia.
4. Explain why culture is important to the study of media.
People today live in an era of technophilia—that is, an age when people embrace technologies and incorporate them into every part of their lives, particularly their social lives. In contrast to the inert functionality of old-school cameras, watches, radios, and televisions, the new “smart” gadgets interact with their users, learn from them, make suggestions, and contact their friends and family members. Insofar as they facilitate users’ interactions with other people and the world around them, these smart technologies become part of their users, akin to an extra organ for sensation and communication. Insofar as they communicate with users, nudging and prodding them, they become like a friend or family member themselves.
Part of what makes these smart technologies so attractive (and addictive) is that they function as means of connecting people to one another, carrying messages and data to other individuals and groups. As instruments of communication, all of these technologies are forms of media. At the most basic level, media are tools for storing and sharing information.
In this basic sense, media have always been essential to the development and durability of human culture. Early forms of symbolic communication, such as cave paintings and ancient writing systems, can be considered media, as they provided people with ways of fixing meaning in material objects that could be shared with people in other places and other times. The scope of these early forms of media was limited, however, by their singularity. People could visit a cave painting, but they could not send a copy of it to their friends. A scholar could inscribe a story on a cuneiform tablet, but that tablet could not be reproduced for a wider audience without the painstaking work of inscribing copies one by one. Up until 1000 CE, scholars in many parts of the world specialized in manually copying books and pamphlets, sometimes using wooden block prints carved out by hand. These methods were so expensive that only the very wealthy could afford to buy written forms of media.
All of this changed with the invention of the printing press, first in China and then in Germany (Frost 2021). Around 1000 CE, the Chinese artisan Bi Sheng created a set of blocks out of baked clay, each one manually inscribed with a Chinese character. To publish a page of text, he arranged the character blocks on an iron frame that could be pressed against an iron plate to create a print. Around 1440, the German entrepreneur Johannes Gutenberg independently invented a similar system of movable-type printing. Gutenberg also created a set of blocks, each one containing a letter, but his were made of metal. He used his invention to print calendars, pamphlets, and 180 now-famous copies of the Bible. Within decades, the printing press had spread from Germany to France, Italy, Spain, England, and the rest of western Europe.
If manual writing systems are basic forms of media, then mechanically reproduced forms of communication are forms of mass media. Whereas forms of basic media operate between one sender and a small number of receivers, forms of mass media operate through a sender, a machine, and a potentially very large number of receivers. Originating in books and pamphlets produced using the movable-type printing press, the category of mass media has expanded over time with the development of new technologies, including photography, radio, television, and the Internet. Mass media are forms of communication facilitated by technology, allowing for broad distribution and reception by large numbers of people.
When considered from this angle, it may seem that technology is the most defining element of mass media. As machines, communication technologies might seem to function much the same in any context. When European printing presses were brought to Africa in the 19th century, they were used to publish newspapers that bore a family resemblance to European ones. If someone enables their mobile phone to function in another country while on vacation, they can use it to call their hotel or hail an Uber in much the same way they would use their phone at home.
Because communication technologies seem to function in uniform ways across contexts, people often assume that mass media are pretty much the same everywhere. Some provide news on current events. Some provide diversion and entertainment. Some allow users to communicate with individuals and groups. In this case, the differences one might see in mass media forms across cultures would be differences in technological sophistication or penetration, the word media scholars use to describe how widespread a communication technology is in a certain context.
Have you ever seen a Ghanaian video film? These are low-budget Ghanaian movies shot on video camera, usually completed within a few weeks and aimed at local audiences. They deal with social themes such as witchcraft and corruption, often combined with Christian redemption. Such video films are frequently criticized (by locals and foreigners alike) for their rudimentary editing and poor production values. When compared to Hollywood blockbuster movies, with their multimillion-dollar budgets and complex technological production processes, African video films may seem like a poor replica of the American form.
But that is not how West Africans view locally made video films. While many Ghanaians enjoy watching American films from time to time, the themes and issues explored in foreign films fail to resonate with their own experiences and concerns. In contrast, local video films engage with the desires and fears of Ghanaians, reinforcing forms of social identity and echoing familiar norms and values. Even as many Ghanaians criticize the rustic editing and uneven sound levels, local video films remain enormously popular among West African audiences.
Anthropologist Tejaswini Ganti (2012) conducted ethnographic research on the film industry in India. She describes how Indian films developed from rustic, homegrown forms of local entertainment to technologically sophisticated spectacles, forming the globalized industry of Bollywood. Ganti situates this transformation in the larger economic shifts of the 1990s and the accompanying neoliberal emphasis on global trade and middle-class consumerism in India. While earlier films focus on themes involving working-class and marginalized peoples, later films more often dramatize the lives of the professional, highly educated, and affluent classes. Thus, Ganti links the themes, technologies, and economic contexts of these films.
While technology may seem to be the defining feature of mass media, it is the immersion of communication technologies in local cultures that produces the total experience of mass media. At heart, mass media are not just technologies but forms of communication—technological vehicles for conveying forms of cultural meaning from senders to receivers. The language, images, symbols, and sounds used to convey meaning are all elements of culture. The thematic content of mass media is also profoundly cultural, shaped by local contexts of production and reception. Ways of consuming and interacting with mass media are also heavily determined by local social norms.


# Anthropology of Media

## Putting Culture into Media Studies

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Describe how an anthropologist might use participant observation to study media.
2. Explain the relationship between modernity and media.
3. Give an example illustrating the complex relationship between media and culture.
4. Define the concept of cosmopolitanism.
In this section, the author of this chapter, Jennifer Hasty, describes her own experience using participant observation.


# Anthropology of Media

## Visual Anthropology and Ethnographic Film

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Give examples of the early use of visual media in ethnographic fieldwork.
2. Define the field of visual anthropology.
3. Describe two examples of ethnographic film.
4. Explain the ethical challenges associated with ethnographic film.
Although the subfield of media anthropology is relatively new, anthropologists have been incorporating media technologies into their methods of research and ethnographic representation since the early 20th century. An early pioneer of visual methods, Margaret Mead took some 200 photographs as part of her first fieldwork project in Samoa (Tiffany 2005). In the 1930s, Mead and Gregory Bateson used both photography and film in their joint fieldwork in Bali and New Guinea. Mead and Bateson embraced visual media as an innovative means of learning about social life and used photos and film to study childhood, public ceremonies, and dance. Together, they took about 33,000 photographs and recorded about 32,600 feet of film as part of their joint research (Jacknis 2020). Focusing on child development and dance, they used these visual materials to produce two photographic ethnographies and seven short films.
Visual anthropology is either the use of visual media as a research method or its study as a research topic. Whether they consider themselves visual anthropologists or not, most anthropologists take photos of the people and places they encounter in their fieldwork. Visual anthropologists go further, using photography and film to document important events for fine-grained future analysis. As moments frozen in time, photographs allow for analytical contemplation and shared consideration. Film can be slowed down or sped up to focus on certain aspects of individual action or group dynamics that might otherwise go unnoticed. Images may be magnified to reveal minute details. Both film and photography allow for images to be placed side by side for comparison.
Visual anthropologists are also interested in how people in the cultures they study produce their own visual representations in the form of art, photography, and film. Visual anthropologists are interested in popular paintings, billboards, and graffiti as well as forms of photography and film.
Early on, cultural anthropologists recognized that visual media made it possible to share the experiences encountered during anthropological research with their colleagues and students, and the general public. One example of many is the film Trance and Dance in Bali (1951), written and narrated by Mead, which features a Balinese dance called the kris. The kris dance dramatizes the story of a witch whose daughter is rejected as a bride to the king. In retaliation, the witch plots to spread chaos and pestilence in the land. When the king sends an emissary with a convoy of servants to stop the nefarious plan, the witch turns the emissary into a dragon. She then causes the followers of the dragon to fall into trance. When the dragon-emissary revives his followers, they emerge in a somnambulant state, stabbing themselves with daggers but inflicting no harm. After dancing the kris dance, the dancers are brought out of their trance with incense and holy water. Included in the US Library of Congress, this stunning early use of film in anthropology can be viewed at the Library of Congress website or on YouTube.
Ethnographic film is the use of film in ethnographic representation as either a method, a record, or a means of reporting on anthropological fieldwork. Like documentary films, ethnographic films are nonfiction films in which live-action shots are edited and shaped into a central narrative drama. While the line between documentary and ethnographic film is blurry, ethnographic film is associated with the work of professional anthropologists and tends to focus explicitly on depictions of sociocultural processes.
Before Mead and Bateson’s professional use of film, several filmmakers had made amateur ethnographic films depicting aspects of non-Western cultures. The very popular film Nanook of the North (1922), made by explorer Robert Flaherty and based on 16 months of living with the Inuit, follows an Inuit family in the Canadian Arctic. The film focuses on the heroism of husband Nanook and wife Nyla as they struggle against the harsh elements to meet their needs and raise their children. The film documents Inuit lifeways such as traveling by dogsled and kayak, hunting walrus, and building an igloo out of glacier ice. In one controversial scene, the family visits a Canadian trading fort, where they express astonishment at instruments of modernity such as a phonograph. Though the film has been praised for its representation of Indigenous peoples as courageous and hardworking, others have criticized Flaherty for staging some of the events and even having his own common-law wife play the role of Nanook’s wife in the film. Like Mead and Bateson’s film, Nanook of the North is now held by the Library of Congress as one of the most significant examples of early documentary filmmaking. While some consider Nanook to be a precursor to ethnographic film, anthropologist Franz Boas dismissed it as completely irrelevant to anthropology due to Flaherty’s use of artifice and staging (Schäuble 2018). The film can be viewed at the Internet Archive or on YouTube.
From its roots in both amateur and professional filmmaking, ethnographic film became an increasingly important tool for teaching and popularizing anthropological research throughout the 20th century. In the 1950s, John Marshall and Timothy Asch pioneered a more objective, naturalist style of ethnographic film, attempting to avoid Western narratives and exoticization. With the development of the ability to simultaneously record sound in the 1960s, the commentary and conversations of people represented in ethnographic films became audible (even if translations still appeared in subtitles). Subjects could now address the camera directly. Around the same time, anthropologists began considering the power dynamics embedded in the production of ethnographic film—in particular, the ethical issues involved in White Western researchers controlling the representation of non-Western peoples.
Responding to these ethical challenges, many ethnographic filmmakers have turned away from the heavily crafted narrative methods of films such as Nanook toward a more purist style that represents unfolding action with little editing. New methods of representation have emerged, revealing the very act of filming itself and highlighting the relationship between filmmakers and those being filmed. Rather than using film as a means of teaching anthropology to students and the public, some experimental filmmakers conceptualize film as the creation of an entirely new sociocultural experience. The experimental ethnographic film Manakamana, for instance, directed by Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez and released in 2013, comprises 11 long shots of Nepalese pilgrims taking cable car rides to a mountaintop temple in Nepal. Rather than teaching the viewer about an anthropological topic, Manakamana provides live-action portraits of people and their relationships against the backdrop of the rugged landscape passing below them. Spray and Velez are collaborators in Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, a project dedicated to the experimental use of multisensory methods to create ethnographic media. You can view a trailer for the film on YouTube.


# Anthropology of Media

## Photography, Representation, and Memory

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Define the gaze and list important features of this concept.
2. Give an example of the imperial gaze in popular photographic media.
3. Describe the use of photography in colonial contexts.
4. Discuss local techniques of self-representation through popular photography.
In addition to creating their own visual media, visual anthropologists conduct research on how the people they study produce visual media to represent themselves as well as cultural others.
Have you ever browsed through a copy of the magazine National Geographic? In the latter half of the 20th century, many American schools and middle-class households subscribed to this magazine as an educational resource for school-age children. Founded in 1888, the magazine has developed a reputation for its colorfully illustrated coverage of science, geography, history, and world cultures. Now owned in part by the Walt Disney Company, the magazine is published in 40 languages and has a global circulation of over six million.
What strikes many young people about National Geographic is not so much the informative textual content but rather the alluring images of non-Western peoples. Cultural anthropologist Catherine Lutz and sociologist Jane Collins (1993) set out to study how National Geographic depicted people in contexts outside the United States and western Europe. In their holistic approach, they conducted research into the production process at National Geographic, then subjected the photographs to rigorous content analysis, and finally interviewed people about how they made sense of the images.
Based on analysis of 600 National Geographic photos depicting non-Western peoples from 1950 to 1986, Lutz and Collins noted that the magazine portrayed non-Western peoples as exotic, idealized, and close to nature. Very rarely did photographs in the magazine reveal any traces of the complex colonial and postcolonial histories of their subjects or their entanglements in national and global processes. Instead, National Geographic photographs tended to depict happy people immersed in purely traditional lifeways. Without historical or political context, the apparent difference between “us” (the viewer) and “them” (the people depicted in the photographs) would seem to be developmental or evolutionary. In other words, the people depicted in the images were made to seem simpler or more backward than those viewing the images. Perhaps, the images seem to suggest, “they” have not yet achieved modernity. While emphasizing a theme of common humanity, the magazine nonetheless reproduced primitivist and orientalist stereotypes about non-Western peoples while obscuring the historical and political processes that have shaped their equally complex lifeways.

### The Gaze of Photography

In the 1970s, film scholars developed the concept of the gaze to refer both to specific ways that viewers look at images of other people in visual media and to the gazes of those depicted within the images. Gaze theory attempts to understand what it means to view people and events through mass media.
Two key features of the gaze are important to this goal. First, the object being gazed at (the person or people in the image) is not aware of the viewer. This makes the gaze voyeuristic, like an anonymous peeping Tom looking through a window into a house. The gazer knows what is going, on but the people in the house (or the image) do not know they’re being watched. Second, and because of the first point, the gaze implies a psychological relationship of power; the watching person has the power to scrutinize, analyze, and judge the watched people. The watcher can manipulate the perspective and conditions of watching. The watcher reserves the power to make sense of the image and to use the image however they please—for knowledge, pleasure, or criticism.
British film theorist Laura Mulvey (1975) used the concept of the gaze to develop a feminist approach to film studies. The male gaze describes how men look at women through any visual medium and even in everyday life. Beauty culture in western Europe and the United States positions women as objects to be gazed upon by men (and other women). Media scholars argue that women come to view themselves through the gaze of others, particularly men, who evaluate the attractiveness and desirability of their bodies. Thus, rather than experiencing her selfhood directly, a woman’s self-image is routed through the male gaze.
The concept of the gaze is also used to think about other sociocultural power relations, particularly the historical processes of imperialism and colonialism. In the colonial period, the desire for conquest motivated strategic ways of gazing at cultural others. Through forms of media and image making developed in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Europeans developed an imperial gaze, positioning themselves as viewers of non-Western peoples. In the visual practices of empire, such as surveys and documentary photography, the lands and peoples were scrutinized, subjected to the domineering eye of European colonizers. The depictions of non-Western peoples in National Geographic are current manifestations of the imperial gaze.

### Photography and the Colonial Gaze

Photography was invented in the early 19th century and became widespread in the period when European countries were beginning to establish formal colonial rule over African, Middle Eastern, and Asian territories. In colonial contexts, the imperial gaze framed how Europeans photographed colonial landscapes and colonized peoples, positioning them in strategic ways to justify colonial rule.
As the head of the Basel Mission Society’s large archive of colonial photographs, historian Paul Jenkins (1993) has studied pictures taken by Swiss and German missionaries in Africa. The Basel Mission Society (BMS) was a Christian missionary group that participated in the larger trend of Christian missionizing in Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Jenkins’s inquiry sought to understand what the BMS photos reveal about the people in the photographs, the people who took the photos, and the wider conditions in which the photos were taken.
Jenkins’s analysis focuses on one particular missionary, Christian Hornberger, who worked in southeastern Ghana in the late 19th century. In 1863, the BMS asked Hornberger to take photographs depicting missionary activities in Ghana to be sold to European Christians who donated to the African missionary effort. Hornberger took many pictures of African children, the mission station, the local landscape, and scenes from Indigenous life. Jenkins points out that the earliest photographs taken by Hornberger emphasize the strangeness of African peoples and environments, while the later ones seem to emphasize the kind of common humanity found in later National Geographic photos. In Hornberger’s later photographs, Africans are depicted in ways that would have been familiar to many Europeans: families are shown eating dinner together, women are depicted grinding corn, and local craftspeople are shown creating pottery.
A set of photographs of children dressed in European clothing caught Jenkins’s eye. Who were these children, and why were there so many photos of them? Where were their parents? Digging deeper, Jenkins discovered that these were local “slave children” (1993, 100) bought into freedom by missionaries and taken to live on the mission compound. In West Africa at the time, people who fell into debt could “pawn” their children to work as servants in lieu of paying the debt. Sometimes, children were given to the priests of local shrines as payment for wrongdoing or gratitude for good fortune. As early Christian missionaries did not initially have much luck converting local peoples to Christianity, some BMS missionaries saw this practice as a way to both accumulate converts and drum up European support. BMS missionaries began offering European supporters the opportunity to “purchase” the freedom of a particular child, give the child a Christian name, and provide for the child’s food, clothing, and other needs. Most of the African children in BMS photos of the time are subjects of this child-sponsorship program.
While this may have seemed like a win-win scheme all around, the “liberation” of African slave children was apparently experienced by the many of the children as a new form of enslavement. Most were unhappy living on the mission compound, divorced from their home cultures, forced to wear uncomfortable clothing and speak a strange language. Many of them ran away, back to the families they had been serving before the missionaries intervened. By 1868, the BMS was forced to abandon the whole scheme. The backstory of Hornberger’s photographs of these children vividly illustrates the strategic artifice of the imperial gaze—how missionaries used photography to position themselves as saviors while local people often saw them as agents of colonial domination. The entire collection of photographs from the Basel Mission Society is archived at the BM Archives website.

### The Modernity of Postcolonial Photography

Focusing on more contemporary contexts, many media anthropologists analyze the images produced by postcolonial subjects themselves, along with the producers of those images and the production process. Rather than scrutinizing the imperial or ethnographic gaze, these scholars are interested in local forms of gazing at the self and others in photographs.
Anthropologist Liam Buckley (2000) has conducted research on studio photography in the West African country of Gambia. Through interviews with photographers and their subjects, Buckley traced the development of photographic strategies from the more realist style of the 1950s to the more fanciful and imaginative style common from the 1970s to the early 2000s.
In the 1950s, photographs were valued for faithfully depicting the character, mood, and personality of the subject, what people referred to as . More recently, people began to prefer being photographed against elaborate studio backdrops depicting scenes of modern leisure and cosmopolitan travels. A staging popular with young people in particular features the subject relaxing amid an array of appliances, such as radio, television, and an open refrigerator full of cold beverages and tasty foods. Some backdrops depict subjects climbing the stairs to board an airplane or visiting a foreign tourist destination. Gambians use the term  to describe the props and imported goods included in these scenes, which might include bicycles, pens, and sunglasses. Young people use these objects to “‘complete’ themselves” (Buckley, 2000), thus using the photograph as a form of aspirational identity formation. The goal of this form of portraiture is not to depict personal jikko but rather to represent , a sense of fashionable novelty and change.


# Anthropology of Media

## News Media, the Public Sphere, and Nationalism

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Describe the worldview presented in news media.
2. Define the concept of the public sphere.
3. Explain the importance of the public sphere to the study of news media.
4. Distinguish from independent media.
While photography arrests attention with images, the various genres of news media draw people in with narratives about what’s going on in their local communities and the larger world. A person who reads or views the news learns not only about current events but also about what counts as a current event—and, implicitly, what doesn’t count as news (and thus doesn’t matter to other people and shouldn’t really matter to them). People learn to view the world in a certain way and to position their communities and themselves within that worldview. The top stories in national newspapers typically highlight the actions of political and economic leaders as the most important stories of the day. Political news is presented as an unfolding drama within or among nation-states—the United States establishes sanctions against Myanmar, for instance, or China takes action against Hong Kong protesters. Economic news is dominated by the gyrations of capitalist markets, both global and national, emphasizing the perspectives of the investors and business owners who make (or lose) money in those markets. Like the discipline of economics, news media take a market-centered approach to covering the economy, rather than a people-centered approach that might highlight labor conditions or environmental effects.
Some of the first news media were handwritten weekly newssheets that circulated in Venice in the 16th century, relaying information about European politics and wars. In the early 17th century, German and Dutch publishers began using the printing press to mass-produce newspapers for the growing population of literate readers in Europe, mainly merchants and lower-level government officials. Early newspapers reflected forms of discussion and debate emerging from the coffeehouses and salons of Europe, dominated by the concerns of the rising merchant classes that participated in those public arenas of discourse. German scholar Jurgen Habermas (1989) links this process to the emergence of the public sphere. Ideally, the public sphere is a domain of social life where people represent, learn about, and discuss the important issues of the day. It is distinct from both the private economic sphere and the sphere of public authority, including government, the military, and the police. The public sphere provides an important stage for the expression of a wide range of popular opinions with the goal of reaching consensus and influencing government policy. According to Habermas, newspapers were essential to the construction of the public sphere in western Europe and therefore were fundamental tools in the emergence of democratic forms of rule. A summary of Habermas’s foundational argument about the rise and eventual corruption of the public sphere can be viewed on YouTube.
Moreover, newspapers were key to processes of language standardization, uniting audiences from regional communities speaking various, sometimes mutually unintelligible dialects. As mentioned in a previous chapter, newspapers thus laid the foundation for the “imagined community” of the nation-state.
A glance at any national newspaper, whether in print or online, demonstrates how news media continue to serve as tools in the construction of public spheres and imagined communities today. With the invention of new genres of media, news discourse has expanded into radio, television, and the Internet, providing an even stronger force for the consolidation of national identities. Conducting research in Malaysia, media anthropologist John Postill (2006) describes how the Malaysian government strategically used state-sponsored media to consolidate a unified nation-state out of an ethnically diverse collection of former colonies. In one community, that of the Iban people on the island of Borneo, the state replaced local-language media with Malaysian-language media in an effort to bind the Iban more tightly to the state. Rather than completely erasing cultural differences within the nation-state, however, the Malaysian state media promoted a certain version of Iban “cultural heritage” while simultaneously undermining Iban political and cultural autonomy.
State media are media that are entirely or partially owned by the government. In many countries, including most African ones, the state has its own media apparatus, including a news agency, newspapers, and radio and television stations. Independent media are media that are privately owned. But wait, one might ask, isn’t all news media supposed to be independent from government? If a state had its own news media, wouldn’t that just be propaganda? In the United States, news media have traditionally emphasized journalistic independence and even critical opposition to the government. News media are thought to be the “watchdogs of the people,” maintaining critical pressure on government leaders and institutions in order to maintain accountability and prevent corruption and abuse of power. This notion that journalists should be critical of government is a near-universal tenet of professional journalism in capitalist democracies. However, even in the United States, the government is heavily involved in shaping news texts and organizations. Through briefings and press releases, the White House press secretary and other public relations officials exert considerable control over the representation of the positions and activities of government officials. The American government funds the global media organization Voice of America, producing radio, television, and digital content in more than 47 languages all over the world. However, the most prominent American news organizations are independently owned and produced.
But are privately owned news media in capitalist countries completely independent? Rather than being dominated by the government, privately owned media are subject to the forces of the market as well as the demands of owners and investors. That is, their commitment to the truth may be challenged by their desire to sell their media to the largest audiences. If sensationalized conflict and conspiracy theories attract audiences, news media may become dominated by misleading half-truths and divisive fantasies. Another strong force threatening the independence of private media is the desire to sell lucrative advertising space to powerful business interests. If the people who pay for advertising favor a market-centered approach to economic issues, then stories about working conditions and environmentalism are likely to be marginalized by market news.
How do journalists handle the conflict between the pressures of government and commercial interests and their role as watchdogs for the public interest? For a firsthand example, read this account by chapter author, Jennifer Hasty,


# Anthropology of Media

## Community, Development, and Broadcast Media

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Explain how radio is associated with different themes and audiences than print media.
2. Define the concept of community radio.
3. Explain how community radio gives expression to local forms of identity and social action.
4. Define the notion of Indigenous media.
The media scholar Marshall McLuhan is famous for his aphorism “the medium is the message” (1964, 23). What he meant by this is that each genre of media has its own set of features that suggest certain uses and kinds of content. In contrast to print media, radio allows for real-time talk and discussion as well as music. Radio reaches beyond the limited audience of avid readers who have time to focus on text to wider audiences of listeners who may be too busy to read or have not had access to formal education. As an oral medium, radio lends itself more readily to linguistic diversity. In places where many languages are spoken, often the language of state is the only one that circulates in written form, while the rest function as spoken languages only. Print media may therefore be limited to dominant languages, while the oral genre of radio can provide content in alternative and even multiple languages. Finally, while reading print media is largely a solitary and silent experience, radio provides a shared and noisy experience. A personal experience shared by Jennifer Hasty illustrates this.
Because of its distinctive features, the genre of radio is not as narrowly focused as print media on themes of political economy such as nationalism and democracy. While including attention to current events, radio typically provides listeners with a wider variety of content, including music, talk shows, drama, and quiz shows. In an effort to provide relevant content to the broadest spectrum of listeners in an area, local radio stations design their programming to reflect the tastes and issues of particular communities. Certainly, print media does this to some degree, but the audience for print media constitutes a narrower segment of the community. Radio attempts to address the community as a whole.
Commercial and state radio are dominant forces in the media landscapes of most countries, but an alternative form, community radio, has been growing rapidly in recent decades. Community radio refers to radio stations that are community owned and operated, staffed by groups of professionals and volunteers. The involvement of local volunteers allows for community participation in programming, production, and on-air performance. Community radio stations often focus on local current events, educational programs, and development initiatives. Typically, they are low wattage with minimal range and thus are nonprofit.
In places where people want to start up a community radio station but lack the capital and technological know-how, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and development organizations have provided support in partnership with community organizations. Such collaborations between community groups and foreign NGOs have made possible the start-up of community radio stations in many countries, including Nepal, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. Throughout Africa, community radio stations sponsored by government and/or NGOs have been used to educate rural peoples about farming methods and spread public interest health messages. In Thailand, the global leader in community radio, more than 7,000 independent radio stations have been started since 2001.
Established in 1997, the Nepalese station Radio Sagarmatha was the first independent community radio station in South Asia. The station was started by the Nepal Forum of Environmental Journalists in an effort to break the government monopoly on radio and provide better coverage of community issues. Regulated by government, Radio Sagarmatha is not allowed to address political or economic issues. Focusing instead on community development, the station features daily discussion programs addressing such issues as public health, education, women’s empowerment, and workers’ concerns. Though not explicitly political, the station identifies itself as the defender of democracy and free speech in Nepal, giving voice to the people. In 2005, the army raided the studio, seizing equipment and arresting staff for rebroadcasting a BBC interview with a politician. The station reemerged after the incident and remains on air today. With 2.5 million regular listeners, Radio Sagarmatha is one of the largest and most successful community radio stations in the world.
Community radio stations in Brazil have faced similar forms of government regulation and harassment. Anthropologist Derek Pardue (2011) describes the expansion of community radio in the wake of political liberalization in the 1980s. As of 2013, there were 4,700 community radio stations operating in Brazil, an increase of 70 percent since 2002. Moreover, approximately 5,000 such stations have been shut down by government, their equipment confiscated and management prosecuted as felons. Associated with free speech and political activism, community radio attracts involvement by counterculture artists and performers such as the hip-hop communities of impoverished favela neighborhoods in São Paulo. Through community radio, local hip-hop artists narrate their stories of hardship and heroism, defining their spatially marginal neighborhoods as economically and politically marginalized periferias (peripheries). Pardue describes how community radio gives hip-hop artists and other community members a platform for demonstrating their awareness of social issues and command of information. Using slang that signals racial and class identities, they publicize otherwise unreported events and perspectives such as police violence and gang activities, providing a much more inclusive public sphere than commercial media.
In Australia, more than 400 independent radio stations broadcast in 70 different community languages. Many of these community radio stations have been started by Indigenous Australian communities as a means of cultural survival and language preservation. Indigenous media refers to the use of media by Indigenous communities for community identity, cultural representation, and activism. In the 1990s, some Indigenous broadcasters developed the ability to link community radio stations together in regional and national networks. As many Indigenous community stations featured call-in request programs, the linking of stations allowed a person in one community to publicly greet a relative in a faraway community with a song dedication. Anthropologist Daniel Fisher (2009) describes how radio has become a way for Indigenous Australian people to celebrate kinship connections in the context of kin dispersal due to government policy, travel, work, and incarceration. Throughout the 20th century, Indigenous children were seized from their families and sent to state institutions and foster homes in order to assimilate them into White Australian settler culture. In the present, Indigenous family ties are further troubled by the disproportionate numbers of young men incarcerated in Australian prisons. In this context, call-in request shows have become wildly popular on Indigenous radio networks, as relatives phone in to dedicate emotionally charged songs about love, separation, and loss to relatives in distant places.
Inspired by a wide variety of social issues, community radio is catching hold in the United States as well. In response to the domination of American radio by large media corporations, the US Congress passed the Local Community Radio Act in 2010, authorizing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to provide licenses to low-powered community radio stations. A group of community organizers in Madrid, New Mexico, just outside of Albuquerque, was awarded a license and began broadcasting KMRD 96.9 in 2015. As an alternative to commercial radio programming, KMRD, like many community stations, features more diverse and locally relevant content. Local DJs host call-in and talk programs about community issues and spin a wide variety of music, including alternative, pop, techno, garage, folk, and western. Local bands get frequent airplay, stimulating the local music scene. On Monday nights, you can hear a program devoted to African music, hosted by the author of this chapter. Those not within range of the station can listen to KRMD online. Over a thousand new community radio stations have emerged as a result of the Local Community Radio Act.


# Anthropology of Media

## Broadcasting Modernity and National Identity

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Identify ways in which governments and development organizations use broadcast media.
2. Detail forms of modernity conveyed by broadcast media in non-Western contexts.
3. Explain the cultural significance of soap opera.
4. Describe the relationship between broadcast media and religious identities and experiences.
Broadcast media are, of course, not always grassroots tools of community expression and development. Even outside of the commercial domain, forms of radio and television are produced by development organizations and state governments to address specific development goals, a more top-down model of community broadcasting. Throughout the 1980s, a radio project for delivering basic education was carried out in the Dominican Republic by the US Agency for International Development. The project was designed to reach schoolchildren living in mountainous and isolated regions of the country. Gathering around radios in community centers, children listened to lessons on reading, math, science, and history. Students were given worksheets and books to supplement the radio lectures. Eighty-two community learning centers were established by 1982. Over time, local community groups and the Dominican government contributed funding to keep the project going. Similar programs to use radio for basic education have been established in other countries, including Mexico and Kenya.
As with radio, the potentially broad reach of television beyond literate audiences has made it useful as a medium of education, particularly for students lacking access to conventional brick-and-mortar schools. In most countries outside of western Europe and the United States, broadcast media were initially developed by the state because local elites often lacked the capital to start radio and television stations. In the 1960s, the newly independent African states used their newly formed state broadcasting corporations to consolidate diverse and distant populations as a united audience for national messages and initiatives.
In her research, communication scholar Carla Heath (1996) shows how Ghanaian children’s television programs serve as a means of cultivating a distinctively modern national culture that embraces innovation and change while remaining grounded in Ghanaian cultural values. For one program, By the Fireside, Ghanaian schoolchildren were recruited to act out Ghanaian folktales, discussing how their moral messages could be applied to contemporary Ghanaian life. Against a background depicting a rural village, children in simple smocks and African-print clothing opened the show with songs and dances, then engaged in greetings, jokes, and riddles with the two adult storytellers. As a storyteller narrated a tale, the children acted out certain scenes and commented on the themes of the story in musical interludes. After the story, children were called upon to recite the moral lessons they had learned. In this way, traditional stories were summoned to discuss such contemporary issues as corruption, political conflicts, and juvenile delinquency. Heath argues that such programs promote a distinctive form of modern citizenship rooted in local morality and wisdom.
Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod (2002) similarly demonstrates how elites have used television dramas to cultivate the ideal of the virtuous modern citizen among women, youth, and rural people in Egypt. One serial drama, Hilmiyya Nights, focused on the lives of a group of characters from the traditional neighborhood of Hilmiyya in Cairo. The show dramatizes their fortunes and relationships from the 1940s, when Egypt was ruled by King Farouk and the British, all the way up to the Egyptian reaction to the US-led Gulf War of 1990. Rather than focusing solely on personal desires, trysts, and betrayals, as American soap operas do, the social lives of the Hilmiyya Nights characters were embedded in historical and political events, making the show a powerful form of commentary on Egyptian national life. Driven by its project of upliftment, the overall theme of the show was one of national unity. Characters from all classes were led astray by the temptations of sex, money, and power, but they inevitably came to see the errors of their ways, putting love of country above all personal desires. Interviewing women who watched Hilmiyya Nights, Abu-Lughod discovered that their love for the show had little to do with the uplifting messages about Egyptian citizenship. In fact, some identified strongly with the most problematic female characters, who schemed and connived in pursuit of sex and money.
Soap opera is a popular format targeted to female audiences in many parts of the world. In India, anthropologist Purnima Mankekar (1999) examined a number of television serials produced by the state television station, Doordarshan, in the 1980s and 1990s. In a well-rounded holistic analysis, Mankekar examines production, text, and reception, the latter an aspect often neglected in media studies. Mankekar interviewed the writers, directors, and producers of these programs and subjected the programs themselves to a fine-grained textual analysis. Her focus, however, was audience reception. Among the questions she asked were how Indian middle-class women viewed these programs, what sense they made of the content, and how they discussed the themes and issues and applied them to their own lives. Indian state television has always worked to cultivate an idealized notion of Indian womanhood, implicitly defined as Hindu, middle-class, north Indian, and upper caste. Mankekar’s analysis focuses on two Hindu epic dramas, The Mahabharat (1989–1990) and The Ramayan (1987–1988). Through these dramas, state television constructed those ideals for the intended audience of Indian women. These epics feature two ideals of womanhood: Sita, who is demure, compliant, and self-sacrificing, contrasted with the enraged Draupaudi, whose reckless husband’s political gamble results in her public humiliation. In interviews with Mankekar, women viewers discussed how they identified with each character in different ways and in relation to different contexts of their own lives. As the programs aired in the midst of rising Hindu nationalism in India, they became a means of asserting Hindu forms of heritage and morality as well as gendered identities.
While in the West, modernity is typically associated with rationality and secularism, many media anthropologists have studied how radio and television enable distinctly modern expressions of religious beliefs and experiences. Media anthropologist Katrien Pype (2015) has conducted research on television dramas in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with a focus on the importance of religious themes and emotional forms of engagement. In one drama, The Heart of Man, two sophisticated urban women become witches in order to harm their romantic rivals. As a result of their occult rituals, one of the women goes blind, leading her to confess her sins to an evangelical pastor. The pastor grants her forgiveness and exorcises the demons from her body. So powerful were the depictions of witchcraft that some viewers reported feeling as if they had become bewitched themselves just by watching the show. Viewers interpreted their emotional responses as signs of the deeper meanings of the program. Not merely entertainment, Congolese television dramas structured by such tales of evangelical redemption are experienced as episodes in an ongoing spiritual war between the Holy Spirit and the devil. Though fictional, such television programs connect with the worldviews of evangelical Christians through the conduit of emotional and bodily response.


# Anthropology of Media

## Digital Media, New Socialities

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Define the concept of sociality.
2. Explain how digital media enable new forms of sociality.
3. Identify how digital media shape friendships and romantic relationships.
4. Define the concept of media ideology.
5. Provide a detailed example of the illicit use of digital media.
As much of this textbook demonstrates, anthropologists most often conduct research on topics involving face-to-face sociocultural interaction such as public ceremonies, religious rituals, work, political activities, and forms of economic exchange. Over the past 30 years, however, anthropologists have begun to conduct research on forms of culture in which face-to-face interaction has been replaced with screens and keyboards. In the Internet era, media anthropologists explore how people connect with others digitally, forming collective identities based on characteristics such as common interests, gender, race, ethnicity, and religion. Some anthropologists are interested in the entirely new modes of social interaction made possible by the Internet, such as hacking, blogging, and creating and sharing memes. Digital media also reshape other domains of sociocultural practice, such as shopping, financial transactions, transportation, religious worship, and kin relations. Encompassing the whole realm of social interaction, cultural anthropologists use the term sociality to describe how people construct and maintain their personal and group relations. Anthropologists are curious about how new forms of digital media function as tools of sociality.

### Digital Socialities: Personal and Political

How do you talk to your friends on a day-to-day basis? How do you arrange to meet up as a group? If you’re an American, it’s very likely that texts and social media are involved in your communication and coordination with your friends. Studying American teens from 2004 to 2007, scholar Danah Boyd found that social networking sites such as Facebook were key to the formation of new friendships and the consolidation of friend groups, while texting deepened one-on-one relationships (Ito et al. 2010). In fact, friendship was the primary reason given by teens for engaging in digital forms of media (rather than, say, looking up information for school projects or texting their parents about where they are at midnight on a Friday night). Of course, the social preoccupation of American teens is not new, nor is it surprising. But digital media provide new modes of engagement, such as the “always on” texting of best friends or social media “friends” who are not really friends at all but strangers or even enemies. Social media also provide new tools for authoring self-identity as well as the ability to search out information about others that may undermine their own professed identities.
While American teens generally embrace social media and texting as ways of building friendships, they are considerably more troubled by the role of digital media in the other side of social relationships: breaking up. In an undergraduate class one day, anthropologist Ilana Gershon asked her students, “What counts as a bad breakup?” (2010). Expecting stories of lying and infidelity, Gershon was surprised to hear so many students complain about breakups via text or Facebook. Anyone who has ever signed into a social media site to discover that their sweetie’s relationship status has changed to “single” knows the kind of confusion and heartache caused by using digital media in this way.
Intrigued by the ambiguities of digital etiquette in the realm of romance, Gershon wrote a book exploring how Americans use digital media to manage and even terminate ambiguous or troubled relationships. At the heart of the matter, according to Gershon, are media ideologies—that is, sets of ideas about the functionality of digital media and their relationship to other forms of communication, such as the telephone and face-to-face conversation. For some Americans, using digital messaging to break up is an ideal way of avoiding an intense emotional scene. This notion relies on a media ideology in which different forms of communication can usually be substituted for one another in the interests of efficiency and ease of use. For others, however, the text breakup is unfair, disrespectful, and cowardly, as the breaking-up process is made into a unilateral speech act rather than a consensual act based on dialogue. Digital media allow the breaker-upper to avoid witnessing the consequences of their action. In this media ideology, different forms of communication are appropriate to different forms of social action and cannot be substituted for one another without careful consideration of the emotional consequences.
In societies all over the world, digital media have become essential elements of social interaction, from the most personal and romantic relationships to larger, more public collectivities. Both media anthropologists and communication scholars have contributed to an effort to de-westernize media studies by exploring the use of digital media in contexts outside of the United States and western Europe. In societies with repressive governments, traditional media and face-to-face political action are often tightly controlled, making digital media important tools of social interaction and political resistance. Media scholars Annaelle Sreberny and Gholam Khiabany (2010) highlight the crucial role of blogging in popular expression and political activism in Iran over the past several decades. There are more than 700,000 blogs in Iran, many of them authored by women. Suppressed in the public arena, Iranian intellectuals have embraced blogging as a way to express their ideas. Though many Iranian blogs are devoted to personal reflections or commentary on entertainment or sports, Sreberny and Khiabany show how bloggers often convey subtle political messages in their seemingly personal writing. Like Egyptian and Indian soap operas, Iranian blogs are always embedded in sociopolitical contexts, whether they are explicitly political or not. Some blogs are, in fact, stridently political, and many political bloggers have been jailed by the government as dissidents.
Similarly, bloggers in Central and South America form activist communities working for social justice and equality (Arriaga and Villar 2021). Afro-Cuban activist Sandra Abd’Allah-Alvarez Ramírez blogs on issues of race and gender in Cuba. Journalist Silvana Bahia operates an organization in Brazil that works to spread the tools of digital technology to diverse communities, in particular Afro-Brazilian women. She has been involved in efforts to teach programming to women, showing them how to apply digital skills to further social projects. She envisions a more inclusive digital sphere that brings in the perspectives of Black, LGBTQ+, low-income, and disadvantaged groups.

### Digital Shadowlands: Illicit Media

Digital media enable and enhance social interaction, deepening relationships and activating imagined communities for social change. However, these new forms of media have a darker side. Digital media are also a tool for piracy, smuggling, scams, human trafficking, and illegal forms of pornography. Frequently, these illicit forms operate across the gulf of global inequality separating wealthy societies from poorer ones. Human trafficking, for instance, often involves abducting youth from impoverished rural communities and smuggling them into urban and wealthier communities to be forced into prostitution. Piracy, on the other hand, often involves making illegal copies of music and movies produced in wealthier countries available to people in poorer communities who may not otherwise be able to afford them.
The digital shadowlands provide opportunities for those left out of legal, mainstream opportunities in the digital economy. Sakawa is a troubling example of this. Around 2010 in Ghana, a new social group emerged. People began to notice that some young men in their twenties were enjoying a very luxurious lifestyle: driving expensive cars such as Lexuses and Range Rovers, wearing designer clothing and shoes, drinking champagne, and living in enormous mansions. How were they becoming so wealthy? During this time, Ghana was experiencing an oil boom, but that wealth was concentrated among older elites. The vast population of poor and working-class people have not benefited all that much from oil wealth. Commonly, young men with little education are unemployed, with very little chance of ever escaping poverty. This new class of conspicuously rich young men were not particularly educated or well-connected, but they had discovered a new way to make money. Combining digital media with spiritual techniques, they had invented a new moneymaking scheme called sakawa.
A Hausa term meaning “putting inside,” sakawa refers to magically enhanced Internet fraud, mainly targeting foreigners. Before they become sakawa practitioners, these young men are often unemployed, sleeping on the streets, not knowing where their next meal is coming from. Often, they report noticing very stylish and well-fed young people apparently making lots of money by doing something in Internet cafés. Sometimes the scammers actively recruit such targets, teaching them Internet skills to carry out the elaborate schemes. The typical con is pretending to be a woman romantically interested in men from Europe, the United States, or Asia. Another, less common scheme involves using fake documents to persuade foreigners to invest in gold, timber, or oil concessions. Even more important than technological skills are the sophisticated social skills involved in creating strategic online personalities, cultivating trust with foreign White men in faraway places, and knowing just how and when to make requests for money.
Many scammers report practicing these techniques for several weeks or months with only modest success, then learning about the “spiritual side” of sakawa. In order to become magnificently wealthy, sakawa practitioners believe it is necessary to become apprenticed to a spiritual leader who can guarantee great success in exchange for performing certain rituals on a regular basis. New apprentices are often instructed to sleep in coffins and anoint their bodies with special medicines. Some are required to have sex with several women each day and deliver their undergarments to the spiritual leader. Some must chew live cockroaches, lizards, or maggots. Ghanaians are horrified by rumors of incest and human sacrifice as scammers are said to perform more and more difficult forms of spiritual service to their masters. Though many refuse to reveal the exact nature of these rituals, numerous sakawa boys report that their efforts to extract money from foreigners suddenly became much more successful after performing them. With sudden windfalls from scamming, sakawa boys often throw epic parties and buy expensive gifts for their friends. In his documentary film Sakawa, Ghanaian filmmaker Ben Asamoah depicts the practices and communities of sakawa in Ghana.
After a time, the thrill of this lifestyle wears off, and sakawa boys come to feel enslaved by the constant ritual demands of their spiritual leaders. If a sakawa boy refuses to perform assigned chores, however, he may break out in a rash, suffer paralysis, or become deaf or mute. Some report that friends have died when attempting to quit sakawa.
Sakawa is widely condemned in Ghanaian society. Government officials, journalists, and religious leaders have all spoken out against it, and the police have even arrested and prosecuted some sakawa scammers. Many Ghanaians lament the unbridled celebration of wealth as a marker of social status, arguing that children should be instilled with traditional values of hard work, honesty, and modest living.
Sakawa may seem like a shocking and unusual combination of digital media with supernatural beliefs and practices, but at the root of this phenomenon is a set of contradictory beliefs about wealth and power found in many cultures and historical periods. Consider the German legend of Faust, based on a 16th-century German alchemist. According to the legend, Faust, a bored and depressed scholar, makes a pact with the devil through the devil’s emissary, Mephistopheles. The deal is that Mephistopheles will help Faust gain access to all worldly pleasures, including sex, power, and knowledge. In return, Faust will be required to turn his soul over to the devil after several years.
Forms of this Faustian bargain have emerged in many other parts of the world, particularly as societies are drawn into new forms of wealth and inequality in the global economy. For instance, anthropologist Michael Taussig (1980) conducted research on beliefs about the devil among people working in the sugar plantations of Colombia and the tin mines of Bolivia. Some wage laborers on sugar plantations were said to enter into contracts with the devil to increase their productivity, helping them make fast money. Most often, they bought flashy clothes and liquor with their newfound wealth but could not establish enduring prosperity. Taussig describes how workers in the Bolivian tin mines created a shrine to the devil to ensure their safety and help them find rich tin deposits. Taussig argues that people in peasant farming societies feel a sense of unease about capitalist forms of work, wealth, and inequality. To agrarian peoples steeped in communal values, it seems unfair that some laborers become wealthy while others work just as hard and fail. And yet, young people are drawn in by the compelling allure of money and commodities associated with labor in the globalized capitalist economy. According to Taussig, this conflicted feeling of unease gives rise to widespread beliefs about serving the devil for temporary gains.
For some young people around the world, digital media have provided paths to astonishing success and wealth, often through global relations and transactions. While new forms of digital trade and technological innovation may provide some well-educated and well-connected elites with a means of getting rich, the vast majority of young people in both wealthy and poorer countries are largely left out of the opportunities of the digital economy. Sakawa may seem like a disturbing form of digital delinquency to many Ghanaians and foreigners alike, but it dramatizes the widespread sense of unfairness and inequality in Ghanaian society as a whole. The phenomenon of sakawa suggests that disadvantaged groups must combine supernatural forms of power with their computer and social skills in order to get ahead. Hard work alone is never enough. The unfairness of this situation is symbolized by the ultimate doom faced by many sakawa scammers: unable or unwilling to keep up with the demands of their supernatural masters, they fall ill and die.
Exploring how forms of media intersect with economic, political, and religious realms as well as gender, ethnicity, and identity, anthropologists take a holistic approach to mass media. Studying photography, news media, broadcasting, and digital media, anthropologists discover the cultural contexts of media production and reception as well as new forms of sociality and transaction. As media technologies become more deeply embedded in people’s lives and instrumental to social relationships and communities, the holistic lens of anthropology is key to understanding the profound sociocultural changes brought about by media innovations.

### Summary

Anthropologists use long-term ethnographic fieldwork and holistic perspectives to study media genres such as photography, film, radio, television, and digital media. In visual anthropology, gaze theory is used to think about the relationship between viewers and the people depicted in photographs, particularly in terms of gender, power, and cultural identity. Anthropologists studying news media focus on the construction of national public spheres of official ideology and political contest. Radio is often used by communities for more participatory and community-based forms of communication. Many anthropologists study how soap operas and other television programs promote forms of ethnicity, gender, and nationalism. Digital media construct entirely new forms of sociality, including illicit shadow forms of impersonation and scamming such as sakawa.

### Critical Thinking Questions

### Suggested Readings

Askew, Kelly, and Richard R. Wilk, eds. 2002. The Anthropology of Media: A Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Ginsberg, Faye D., Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, eds. 2002. Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Berkeley: University of California Press.

### Bibliography

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2002. “The Objects of Soap Opera: Egyptian Television and the Cultural Politics of Modernity.” In The Anthropology of Media: A Reader, edited by Kelly Askew and Richard R. Wilk, 376–391. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Anas, Anas Aremeyaw. 2013. “How I Named, Shamed and Jailed.” Filmed February 2013 in Long Beach, CA. TED video, 12:34. https://www.ted.com/talks/anas_aremeyaw_anas_how_i_named_shamed_and_jailed.
Arriaga, Eduard, and Andrés Villar, eds. 2021. Afro-Latinx Digital Connections. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.
Askew, Kelly, and Richard R. Wilk, eds. 2002 The Anthropology of Media: A Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Buckley, Liam. 2000. “Self and Accessory in Gambian Studio Photography.” Visual Anthropology Review 16 (2): 71–91. https://doi.org/10.1525/var.2000.16.2.71.
Fisher, Daniel. 2009. “Mediating Kinship: Country, Family, and Radio in Northern Australia.” Cultural Anthropology 24 (2): 280–312. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2009.01132.x.
Flaherty, Robert, dir. 1922. Nanook of the North. Video, 77:57. https://archive.org/details/nanookOfTheNorth1922.
Frost, Randall. 2021. “Printing.” In The Gale Encyclopedia of Science, edited by Katherine H. Nemeh and Jacqueline L. Longe, 6th ed., vol. 6, 3583–3587. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale.
Ganti, Tejaswini. 2012. Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Gershon, Ilana. 2010. The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Ginsburg, Faye D., Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, eds. 2002. Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Habermas, Jurgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.
Hasty, Jennifer. 2005. The Press and Political Culture in Ghana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Heath, Carla W. 1996. “Children’s Television in Ghana: A Discourse about Modernity.” African Affairs 96 (383): 261–275. https://www.jstor.org/stable/723861.
Ito, Mizuko, Sonja Baumer, Matteo Bittanti, Danah Boyd, Rachel Cody, Becky Herr Stephenson, Heather A. Horst et al. 2010. Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jacknis, Ira. 2020. “Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Visual Anthropology.” Oxford Bibliographies. Oxford University Press, last modified July 29, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0250.
Jenkins, Paul. 1993. “The Earliest Generation of Missionary Photographers in West Africa and the Portrayal of Indigenous People and Culture.” History in Africa 20:89–118. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3171967.
Lutz, Catherine A., and Jane L. Collins. 1993. Reading National Geographic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mankekar, Purnima. 1999. Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Mead, Margaret, and Gregory Bateson, dir. 1951. Trance and Dance in Bali. Video, 21:40. https://www.loc.gov/item/mbrs02425201/.
Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16 (3): 6–18. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6.
Pardue, Derek. 2011. “Place Markers: Tracking Spatiality in Brazilian Hip-Hop and Community Radio.” American Ethnologist 38 (1): 102–113. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41241503.
Postill, John. 2006. Media and Nation Building: How the Iban Became Malaysian. New York: Berghahn Books.
Pype, Katrien. 2015. “The Heart of Man: Pentecostal Emotive Style in and beyond Kinshasa’s Media World.” In New Media and Religious Transformations in Africa, edited by Rosalind I. J. Hackett and Benjamin F. Soares, 116–136. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Schäuble, Michaela. 2018. “Visual Anthropology.” In The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Hilary Callan. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1969.
Spitulnik, Debra. 1993. “Anthropology and Mass Media.” Annual Review of Anthropology 22:293–315. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2155850.
Spray, Stephanie, and Pacho Velez, dir. 2013. Manakamana. Cambridge, MA: Sensory Ethnography Lab, Harvard University. Video, 118 min.
Sreberny, Annabelle, and Gholam Khiabany. 2010. Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran. London: I. B. Tauris.
Taussig, Michael T. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Tiffany, Sharon W. 2005. “Contesting the Erotic Zone: Margaret Mead’s Fieldwork Photographs of Samoa.” Pacific Studies 28 (3–4): 19–45. http://ojs-dev.byuh.edu/index.php/pacific/article/view/2120.


# Art, Music, and Sport

## Introduction

Think about the last concert or sporting event that you attended, observed on television, or watched on social media. What was the last piece of art that you saw in person, online, or on social media? Did you consider that your experience was likely a culmination of tens of thousands of years of human evolution? Would you consider graffiti on the sides of train cars to be art? Is a pickup game of football in the neighborhood sport? Figure 16.1 depicts a famous structure connected to sport that is now more often viewed as an art object—the Colosseum of Rome. The Colosseum served a role in ancient Roman society similar to an NFL (National Football League) stadium in contemporary American culture. Here gladiators battled animals such as lions and bears for the entertainment of a crowd of tens of thousands made up of all levels of Roman society.
As you read about the sociocultural diversity in art, music, and sports highlighted in this chapter, remember the central narrative of anthropology: Human beings have developed flexible biological and social features that have worked together in a wide variety of environmental and historical conditions to produce a diversity of cultures. Art, music, and sports have been and continue to be important elements of every culture on earth, helping to create a sense of collective identity and helping societies to hold together. Art, music, and sports both reflect the sociocultural diversity found around the world and have played roles in effecting cultural change. Art, music, and sports have shaped the evolution of societies, and the evolution of a societies has influenced art, music, and sports in turn. As you read this chapter, consider your own experiences with art, music, and sport. Consider what you are familiar with and what you appreciate. Reflect also on the art, music, and sport in your society that are not particularly interested in or moved by. Where do these preferences come from? To what degree are they individual and to what degree do they reflect connections to your culture and to the subcultures within it?


# Art, Music, and Sport

## Anthropology of the Arts

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Describe the anthropological approach to understanding art.
2. Provide three examples of material artifacts of art.
3. Identify forms of prehistoric art and describe how anthropologists have interpreted those forms.
4. Provide two examples of purposes that art serves in a society.
5. Define visual anthropology and describe its role in understanding culture.
6. Describe the relationship between visual representation and cultural expression and memory.
7. Provide three examples of body art and describe the cultural meaning of each.
The anthropology of the arts can include various approaches to interpreting art forms, including analyses of the symbolic meanings represented, the mediums through which art is disseminated, and even how the art is manufactured. Art is strongly anchored in the human experience.

### How Do Anthropologists Approach Art?

You might be asking yourself, How does art reflect or guide the study of anthropology? The simple answer is that art is created by humans. While definitions of art vary and have historically been narrowly construed to fit within a Western understanding of the term (Morphy and Perkins 2006), a constant element has been the intentional application of imagination, creativity, and skill. Art is created with intent.
Art is a representation of the human experience, and anthropologists approach the study of art the same way they do any other aspect of human existence. Anthropologists take a holistic approach to any given topic, situating that topic among the broader context of a culture—its “language, environment, economy, religion, family life, governance and so on” (Plattner 2003, 15). All of these details are implicitly and inextricably embedded in the products of a culture, which cannot be fully understood and appreciated without some awareness of them. This is particularly important in regard to the arts, which rely so heavily on a shared cultural vocabulary. As Stuart Plattner (2003) asserts:
Anthropology lends itself to examining both the how and the why of the arts. Art is studied by anthropologists through methods such as observation, interviews, focus groups, and site assessments. Anthropological study of art includes ethnographic studies as well as inquiries in physical anthropology and archaeology (e.g., Upper Paleolithic cave paintings, Aboriginal rock paintings, etc.). Consider the work that is required to analyze an artistic creation or sporting event through these anthropological techniques. Such work could include unearthing and evaluating artifacts of ancient societies, interviewing theatrical performers, or attending a game or match. The study of art, music, and sports requires the same holistic, wide-ranging approach as do all other anthropological studies.
What is art? Who defines it? What is the difference, if any, between a cultural practice and a piece of artwork? These are all valid questions to consider when exploring the arts with the goal of better understanding human cultures. The modern understanding of art began in the 18th century, when the word art shifted from referring to any specialized skill (e.g., art of gardening) to referencing the fine arts (Kristeller 1990). Anthropologists consider that art has historical, economic, and aesthetic dimensions. Consider painters in ancient Roman times, who often had patrons of their work who supported their livelihoods. It could be said that such painters were people of lesser means; however, with a patron’s support, they could earn a wage for expressing their talents. And in aesthetic terms, art provides a representation of what is considered beautiful within a certain cultural context.
The subfield of anthropological archaeology has approached the study of arts from its own specific perspectives. Archaeologists cannot observe how an art object was created or used and are unable to ask its creators or consumers the types of ethnographic questions that other cultural anthropologists may rely on. Archaeologists possess specialized knowledge pertaining to the sociohistorical and cultural contexts of early art. Their research on these art pieces provides other anthropologists with a starting point for analyzing older art. It also provides them with a more well-rounded understanding of the functionality and purposes of early art.
Material artifacts of art can include many of the things people interact with at home, work, or school. These include artifacts that are the results of various people’s representations of the world, such as the architecture of the building one lives in or a favorite coffee shop. They can also be relics from ancient times, such as weapons, tools, and cave drawings. These relics can be found in the research and reports that art historians, anthropologists and archaeologists use to analyze the symbolic and cultural meaning of art. Iconographic study is the study of the visual images, symbols, or modes of representation collectively associated with a person, cult, or movement. Art is an expressive behavior that encompasses and expresses cultural worldviews, social status and hierarchy, myth, and cosmology.

### Studying Prehistoric Art

Much of what anthropologists consider prehistoric art consists of artifacts and materials used to facilitate the work necessary to sustain life. It also includes cave paintings created tens of thousands of years ago. Examples of such cave paintings are the Upper Paleolithic cave art dated to 40,000 to 64,000 years ago, which features stenciled figures of animals and artifacts, though not usually humans.
This rock art, often called cave art, served as a medium to archive the human experience, tell a story, and depict how prehistoric peoples saw the world around them. Figure 16.3 above demonstrates how someone saw animals that were being hunted—and, unusually for this type of art, the people doing the hunting. These drawings served as a communication tool, historical archive, and artistic representation of a period of time and the human experience of the people who were there.

### Interpreting Art

Visual art can be viewed as important evidence in attempting to understand a culture. Throughout time, visual art has been used to convey the human experiences of a vast range of cultures. This art provides modern anthropologists with valuable perspectives on other cultures and other times that could be hard to gain access to through other means. The image of the Kangxi emperor in Figure 16.4 conveys pride, wealth, and strength, characteristics that this artist connects to the China’s Qing dynasty, depicting the emperor as its representative. This image articulates the successes of this culture at that particular point in history. Detailed analysis of works of art can contribute to the sophistication with which anthropologists understand both individual cultures and the shifting nature of human cultures in general.

### Spiritual Art

Other forms of visual art are significant to spiritual and sociocultural practices and beliefs. One example is the mandala, a symbolic diagram consisting of various geometric patterns that represents the universe. Mandalas are a cultural practice in Tibet, India, Nepal, China, Japan, and Indonesia (Tucci [1961] 2001) and can be traced back to the fourth century CE. Typically square or circular in shape, they are used in Hinduism and Buddhism to focus attention during meditation.
One significant variation on the mandala is the sand mandala, a beautiful arrangement of colored sand that originated in India and is now a Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Specially trained Buddhist monks create elaborate patterns with the sand, beginning in the middle of the diagram and using concentric circles to work their way to the edge. Once constructed, the sand mandalas are then ritualistically destroyed in recognition of the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence and the transitory nature of existence.

### Visual Anthropology

Visual anthropology is a subfield of anthropology and itself a form of anthropological inquiry. It includes the study of art as represented in photography and film. The field largely arose with the invention of the camera, as anthropologists started to document Indigenous groups of the time on film. Some of the best-known figures in the field of visual anthropology are Edward Curtis, whose images of Native Americans are discussed in detail in Chapter 19: Indigenous Anthropology, and Robert Flaherty, whose 1922 film Nanook of the North is frequently shown in introductory anthropology courses as an early example of documentary filmmaking.
While visual anthropology is often confused with ethnographic film, tfilm representations are only a small part of what the subfield encompasses. Visual anthropology is the study of all visual representations produced by human cultures, including dances, plays, and collections of art, from the beginning of time. In recent times, it has become a standard practice to use visual arts to articulate one’s feelings, thoughts, and interpretations of things seen, heard, and witnessed. Many cultures practice visual arts and use them in a variety of scenarios. They may be used to capture a certain mood, a cultural trend, or a historical event.
As mentioned above, film and photography played a major role in the development of visual anthropology as a field. Film can be used to capture images of art, such as cave paintings, sculptures from Roman times, or modern-day theater. Further, film itself has become an important form of art. Film provides an artistic representation of the human experience as seen by its directors, performers, editors, and all who contributed to its development.
The field of visual anthropology has had a significant impact on how anthropologists look at art. It also has become a driving force in how anthropologists view sociodemographic evolution, or the evolution of human societies with respect to combinations of social and demographic factors. The visual anthropology of art transcends generations, centuries, cultures, and other delineating categorical definitions. Consider Figure 16.5, which depicts tourists in the French Louvre, crowding around and photographing Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting the Mona Lisa. This photograph portrays the dimensions and complexity of the anthropology of art. It transcends the time of the Mona Lisa and is itself an expression of the human experience in a more recent time, including how humans relate to visual artifacts from an older time in history.
Because of its age, the Mona Lisa image is in the public domain and can be copied and reproduced anywhere. The painting has become the subject of many parodies or memes. A meme is an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations. The prolific production of memes of the Mona Lisa has kept the image relevant in society over a long period of time. Read more on the memes that have been created of the Mona Lisa here. Have We Over-Hyped the Mona Lisa?

### The Appreciation of Art

Neuropsychologist Dahlia Zaidel has proposed that people’s appreciation of aesthetics stems from their cognitive and affective processes. This simply means that people are attracted to art on the basis of preexisting conditions and that their interest in art evolves through time as they have new experiences, develop appreciation for new things, and otherwise mature as humans.
Appreciation of art is a biological and neurological response. People’s individual perspectives are innately grounded in biology and nature and neurology and nurturing. Think about someone you find attractive and the attributes of theirs that you find beauty in, or consider the last piece of clothing you bought because you liked how it fit, how it looked, or how others appreciated it. Attraction is a response based on a myriad of biological attributes that each individual person possesses and has since birth. These are anchored in laws of attraction. Humanity’s attraction to art is as biologically founded as attraction to other things (Zaidel et al. 2013). Perhaps this is why some people like various types of art from different time periods that depict the human experience.

### Pottery

Traced back to the Neolithic period, pottery is considered one of the oldest inventions of humankind. Pottery is an art form created by many cultures for both aesthetic and functional purposes, including storing and cooking foods, carbonization (the formation of carbon from organic matter), and ritualistic practices. It has long been an important artifact type in archaeology. Pottery is an example of a practical object that also contains features of artistic beauty. One example is the Acoma pottery created by the Pueblo culture. Acoma pottery is functional and was not created purely as what we would now consider to be works of art. However, the pottery itself is a material art. Much can be learned about a culture by analyzing both the functionality of a particular piece or style of pottery and the imagery or stories depicted within its details and designs. Pottery, such as the 20,000-year-old pottery pieces found in ancient China depicted in Figure 16.6, has been crucial to understanding cultural history. The creation of pottery merges human knowledge and experiences, including artistic resources, emerging technological processes, and the needs of a population at a given time (P. M. Rice 2015).
Though it serves a functional purpose, pottery throughout history has often been adorned with decoration, color, and other aesthetically attractive features. Decorated pottery is assigned a high value in many cultures, with people paying large sums of money for especially decorative pieces.

### Body Art

Various forms of body art are a foundational form of expression in cultures all over the world. All cultures decorate and modify the human body in some way, whether temporarily or permanently. Anthropological frameworks can be used to understand body art as both a form of visual art and a cultural tradition.
Tattooing is a form of body art that has been practiced for thousands of years. Tattoo is a Polynesian term. Polynesian tribes and people used tattoos to establish identity, personality, and status. The Maori, an Indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand, have traditionally used tattoos as an expression of identity and cultural affiliation. Examples of this can also be found in the Tonga and Samoa warrior cultures, in which specific tattoo designs and placement on the body were used to demonstrate a warrior’s affiliation with a particular group of elite warriors. In the mid-20th century, American sailors used tattoos to represent personal interests, aspects of their identity, and group affiliation. Such tattoos might include representations of a unit mascot, places individuals have visited, or things they found beauty in.
There is clear evidence of the practice of modifying the body with markings dating as far back as 5,300 to 3,000 years ago (Deter-Wolf et al. 2016; Shishlina, Belkevich, and Usachuk 2013). Such markings are still practiced by some of these same cultures today, such as the Maori people. Ötzi, a naturally mummified man found in the Ötzal Alps whose death has been dated to around 3250 BCE, is the first known tattooed human. His tattoos were of lines and crosses across his body. They are believed to have been made by creating incisions in the skin and rubbing charcoal into the incisions.
Tattooing can be a way for individuals to express membership in a larger community. Not only are communities formed around having body art, but some may obtain tattoos as a mark of belonging to a certain community (e.g., tattoos of a cross as a symbol of the Christian faith). Tattoos in recent decades have come to serve many purposes, including memorializing loved ones, expressing aesthetic tastes, depicting personal histories, expressing emotions or feelings, and symbolizing rebellion (Dey and Das 2017).
A modified approach to the classic tattoo can be found in the art of scarification. Scarification is the branding, burning, or etching of designs into the skin. Scarification marks often identify someone as being affiliated with subcultures or other groups. The practice is also used to represent individual growth or the growth and development of a group or subset of a society.
Makeup has been an expression of visual art since prehistoric times. It is used to enhance beauty, cover up flaws, and represent cultural ideals of what beauty is and should be. It is often a sociocultural delineation of wealth and success. Piercings are used for many of the same reasons and have been found in the earliest of ancient African mummies. They may be seen as an expression of individuality or of identity and affiliation.
Another example of body art is body painting. In some cultures, body painting is limited to the face, while others cover their entire bodies. The painting of the whole body is a common practice among Indigenous Australian peoples (Figure 16.9). The purposes of this type of body art include, but are not limited to, subcultural identification and announcements of social status and accomplishments. The painting can be temporary or semipermanent, achieved through various types of paints and stains. Body painting follows uniform patterns and styles in some cultures and is independently driven in others. The specific designs might reveal an individual’s position within their family, membership in a group, social position, tribal identity, and even precise ancestral history (Layton 1989).
Henna art is another example of body painting. Henna paint is derived from crushed, milled, and sifted henna leaves. It is applied directly on the skin in intricate designs that leave a red or orange stain once the paint is removed. Henna body art is used in various cultures of North Africa, Somalia, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent to adorn the hands and sometimes the feet of young women on special occasions, such as weddings and religious celebrations such as Eid al-Fitr (Chairunnisa and Solihat 2019). During weddings, women use henna to articulate cultural, familial, and religious affiliations. It is also used to accentuate the beauty of the bride and as a testament to the status of the family she is coming from and of the one she is marrying into.
The grooming of hair is also a culturally significant practice in societies throughout the world. The way one styles or displays their hair can symbolize many things, including membership in a religious sect, racial affiliation, and alignment with pop cultural trends. Hair also has been seen as an indicator of social status. From an evolutionary perspective, the quality and amount of hair one has indicates robustness and has contributed to mate selection and group identification. Hairstyles, hair volume, and hair coverings all have contributed to cultural identity and have been viewed as artistic representations of the lived experiences of people in myriad cultures and times. In some traditional Muslim cultures, hair is concealed by headscarves called hijabs. This representation of modesty has become an icon of Middle Eastern tradition and culture.
Hairstyles are especially significant in African and African diasporic cultures. Hair played a significant role in ancient African civilizations, used to symbolize familial background, social status, tribal belonging, marital status, and spirituality. Hair-grooming practices, particularly time-intensive practices such as getting one’s hair braided, are often social activities.