Chinese, Mandarin

Spanish

English

Hindi

Arabic

Portuguese

Bengali

Russian

Japanese

Punjabi

German

Javanese

Malay

Telugu

Vietnamese

Korean

French

Marathi

Tamil

Urdu

Turkish

Italian

Chinese, Yue / Cantonese

Thai

Gujarati

Chinese, Jin

Chinese, Min Nan

Persian, Dari

Persian, Western

Polish

Pashto

Kannada

Chinese, Xiang

Malayalam

Sundanese

Hausa

Odia

Burmese

Chinese, Hakka

Ukrainian

Bihari, Bhojpuri

Tagalog

Yoruba

Bihari, Maithili

Uzbek

Sindhi

Amharic

Fula

Romanian

Oromo

Igbo

Azerbaijani

Chinese, Gan

Dutch

Kurdish, Central

Kurdish, Northern

Kurdish, Southern

Malagasy

Lahnda, Saraiki

Nepali

Sinhalese

Chittagonian

Zhuang

Khmer

Turkmen

Assamese

Madurese

Somali

Marwari

Bihari, Magahi

Haryanvi

Hungarian

Chhattisgarhi

Greek, Modern

Chewa

Dakhini

Akan, Twi

Akan, Fante

Kazakh

Chinese, Min Bei

Sylheti

Zulu

Czech

Kinyarwanda

Marwari, Dhundhari

Haitian Creole

Chinese, Min Dong

Ilocano

Quechua

Kirundi

Swedish

Hmong

Shona

Uyghur

Hiligaynon

Mossi

Xhosa

Belarusian

Balochi

Anthropology

<OpenstaxFigure id="fig-00001" src="https://openstax.org/apps/archive/20240226.174525/resources/8e60ad21db584a8f08911e95c35862f924f91a5a" alt="Person standing at podium giving a speech, wearing a tall hat and a veil fully covering their face. An image on a screen to the side of the podium includes the words “Defend Media Freedom”." mediaType="image/jpeg" width="1500" height="801" />
<OpenstaxFigureText width="1500">
	<strong>Figure 15.1</strong> Anas Aremeyaw Anas, an investigative journalist from Ghana, participating in the Global Conference for Media Freedom in London, 2019. He keeps his face hidden during all public appearances in order to protect himself from retaliation. (credit: Foreign, Commonwealth &amp; Development Office/flickr, CC BY 2.0)
</OpenstaxFigureText>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	“I am sorry I cannot show you my face. Because if I do, the bad guys will come for me.” Who is that masked man? That man is Anas Aremeyaw <OpenstaxTerm>Anas</OpenstaxTerm>, the famous investigative journalist from Ghana who <a href="https://openstax.org/r/gaveaTEDTalk">gave a TED Talk</a> about how he “names, shames, and jails” those “bad guys” (Anas 2013). Using controversial undercover methods, Anas has posed as a street hawker, a priest, a patient in a mental facility, a janitor in a brothel, and a boulder. His investigations have revealed widespread corruption in the Ghanaian judiciary, police service, electric company, Ministry of Youth and Sports, and passport office as well as a Ghanaian orphanage. He has exposed cocoa smuggling, rebel invasions, human trafficking, child slavery, torture of Africans in Thai prisons, unsanitary food production, forced prostitution, and abuse of people with mental illness in a hospital.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	Anas has become a kind of anti-corruption superhero in Ghana, combining anonymity and celebrity to force social change. While his undercover research is mostly in person, he publishes the reports of his investigations as videos, many of which are available for viewing on his <a href="https://openstax.org/r/anasaremeyawanas">website</a>. He has become famous worldwide through the spread of these videos and the accumulation of interviews and commentary on his work that can be found on the Internet. His intriguing persona illustrates the complexities of identity in the digital era. Though many have attempted to unmask him, his “real” identity remains a mystery.
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<OpenstaxParagraph>
	As previous chapters have demonstrated, anthropologists are keenly interested in questions of identity and social action. The holistic approach leads anthropologists to consider how certain social, cultural, economic, and political conditions give rise to public figures such as Anas. Clearly, the phenomenon of Anas cannot be fully understood without attention to the functions of media at local, national, and global levels. At the local level, investigative journalism functions as a tool of anti-corruption, while global digital media function as a tool of celebrity. Are these two functions compatible or contradictory?
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<OpenstaxParagraph>
	A new field of media anthropology has emerged in the past few decades to address such pressing issues. This chapter explores the anthropology of mass media, including how media functions at local, national, and global levels. It also addresses how social conditions and cultural forces shape a variety of media genres, including news media, photography, radio, television, and the Internet. Just as anthropologists bring their unique approach to other fields, the distinctive methods and concepts of anthropology contribute complex, holistic insights to the study of media.
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15 Anthropology of Media

1 What Is Anthropology?

1.1 The Study of Humanity, or "Anthropology Is Vast"

1.1.1 The Heart of Anthropology: Central Narrative and Commitments

1.1.2 Central Commitment #1: Exploring Sociocultural Diversity

1.1.3 Central Commitment #2: Understanding How Societies Hold Together

1.1.4 Central Commitment #3: Examining the Interdependence of Humans and Nature

1.2 The Four-Field Approach: Four Approaches within the Guiding Narrative

1.2.1 Biological Anthropology

1.2.2 Archaeology

1.2.3 Cultural Anthropology

1.2.4 Linguistic Anthropology

1.2.5 How the Four Fields Work Together: The Example of Race

1.3 Overcoming Ethnocentrism

1.3.1 Enculturation and Ethnocentrism

1.3.2 Primitivism and Orientalism

1.4 Western Bias in Our Assumptions about Humanity

1.4.1 Primitivism and Orientalism in Popular Culture

1.4.2 The Bias of Backwardness

1.5 Holism, Anthropology’s Distinctive Approach

1.5.1 Society as an Integrated Whole

1.5.2 Sources of Contradiction, Conflict, and Change

1.6 Cross-Cultural Comparison and Cultural Relativism

1.6.1 Relativism Is Not “Anything Goes”

1.6.2 Morality, Activism, and Cultural Relativism

1.7 Reaching for an Insider’s Point of View

1.7.1 The Challenge of Representing Others

1.7.2 Collaborative Methods of Representation

1.7.3 Working across Cultures toward Common Goals

1.7.4 Suggested Readings

2 Methods: Cultural and Archaeological

2.1 Archaeological Research Methods

2.1.1 Archaeological Techniques

2.1.2 Archaeological Dating Methods

2.2 Conservation and Naturalism

2.2.1 Early Efforts

2.2.2 Salvage Anthropology

2.2.3 Museum Collections

2.2.4 Interpretation and Voice

2.3 Ethnography and Ethnology

2.3.1 The Development of Ethnography and Ethnology

2.3.2 Perspective and Interpretation in Ethnography

2.4 Participant Observation and Interviewing

2.4.1 Participant Observation

2.4.2 Interviewing Informants

2.4.3 Ethical Considerations

2.5 Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis

2.5.1 Differences between Quantitative and Qualitative Information

2.5.2 Modeling

2.5.3 The Science of Anthropology

2.6 Collections

2.6.1 Archives

2.6.2 Three-Dimensional Collections

2.6.3 Ownership

2.6.4 Suggested Readings

3 Culture Concept Theory: Theories of Cultural Change

3.1 The Homeyness of Culture

3.2 The Winkiness of Culture

3.3 The Elements of Culture

3.3.1 Culture Is What We Make

3.3.2 Culture Is What We Do

3.3.3 Culture Is What We Think

3.4 The Aggregates of Culture

3.4.1 Symbols

3.4.2 Ritual

3.4.3 Social Structure

3.5 Modes of Cultural Analysis

3.5.1 Evolution, Adaptation, and Historical Particularism

3.5.2 Functionalism

3.5.3 Structuralism

3.5.4 Ontology

3.6 The Paradoxes of Culture

3.6.1 Paradox 1: Culture Is Continuous, but It Changes

3.6.2 Paradox 2: Culture Is Bounded but Mobile

3.6.3 Paradox 3: Culture Is Consensual but Contested

3.6.4 Paradox 4: Culture Is Shared, but It Varies

3.6.5 Suggested Readings

4 Biological Evolution and Early Human Evidence

4.1 What Is Biological Anthropology?

4.1.1 Looking to the Deep Past

4.1.2 Exploring What It Means to Be Human

4.2 What’s in a Name? The Science of Taxonomy

4.2.1 Defining the Science of Taxonomy

4.2.2 Defining a Species

4.3 It’s All in the Genes! The Foundation of Evolution

4.3.1 The Units of Life

4.3.2 Gregor Mendel and the Laws of Heredity

4.3.3 Mendelian Inheritance in Humans

4.4 Evolution in Action: Past and Present

4.4.1 Early Evolutionists and the Fixity of Species

4.4.2 Charles Darwin’s Role in Changing Views of the Natural World

4.4.3 Understanding Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection

4.5 What Is a Primate?

4.5.1 What Is a Primate?

4.5.2 Primate Behavioral Variation

4.5.3 Explaining Primate Success

4.5.4 Primate Classification and Taxonomy

4.6 Origin of and Classification of Primates

4.6.1 Understanding Concepts of Time

4.6.2 Fossils and Dating Methods