Putting Culture into Media Studies

Anthropology of Media ANTH 2301 Putting Culture into Media Studies I travelled to Ghana, a West African nation, in the early 1990s to pursue studies in politics and journalism. I was particularly interested in how media contributed to the massive democratisation tsunami that swept across several African nations during that decade (Hasty 2005). Having completed some journalistic coursework as an undergraduate, I made the decision to serve as an intern at many newspapers to gain insight into Ghanaian news production. Over the course of several years, I ended up working as a journalist in Accra, the capital city of Ghana, for five different news organisations. I gained a tremendous deal of knowledge about how history and culture influence the creation, distribution, and consumption of local news via these experiences. When non-anthropologists inquire about my fieldwork, I probably talk about my time spent working as a journalist in Ghana a bit too much. They frequently reply, "Wait, I thought you said you were an anthropologist," with a puzzled expression on their faces. Most people associate anthropological fieldwork with charming towns and isolated rural areas that appear to be cut off from the outside world. People often associate religious rites, political pageantry, intricate family relationships, and folk arts with the subjects that anthropologists study. In other words, they consider the domain of “tradition.” The environments in which anthropologists operate are not, and have never been, isolated from the outside world. Global flows of information, pictures, ideas, commodities, and people are connected to people worldwide, living in both urban and rural areas. Almost everywhere in the globe, newspapers, photos, radio, television, and the Internet are all part of everyday life. Remember the chapters before this one, when we talked about modernity? Modernity, historically speaking, refers to the whole way of life associated with industrial and postindustrial cultures; in other words, modernity's institutions and characteristics arose along with mass production and industrialization. Nonetheless, modernity's characteristics have permeated non-industrial and non-postindustrial communities worldwide. Primarily agricultural, pastoral, and gatherer-hunter communities are shaped by contemporary characteristics like mass media, wage labour, and the nationstate. The notion that some people lead traditional lives while others lead contemporary ones has been abandoned by anthropologists. Instead, each person possesses a unique modernity that has been influenced by regional historical and cultural factors. Anthropologists' interest in the diverse manifestations of modernity that have arisen in non-European and nonAmerican contexts has grown since the early 1990s. Over the past thirty years, the media—a vital instrument of modernity—have drawn increasing attention from the field of anthropology. An early wave of media studies in anthropology, which culminated in the creation of a whole subdiscipline called media anthropology, including my own first research (Spitulnik 1993; Askew and Wilk 2002; Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002). Through analysing how media is used in modern sociocultural life, media anthropologists have discovered that almost every type of culture is influenced by different media genres. To remember cultural events and to share their recollections with others, people capture images and films. Print, radio, and television journalists cover cultural subjects; they also talk about them on talk programmes and social media. It's reasonable to argue that mass media have evolved into essential instruments for identifying, preserving, and propagating regional cultures. Mass media are important tools for conveying and maintaining both modernity and traditional cultures, not antagonistic to either. George Sydney Abugri, a friend of mine who works as a journalist in Ghana, sent me an email a few months ago asking if I could assist him with self-publishing many novels on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). Abugri, who is currently retired, want to distribute his memoirs, writings, and poems to academics, journalists, and Ghanaians worldwide. Ghana was not on the list of "approved" nations, and you need a bank account from the US or another to publish on KDP. I was able to get his books online and create an account for him after some textual back and forth, enabling him to reach a worldwide readership. The type of worldly attitude that is seen in Abugri's wish to address global concerns with an international audience is known to anthropologists as cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is a term used to describe a sophisticated and worldly way of thinking. Working in village, urban, and rural settings, modern anthropologists discover that people are remarkably aware of global topics like the Arab Spring, climate change, and the Me Too movement. In one of Abugri's poems, a White flight attendant on the German airline Lufthansa is quoted as saying she didn't comprehend Abugri's request for a drink of water. Abugri is one of those cosmopolitan writers who connects global themes like female equality, environmentalism, and racism with personal experiences. Global challenges and contemporary media are deeply ingrained in the lives of individuals in rural and urban areas worldwide.