Counterpunch, March 10, 2009
Shortchanging Citizens, Damaging the Profession
How Anthropology Disparages Journalism
By BRIAN McKENNA
Where is anthropology's Ida Tarbell? Its I.F. Stone? Its Lincoln
Steffens? All were outstanding journalists, chroniclers of the culture,
resources and power of their times.
And where is anthropology's Juan Cole? Its Stanley Aronowitz? Its Noam
Chomsky? A historian, sociologist and linguist respectively. All are
academicians. All are well known public writers.
With an upcoming Yalta-esque American Anthropology Association
conference in December 2009 titled, "The End/s of Anthropology,"
academic anthropology continues to worry about its future while
imploring its members to get more involved in public life outside of the
ivy. Of course that's something applied anthropologists (in the
break-away Society for Applied Anthropology) have been doing for
decades. One wonders how the conference will showcase journalism, one of
the most consequential forms of public anthropology. Typically the
anthropology profession - both academic and applied - looks skeptically
at journalism.
A common refrain among academic anthropologists is this: "I never talk
to journalists, they always get me wrong. I just can't trust them."
Whenever I hear this my mind churns, "Then why don't you become the
journalist and write it yourself?" Applied anthropologists are more
inclined to write an occasional journalistic piece, but it's not viewed
as a central focus of applied work. Again, why not become the seasoned
journalist?
Is there a career danger for an anthropologist in wanting to be a
relevant, publicly engaged writer? Maybe. Consider, why is it that some
of U.S. culture's most talented writers, like David Moberg (senior
editor for In These Times) and Kurt Vonnegut felt as though they had to
drop out of anthropology graduate programs, (University of Chicago) just
inches from the dissertation finish line, to become public
communicators, public intellectuals, novelists and journalists?
Hermetically Sealed Classroom, Dusty Journals
Too many academic anthropologists are marooned in the coffin-boxes of
university classrooms, their pearls of wisdom echoing wistfully off of
hermetically sealed-walls. Paradoxically, just outside of campus bounds,
local TV and radio programs - which can potentially educate millions -
are staffed by their freshly minted (and inexperienced) former students!
These are campus graduates of journalism, broadcast communications,
speech, and/or theater programs where they were groomed in the practical
arts of elocution and head bobbing for the airwaves and/or TV cameras.
According to the FCC, these are supposed to be democratic public
airwaves. But in practice, under corporate hegemony, they are mostly off
limits to Ph.D.s, social scientists and even investigative journalists,
i.e. thinkers and social critics. Anthropologists must fight for access
to these spaces. Meanwhile they must circulate their voices in a
multitude of public fora in local newspapers, the alternative press, the
Internet, public television and public radio.
I worked as a development consultant on FRESH AIR with Terry Gross in
Philadelphia in 1991. The show now reaches 4.5 million listeners daily
and is in Europe on the World Radio Network. Ms. Gross and her
colleagues have featured the work of numerous anthropologists such as
David Kertzer, Peter Goldsmith, Sam Charters (musical anthropologist)
and medical anthropologists Paul Farmer and Terry Graedon. When I left
to pursue a Ph.D. I told Ms. Gross and her staff, "you help do the work
of a great many anthropologists, getting the message out about their
work. Keep it up." The broadcast could conceivably profile an
anthropologist every week to great effect, but does not. We cannot
depend on what Anthony Giddens called the double hermeneutic
(interpreters of our interpretations) line of gatekeepers like Gross for
our public media education. Anthropologists have no choice. They must
become media makers and journalists themselves. This will be tough in a
field, anthropology, that does not provide systematic education on "how
to become a public intellectual" in its curricula, pedagogy, modes of
evaluation or reward structure.
full: http://www.counterpunch.org/mckenna03102009.html
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