Food and Cultural Identity Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Describe the relationship between food and cultural identity. Contrast food prescriptions with food proscriptions. Illustrate the connection between food and gender. Food and Cultural Identity Food travels across cultures perhaps more often and with more ease than any other tradition. Sometimes food carries with it related culinary practices (such as the use of chopsticks), and sometimes foods mix with existing culinary traditions to form new syncretic cuisines (such as Tex-Mex food, which evolved from a combination of Mexican and US Southwest food traditions). Like culture itself, foods are shared within and move between communities, adapting to changing circumstances and settings. Although it is adaptable, food is also tightly linked to people’s cultural identities , or the ways they define and distinguish themselves from other groups of people. As part of these cultural identities, the term cuisine is used to refer to specific cultural traditions of cooking, preparing, and consuming food. While urban areas tend to shift and adapt cuisine more frequently than rural areas, those aspects of cuisine most tightly linked to identity tend to change slowly in all settings. Japanese short-grain rice plays an important role in Japanese identity. Here, short-grain rice is served with a beef curry. (credit: Ocdp/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain) In her research on Japanese food and identity, cultural anthropologist, and Japanese scholar Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (1993, 1995) explores the sociocultural construction of rice as a dominant metaphor for the Japanese people. Using evidence from official decrees, taxation documents, myths, rituals, woodblock prints, and poetry, Ohnuki-Tierney traces the long history of rice cultivation in Japan. Introduced from China, rice agriculture began during the Yamato period (250–710 CE). While the Chinese preferred long-grain rice, the Japanese cultivated short-grain rice, which they considered the only pure form of rice. During this period, a series of myths connecting short-grain rice to Japanese deities emerged in folktales and historical documents—evidence of Japanese efforts to distinguish themselves from the Chinese, who also relied on rice as an important source of calories. Over the years, rice developed into a staple crop that Japanese landowners used as a form of tax payment, indicating strong connections between Japanese land, Japanese short-grain rice, and the Japanese landowning elite. By the early modern period (1603–1868), as Japan became increasingly urban and eventually industrialized, agricultural life declined. People moved off the land and into cities, and rice began to take on new meanings. Symptomatic of a cultural identity strongly rooted in national history, rice became an increasingly sacred symbol of Japanese identity—a cultural memory with a long history that consistently tied being Japanese to eating domestic Japanese rice. As Japan opened to interactions with Western nations, the Japanese continued to use rice as a metaphor for national identity: while the Japanese referred to themselves as “rice-eaters,” they referred to Western peoples as “meat-eaters.” For years, Japan has had a ban on importing any foreign-grown rice, even California export rice, which is primarily the Japanese short-grain variety and available at a significantly lower price. In 1993, Japan suffered a growing season that was colder and wetter than normal and had a low-producing rice harvest. US rice exporters were able to negotiate a trade deal allowing some limited rice exports to Japan. Yet most of this rice remained in warehouses, untouched. Japanese people complained that it was full of impurities and did not taste good. Today, on average, Japanese people consume only about 160 grams of rice daily, half of what they consumed 40 years ago (Coleman 2017). Yet their cultural and symbolic connection with domestic Japanese rice remains strong. Japanese short-grain rice is still referred to as shushoku , “the main dish” (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993, 16)—the symbolic centerpiece, even though it is now more frequently a small side dish in a more diverse cuisine. Ohnuki-Tierney notes that rice plays a particularly important role in the Japanese sense of community: Not only during ritual occasions, but also in the day-to-day lives of the Japanese, rice and rice products play a crucial role in commensal activities. Cooked white rice is offered daily to the family ancestral alcove. Also, rice is the only food shared at meals, served by the female head of the household, while other dishes are placed in individual containers. Rice stands for “we,” i.e., whatever social group one belongs to, as in a common expression, “to eat from the same rice-cooking pan,” which connotes a strong sense of fellowship arising from sharing meals. (1995, 229) Although the meaning of rice has shifted during different historical periods—from a comparison between short-grain Japanese and long-grain Chinese rice to a way to distinguish rice-eating Japanese from meat-eating Westerners, then to a measure of the quality of what is grown in Japanese versus less desirable imported rice—the Japanese continue to hold a cultural identity closely connected with rice. Being Japanese means eating Japanese rice still today. The relationship between food and cultural identity is readily apparent in Western societies. Most grocery stores have aisles containing goods labeled as “international foods” or “ethnic foods,” and large urban areas often include neighborhoods featuring a conglomeration of restaurants serving diverse cuisines. In Washington, DC, the neighborhood of Adams Morgan is famous for its ethnic restaurants. Walking down the street, one might smell the mouthwatering aroma of injera , a sour, fermented flatbread from Ethiopia, or bún bò hu? , spicy lemongrass beef soup from Vietnam. Think about your own town and nearby urban areas. Where do you go to try new foods and dishes from other cultures? Food Prescriptions and Proscriptions As with all cultural institutions, there are various rules and customs surrounding food and eating. Many of these can be classified as either food prescriptions , foods that one should eat and are considered culturally appropriate, or food proscriptions , foods that are prohibited and not considered proper. These food regulations are social norms that connect production and consumption with the maintenance of cultural identity through food. In the previous section, you read about the importance of Japanese short-grain rice as a symbol of Japanese identity. For many Japanese people, short-grain rice is a food prescription, something that they feel they should eat. Food prescriptions are common across cultures and nation-states, especially in regard to special holidays. There are many examples: turkey on Thanksgiving in the United States, corned beef on St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland, special breads, and candy figurines on Día de los Muertos in Mexico, saffron bread and ginger biscuits on St. Lucia Day in Sweden, or mutton curry and rice on Eid al-Fitr in Muslim countries. Food prescriptions are also common in the celebration of commemorative events, such as the cakes eaten at birthday parties and weddings, or the enchiladas and tamales prepared for a quinceañera celebrating a young Latin American woman’s 15th birthday. Most of these occasions involve feasts , which are elaborate meals shared among a large group of people and featuring symbolically meaningful foods. One interesting example is the food eaten to mark the Dragon Boat Festival (Dragon Boat Festival, also called Duanwu), held in China on the fifth day of the fifth month of the Chinese lunar year. There are various origin stories for the Dragon Boat Festival. In one of them, the festival commemorates a beloved Chinese poet and government minister named Qu Yuan (ca. 340–206 BCE), who fell out of imperial favor and died by suicide, drowning himself. According to the story, people threw sticky rice dumplings into the river where he had drowned himself in order to distract the fish so that they could retrieve his body and give him a proper burial. The most important Dragon Boat food is zongzi , a sticky rice dumpling with different fillings, but the feast also traditionally includes eel, sticky rice cakes, boiled eggs, jiandui (a wheat ball covered in sesame seeds), pancakes with fillings, and wine. Zongzi , a sticky rice dumpling, wrapped in bamboo leaves, prepared for the Dragon Boat Festival. Festival foods are typically associated with specific ritual events. (credit: “Dragon Boat Festival Zongzi” by Evan Wood/flickr, CC BY 2.0) Food proscriptions, also called food taboos , are also common across cultures and contribute to establishing and maintaining a group’s identity. Often, these rules and regulations about what not to eat originate in religious beliefs. Two examples are the vegetarianism practiced by many Hindus, which is grounded in the spiritual principle of ahimsa (nonviolence in relation to all living things), and kashrut , a Jewish principle that forbids mixing meat and dairy foods or eating pork or shellfish. Sometimes food proscriptions are active for limited periods of time. For many Christians, especially Catholics, the 40 days of Lent, a period of religious reflection commemorating the 40 days Jesus spent fasting in the desert, are a time when people give up certain foods or drinks to make a symbolic sacrifice. For many Catholics, this means fasting (withholding a measure of food) throughout the period and/or totally abstaining from meat on the special days of Ash Wednesday and Good Friday: For members of the Latin Catholic Church, the norms on fasting are obligatory from age 18 until age 59. When fasting, a person is permitted to eat one full meal, as well as two smaller meals that together are not equal to a full meal. The norms concerning abstinence from meat are binding upon members of the Latin Catholic Church from age 14 onwards. (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops n.d.) Muslims observe Ramadan , a month-long commemoration of the prophet Muhammad receiving the revelations of the Quran, by fasting every day from sunup to sundown. The Islamic fast entails a prohibition on food and drink, including water. Every evening after sundown, Muslims eat a large meal that include fruits, vegetables, and dates to rehydrate for the next day’s fast. Some food prohibitions are customary and tied more to ancient cultural traditions than religion. Many food prohibitions pertain to meat. Among several East African groups, there is a prohibition against eating fish of any kind. This is called the Cushitic fish taboo because the prohibitions are found among many, but not all, cultural groups whose languages are part of the Cushite family, such as the Somali, Masaai, and Bantu peoples. Horsemeat was historically consumed infrequently in the United States until it was outlawed in 2005, primarily because of toxins in the meat related to the butchering process. Even before then, horsemeat in mainstream US society was a food prohibition. However, it is consumed throughout Europe, where there are butchers solely devoted to handling horsemeat. A horse butcher shop in Italy. In many European countries, horsemeat is processed separately from other meats and sold at specialized butcher shops. (credit: Schellack at English Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0) An interesting case of food rules and regulations across cultures is cannibalism , the act of eating an individual of one’s own species. Although we do not usually think of human flesh as a menu item, in some cultures it is considered a kind of food, typically eaten as symbolic nutrition and identity. U.S. cultural and medical anthropologist Beth Conklin (1995) and Brazilian cultural anthropologist Aparecida Vilaça (2002) conducted research among the Wari’ of western Amazonia in Brazil and found that prior to evangelization by Christian missionaries in the 1960s, the Wari’ practiced two different types of cannibalism: endocannibalism , or eating members of one’s own cultural group, and exocannibalism , or eating those who are “foreign” or outside of one’s cultural group. Each form of cannibalism was associated with its own beliefs, practices, and symbolism. The Wari’ belief system is based on the principle that only the Wari’ are real people. All non-Wari’ others, people and animals alike, are not humans and thus can be considered meat (Vilaça 2002, 358). When speaking of the practice recognized by anthropologists as exocannibalism, the Wari’ did not consider themselves to be practicing cannibalism at all; they saw non-Wari’ people as not fully human and classified them as a type of prey. Endocannibalism was understood differently. Endocannibalism among the Wari’ was practiced as part of the mourning process and understood as a way of honoring a Wari’ person who had died. Following a death, the immediate family of the deceased arranged for non-kin and relatives by marriage to dress and prepare the body by dismembering, roasting, and eating virtually all of it. Consuming the flesh of the deceased was considered the ultimate act of respect, as the remains were not buried in the ground but in the living bodies of other Wari’. Once eaten by non-family Wari’, the deceased could transform from humans into spirits and eventually return as prey animals to provide food for the living. For Conklin, this practice indicates mutualism , or the relationship between people and animals through the medium of food and eating: For Wari’, ... the magic of existence lies in the commonality of human and animal identities, in the movements between the human and nonhuman worlds embodied in the recognition through cannibalism of human participation in both poles of the dynamic of eating and being eaten. (Conklin 1995, 95) Cannibalism has been associated with many cultures, sometimes accompanying warfare or imperial expansion, as in the case of the Aztecs (Isaac 2002), and sometimes as a means of showing respect for and establishing kinship with the deceased (see Lindenbaum 1979 for an example in Papua New Guinea). Although there have been scholarly arguments around the nature and frequency of cannibalism (Arens 1979), there is increasing evidence that this was a practiced norm in many human societies. Some religions also incorporate symbolic cannibalism as a way of identifying with the deity. Food can be deeply symbolic and plays an important role in every culture. Whether foods are prescribed or prohibited, each culture constructs meanings around what they define as food and the emotional attachments they have to what they eat. Consider your own plate when you next sit down to eat. What meanings are attached to the different foods that you choose? What memories do different foods evoke? Food and Gender While food itself is a material substance, humans classify and categorize foods differently based on cultural differences and family traditions. In many cultures, food is gendered, meaning some foods or dishes are associated with one gender more than with the other. Think about your own culture. If you were cooking a meal for only women or only men, would that influence the foods you chose to prepare? Although gender-specific food choices are stereotypes of male and female dietary preferences and every person has their own individual preferences, many social institutions and entertainment venues cater to gendered diets. When the television show Man v. Food , a show devoted to “big food” and eating challenges, premiered on the Travel Channel in 2008, it had some of the highest ratings of any show on that channel. Many of the foods showcased are those stereotypically associated with men (burgers, potatoes, ribs, fried chicken), and the host participates in local food-eating competitions, highlighting regional cuisines around the United States. In this show, food functions as a sporting activity under extreme conditions. Food delivery business GrubHub did a study of male and female ordering preferences in 2013–2014 at some 30,000 different restaurants in more than 700 US cities to “better understand takeout and delivery” (GrubHub 2018). In their results, they noted some significant differences between men’s and women’s ordering habits. Pizza was the most popular item for both men and women, but among other selections, women tended to order more healthy options, such as salads, sushi, and vegetable dishes, and men ordered more meat and chicken, with the most popular choices being General Tso’s chicken, chicken parmesan, and bacon. Food historian Paul Freedman traced the emergence of gendered foods and gendered food stereotypes in the United States back to the 1870s, when “shifting social norms—like the entry of women into the workplace—gave women more opportunities to dine without men” (2019b). Freedman notes that there was a rapid development of restaurants meant to appeal to women. Many of these featured lighter fare, such as sandwiches and salads, and some were referred to as “ice cream saloons,” playing on a distinction between them and the more traditional type of saloon primarily associated with men (Freedman 2015). There was also growth in the recipe industry to provide women with home cooking options that allowed for quicker meal preparation. Gendering foods, a practice often associated with specific life stages and rituals, is found across cultures and across time. In his study of marriage customs in the chiefdom of Batié in Cameroon, social anthropologist Emile Tsékénis notes that the marriage is formalized by an exchange of gendered foods between the couple’s polygamous families: The groom offers raw “male” products (palm oil, plantain, and raffia wine) to the co-wives of the girl’s mother, while the co-wives hand over the palm oil to the girl’s father, and the girl’s side offers “female” products (yams, potatoes, and/or taro) to the husband’s side. (2017, 134) This exchange of gendered foods between families mirrors the marriage ceremony and symbolically binds the couple’s families together. Gendered foods are also common during puberty rituals in many cultures, especially for young women, as female puberty is marked by the beginning of menstruation, an obvious and observable bodily change. In the Kinaaldá , the Navajo puberty ceremony for young girls that takes place shortly after the first menstruation, the girl and female members of her family together cook a corn cake in a special underground oven. The corn cake, called an alkaan , is understood as a re-creation of the first corn cake baked by the Navajo deity Changing Woman. After baking this first corn cake, Changing Woman offered a piece of it to the sun in gratitude for food and life. By reenacting this ritual, the young girl marks her own journey toward the creation of life, as she is now capable of becoming a mother. Ashes smolder in a firepit in preparation for baking the corn cake that is used to celebrate a Navajo girl’s Kinaaldá (puberty) ceremony. (credit: “Campfire 1” by Jaroslav A. Polák/flickr, Public Domain) As we saw in Chapter 12, Gender & Sexuality, cultures may also celebrate foods that enhance sexuality. In some regions of Vietnam, there are restaurants that serve dog to male customers only, as dog meat is believed to enhance masculinity (Avieli 2011). Food contains and conveys many cultural beliefs. This can be compared to the joys attributed to chocolate in the United States, especially during the celebration of Valentine’s Day. Do you have similar beliefs about food and sexuality? cannibalism the act of eating an individual of one’s own species. cuisine the cultural traditions of cooking and preparing food. cultural identity the ways in which people define and distinguish themselves culturally from other groups. feasts elaborate meals of symbolically meaningful foods shared among large groups of people. food prescriptions foods that one should eat and are considered culturally appropriate. food proscriptions foods that are prohibited and are not considered proper as food; also called food taboos.

Social Sciences


The Globalization of Food Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Describe the impacts of globalization on food and food diversity. Define food deserts and food oases. Globalization of Food Most people, when they think about food, consider it a local, individual choice based on personal preferences and economic possibilities. But food is a global commodity marketed by transnational corporations, health institutes, advertising campaigns, and subtle and not-so-subtle cultural messaging through global media such as movies, television, and online video. Most often, what people choose to eat is based on underlying structures that determine availability and cost. While there are now hothouse businesses growing year-round fruits and vegetables, affordability often prohibits everyone from having access to fresh, ripe foods. Instead, mainstream grocery stores most often stock foods imported across long distances. Most fruits and vegetables sold in the grocery store were harvested unripe (and often tasteless) so that they would last the days and weeks between harvesting and purchase. Pallets of fruit being loaded on deck for shipment overseas. Most commercial fruits are harvested before they are ripe so that they will not spoil before arriving at a supermarket, often far from where they were picked. (credit: Dr. Karl-Heinz Hochhaus/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0) In her work on food and globalization, anthropologist and food studies specialist Lynne Phillips points out the “crooked pathways” (2006, 38) that food takes to become a global commodity. Increasingly affected by transnational corporations, food today is marketed for endlessly higher profits. Food no longer goes simply from producer to consumer. There are many turns along the way. Food globalization has numerous effects on our daily lives: The food chains from producers to consumers are increasingly fragile as a small number of transnational corporations provide the basic foods that we eat daily. Failures in this food chain might come from contamination during production or breaks in the supply chain due to climate crises, tariffs, or trade negotiations between countries. Our dependence on global food chains makes the food supply to our communities more vulnerable to disruption and scarcity. Our food cultures are less diverse and tend to revolve around a limited number of mass-produced meats or grains. With the loss of diversity, there is an accompanying loss not only of food knowledge but also of nutrition. As foods become more globalized, we are increasingly dependent on food additives to enhance the appearance and taste of foods and to ensure their preservation during the long journey from factory farm to table. We are also increasingly exposed to steroids, antibiotics, and other medicines in the meat we eat. This exposure poses health risks to large numbers of people. As plants and animals are subjected to ever more sophisticated forms of genetic engineering, there is an increasing monopoly on basic food items, allowing transnational companies to affect regulatory controls on food safety. As corporate laboratories develop patented seeds (such as the Monsanto Corporation’s genetically engineered corn) that are super-producers and able to withstand challenges such as harsh climate conditions and disease, growers become dependent on the seed sold by these corporations. No longer able to save seed from year to year, growers have little choice but to pay whatever price these corporations choose to charge for their genetic material. Factory farming of all types, but especially large-scale animal farms, are major contributors to global warming. Not only do they produce large amounts of water and air pollution and contribute to worldwide deforestation, but as more and more forest is turned into pasture, the sheer number of livestock contributes significant levels of greenhouse gases that lead to global warming. Worldwide, livestock account for around 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (Quinton 2019). Food has long been an international commodity, even during the 17th and 18th centuries, when traders sought spice and trade routes connecting Europe and Asia. Today, however, food has become transnational, with production sometimes spanning many different countries and fresh and processed foods moving long distances from their original harvest or production. Because these migrating foods must be harvested early or packaged with preservatives that we may not know or even be able to pronounce, there has been a parallel development in local food movements, organic food movements, and farm-to-table establishments as people see the dangers of food globalization. In the very popular The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006), American author and food journalist Michael Pollan advocates that people should know the identity of the foods they eat and should make every effort to eat locally sourced products. Shortly after the book’s publication, chef and author Jessica Prentice coined the term locavore to refer to those who eat locally and know the origins of their foods. In 2007, locavore was chosen as the New Oxford American Dictionary word of the year. Food Deserts and Oases Worldwide, access to nutritious and affordable foods is growing increasingly unequal. Areas with inadequate or unreliable access to nutritious foods are sometimes called food deserts . Food deserts present serious challenges to health and wellness in multiple ways and have been linked to eating disorders, obesity, and malnutrition. In Western nations, food deserts frequently correspond to other areas of social inequality, such as low-income and minority communities. Reduced availability of healthy and economical food often exacerbates many of the challenges these communities face. Food deserts are common in Western countries, especially in and around urban areas. This chart shows areas in the United States where significant percentages of people both have no car and no grocery store within a mile of their home, which is about a twenty minute walk for a healthy adult. (credit: United States Department of Agriculture and Centers for Disease Control/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain) As the world population continues to grow ( currently at around 7.9 billion people ), climate change accelerates, and food production becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of a few corporations, access to food will become increasingly critical to our survival. The story of progress embraced by Western society tells us that globalization and agricultural developments have stabilized and secured our food chains, but anthropological studies of foragers suggest otherwise. Agricultural production is tied to access to arable land, clean water, stable climate, and a reliable workforce. Periodically, crops (and animals) fail due to disease, drought, and even disruption from warfare and extreme weather, leading to scarcity and famine in many parts of the world. In addition, as families and communities produce less and less of their own food and become more and more dependent on intermediaries to gain access to food, their vulnerabilities increase. While there are many differences between state societies and foragers, there are valuable lessons we can learn from them. Foragers, facing the same unstable conditions that we all face worldwide, have a more varied and flexible diet and are able to adjust their needs seasonally based on local availability. They eat locally, and they adjust their needs to what is available. There are also food oases , areas that have high access to supermarkets and fresh foods, and these are growing in number. Some are in urban or suburban areas, and some are in rural areas where sustainable farming supports a local community or restaurant. In Harrodsburg, Kentucky, the Trustees’ Table serves food from the nearby Pleasant Hill Shaker gardens. Visitors to the Shaker site, a historic cloistered religious community, learn about the Shaker seed industry, plant varieties, and sustainable gardening techniques at Shaker Farm, then walk down to the Trustees’ Table to have a farm-to-table meal. The seasonal menu features local Kentucky dishes that would have been common fare during the period of Shaker occupation (1805–1910), such as garlic potatoes, warm or cold salads, vegetable pot pies, and apple pie. By utilizing the foods raised in the nearby gardens, the Trustees’ Table serves as a legacy restaurant that helps preserve and sustain Shaker research and farming on-site. In Richmond, Virginia, an organization called Real Local RVA was founded in 2014 as a grassroots local food movement to support businesses and residential areas in the downtown area of the city. It expresses its core value as “collaboration over competition.” The group sponsors monthly meetings, local farm tours, and community events highlighting businesses and prominent figures in the local food movement. The participants are all farmers, independent grocers, or local restaurants that source local ingredients and products as part of their mission. Besides advocating for small farms and independent businesses, Real Local RVA also sponsors workshops and education on sustainable farming, does joint marketing and “storytelling” about its partnership and the values of local food networks, and provide a recognizable brand to identify participating members for the wider urban community. Although local food movements are increasingly popular, most still primarily operate in more affluent areas. As we develop more of these healthy initiatives, we also must expand the zones in which they operate, especially in cities, to include all of our neighbors and neighborhoods. Food and sociality go hand in hand. As Michael Pollan writes, “The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from mere animal biology to an act of culture” (2008, 192). The study of food in anthropology is important for many reasons. Food reveals cultural identities and physical vulnerabilities, and it helps build social networks and mark important life events. How often eating is prescribed, what foods are considered appropriate, who cooks, who serves whom, and what foods are most and least valued all vary across cultures. As anthropologists seek to understand human cultures, food is often a centerpiece ingredient in knowing who we are. Summary Food is a ubiquitous artifact. Found everywhere during all periods of history, it is diverse and symbolic. The study of early human diets is important for understanding the evolution of humans, and archaeologists use various kinds of evidence to determine early foodways, from material artifacts such as food utensils to food residues and even coprolites. The study of ancient foods provides valuable information about health, economics, politics, and religion of early humans and the ways humans adapted to changing environments. Today, Indigenous groups such as the Cherokee are incorporating traditional foodways in cultural revitalization efforts, negotiating with the government to protect their ability to harvest wild foods on ancestral lands. Many anthropologists take a biocultural approach to the study of food, examining the biological/nutritional role of food and its connection to identity. Agricultural practices such as the Three Sisters practice of the Haudenosaunee are good examples of ways in which human cultures have used their knowledge about food to develop sustainable and healthy farming techniques. Sustainable farming techniques, many of them grounded in traditional practices, typically produce higher food yields, reduce fertilizer costs, build healthier soils, and avoid genetically modified plants. There is also growing interest today in cultural foodways that may increase health and wellness, such as the Mediterranean diet, based on fruits, vegetables, and olive oil, and the paleo diet, which is based on our perspective of early human diets and includes lean meats, fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Food plays a central role in cultural identity. Cultures practice food prescriptions, or specific foods considered critical to maintaining cultural identity, such as short-grain rice for the Japanese, and food proscriptions, which are food taboos, such as horsemeat in the United States. Feast foods are another way in which cultures use food to mark and symbolize special occasions. In short, what we eat as human societies defines who we are. Some societies, such as the Wari’ in Brazil and many others, have also practiced forms of cannibalism as ways of defining kinship and humanity. Gender and religion are other areas in which food plays a major role in creating boundaries and identities. Today, many foods are global commodities. Grocery store foods, produced and distributed by transnational corporations, may be shipped many thousands of miles from their points of origin. Access to fresh food is a global challenge, especially in urban environments with concentrated populations. In food deserts, multiple forms of social inequality affect the health and wellness of the whole society. There are also growing numbers of food oases, where local movements offer farm-to-table meat and produce. Food plays an important role in our biological and cultural lives. Given the ongoing challenges of climate change, food insecurity is increasing worldwide as dependable food networks are shifting. Food Memories Food plays an important role in long-term memory, as it is linked to smell, taste, and texture and often is a central feature of social functions, whether they be family dinners or holiday feasts. In this project, you will interview two individuals who are likely to have different food memories than you; they may be older, they may be living in a different part of the country (or world), or they may have lived part of their lives in a specific environment (rural or urban) that is different from yours. Ask each person to share with you stories about special holiday meals prepared and served as part of their family life, whether as a child or an adult. What foods do they most identify with specific holidays? How did they prepare and consume those foods? Were there specific gender roles during the preparation and holiday meals? After collecting and writing up what you have learned, what conclusions can you make about the role of food in human social and cultural life? Critical Thinking Questions Bibliography Ahmad, Shafqat, M. Vinayaga Moorthy, Olga V. Demler, Frank B. Hu, Paul M. Ridker, Daniel I. Chasman, and Samia Mora. 2018. “Assessment of Risk Factors and Biomarkers Associated with Risk of Cardiovascular Disease among Women Consuming a Mediterranean Diet.” JAMA Network Open 1 (8). https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2018.5708. Arens, William. 1979. The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy . New York: Oxford University Press. Avieli, Nir. 2011. “Dog Meat Politics in a Vietnamese Town.” Ethnology 50 (1): 59–78. http://ethnology.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/Ethnology/article/viewArticle/6092. Blackley, Seamus, Serena Love, and Richard Bowman. 2019. “A Conversation with the Team That Made Bread with Ancient Egyptian Yeast.” Interview by Jenny G. Zhang. Eater. August 8, 2019. https://www.eater.com/2019/8/8/20792134/interview-seamus-blackley-serena-love-richard-bowman-baked-bread-ancient-egyptian-yeast. Borowski, Oded. 2004. “Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: The Mediterranean Diet.” Near Eastern Archaeology 67 (2): 96–107. Braun, Adee. 2014. “Looking to Quell Sexual Urges? Consider the Graham Cracker.” Atlantic , January 15, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/01/looking-to-quell-sexual-urges-consider-the-graham-cracker/282769/. Carnegie Museum of Natural History. 2018. “The Three Sisters: Sustainers of Life.” North South East West: American Indians and the Natural World. https://nsew.carnegiemnh.org/iroquois-confederacy-of-the-northeast/three_sisters/. Chang, Melanie L., and April Nowell. 2016. “How to Make Stone Soup: Is the ‘Paleo Diet’ a Missed Opportunity for Anthropologists?” Evolutionary Anthropology 25 (5): 228–231. Chávez, Karen. 2019. “Great Smokies Approves Historic Sochan Collecting Agreement with Eastern Band of Cherokee.” Citizen-Times , updated March 27, 2019. https://www.citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2019/03/25/great-smoky-mountains-national-park-allow-cherokee-gather-sochan/3267860002/. Coleman, Rei Kataoka. 2017. “Where Did Japan’s Imported Rice Go?” Tokyo Review. July 7, 2017. https://www.tokyoreview.net/2017/07/where-did-japans-imported-rice-go/. Conklin, Beth A. 1995. “‘Thus Are Our Bodies, Thus Was Our Custom’: Mortuary Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society.” American Ethnologist 22 (1): 75–101. Cornaro, Lewis [Alvise]. 1779. Discourses on a Sober and Temperate Life . London: Benjamin White. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30660. Duffy, Lisa. 2020. “Ancient Maya Cuisine and Residue Analysis.” Florida Museum of Natural History. Updated June 29, 2020. https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/envarch/research/maya/residue-analysis/. Ebeling, Jennie R., and Yorke M. Rowan. 2004. “The Archaeology of the Daily Grind: Ground Stone Tools and Food Production in the Southern Levant.” Near Eastern Archaeology 67 (2): 108–117. Farb, Peter, and George Armelagos. 1980. Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating . Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Freedman, Paul. 2015. “Women and Restaurants in the 19th-Century United States.” OUPblog , Oxford University Press. March 30, 2015. https://blog.oup.com/2015/03/women-restaurants-united-states-history/. Freedman, Paul. 2019a. American Cuisine: And How It Got This Way . New York: Liveright. Freedman, Paul. 2019b. “How Steak Became Manly and Salads Became Feminine.” The Conversation. October 24, 2019. https://theconversation.com/how-steak-became-manly-and-salads-became-feminine-124147. Gish Hill, Christina. 2020. “Returning Corn, Beans, and Squash to Native American Farms.” JSTOR Daily , JSTOR. November 24, 2020. https://daily.jstor.org/partner-post-indigenous-agriculture/. Graff, Sarah R. 2020. “Archaeology of Cuisine and Cooking.” Annual Review of Anthropology 49:337–354. GrubHub. 2018. Men vs. Women Eating Preferences: Online Ordering Data Reveals Gender Differences in Takeout Dining . https://media.grubhub.com/files/doc_downloads/GrubHub-Inc-Men-vs-Women-Eating-Preferences-White-Paper_v001_b3cw14.pdf. Isaac, Barry L. 2002. “Cannibalism among Aztecs and Their Neighbors: Analysis of the 1577–1586 ‘Relaciones Geográficas’ for Nueva España and Nueva Galicia Provinces.” Journal of Anthropological Research 58 (2): 203–224. Lewis, Courtney. 2012. “The Case of the Wild Onions: The Impact of Ramps on Cherokee Rights.” Southern Cultures 18 (2): 104–117. Lindenbaum, Shirley. 1979. Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands . Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield. Linnekin, Baylen. 2019. “Complicated Rules for Foraging Aren’t Helping Our National Parks.” Reason , April 6, 2019. https://reason.com/2019/04/06/complicated-rules-for-foraging-arent-hel/. Lobel, Cindy. 2012. “Sylvester Graham and Antebellum Diet Reform.” The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History AP US History Study Guide. July 31, 2012. http://ap.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/first-age-reform/essays/sylvester-graham-and-antebellum-diet-reform. Mayo Clinic Staff. “Paleo Diet: What Is It and Why Is It So Popular?” Mayo Clinic. August 25, 2020. https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/paleo-diet/art-20111182. Mitchell, Dawn. 2019. “The Cure for What Ails You: Elixirs, Tonics and Snake Oil.” Indy Star , updated January 4, 2019. https://www.indystar.com/story/news/history/retroindy/2019/01/03/cure-what-ails-you-elixirs-tonics-and-snake-oil/2288353002/. Mt. Pleasant, Jane. 2016. “Food Yields and Nutrient Analyses of the Three Sisters: A Haudenosaunee Cropping System.” Ethnobiology Letters 7 (1): 87–98. https://doi.org/10.14237/ebl.7.1.2016.721. Murphy, Andi. 2018. “Meet the Three Sisters Who Sustain Native America.” Native Voices , PBS. November 16, 2018. https://www.pbs.org/native-america/blogs/native-voices/meet-the-three-sisters-who-sustain-native-america/. The Nutrition Source. 2018. “Diet Review: Mediterranean Diet.” Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Updated December 2018. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-weight/diet-reviews/mediterranean-diet/. Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. 1993. Rice as Self: Japanese Identities through Time . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. 1995. “Structure, Event and Historical Metaphor: Rice and Identities in Japanese History.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1 (2): 227–253. Phillips, Lynne. 2006. “Food and Globalization.” Annual Review of Anthropology 35:37–57. Pobiner, Briana. 2013. “Evidence for Meat-Eating by Early Humans.” Nature Education Knowledge 4 (6): 1. https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/evidence-for-meat-eating-by-early-humans-103874273/. Pollan, Michael. 2006. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals . New York: Penguin Press. Pollan, Michael. 2008. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto . New York: Penguin Press. Quinton, Amy. 2019. “Cows and Climate Change: Making Cattle More Sustainable.” Feeding a Growing Population, UC Davis. June 27, 2019. https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/making-cattle-more-sustainable. Richter, Tobias, and Amaia Arranz-Otaegui. 2018. “Following a New Trail of Crumbs to Agriculture’s Origins.” Sapiens , July 16, 2018. https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/oldest-known-bread-crumbs-discovered/. Rivers, Bridgette, Robert Oliver, and Lynn Resler. 2014. “Pungent Provisions: The Ramp and Appalachian Identity.” Material Culture 46 (1): 1–24. Robb, Alice. 2014. “Will Overpopulation and Resource Scarcity Drive Cannibalism?” New Republic , June 19, 2014. https://newrepublic.com/article/118252/cannibalism-and-overpopulation-how-amazon-tribe-ate-their-dead. Tsékénis, Emile. 2017. “Personhood, Collectives, and the Human-Animal Distinction: The Cases of the Cameroon Grassfields and Madagascar.” Anthropologica 59 (1): 130–144. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. n.d. “Fast and Abstinence.” Accessed September 30, 2021. https://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/liturgical-year-and-calendar/lent/catholic-information-on-lenten-fast-and-abstinence. Vilaça, Aparecida. 2002. “Making Kin out of Others in Amazonia.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8 (2): 347–365. Waldstein, Anna. 2017. “Food, Anthropology Of.” In The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology , edited by Hilary Callan. John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1605. White, Max E. 1975. “Contemporary Usage of Native Plant Foods by the Eastern Cherokees.” Appalachian Journal 2 (4): 323–326. Wild, Sarah. 2019. “Scientists Find First Evidence of Humans Cooking Starches.” Sapiens , June 21, 2019. https://www.sapiens.org/news/starches-first-evidence-humans-cooking/. locavore a person who eats locally produced foods and knows their origins. food deserts areas that lack access to nutritious and affordable foods. food oases areas that have high access to supermarkets and fresh foods.

Social Sciences


Introduction 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 & Development Office/flickr, CC BY 2.0) “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 Anas , the famous investigative journalist from Ghana who gave a TED Talk 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. 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 website . 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. 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? 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.

Social Sciences


Putting the Mass into Media Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Define the basic function of media. Distinguish basic media from mass media. Describe the social phenomenon of technophilia. Explain why culture is important to the study of media. Technophiles of the world. Modern communication technologies are widely used in most cultures of the contemporary world. (credit: top left, “Sinaw, Bedouin Woman with Mobile Phone” by Arian Zwegers/flickr, CC BY 2.0; top right, “Kiwanja_Burma_Calling_17” by Ken Banks, kiwanja.net/flickr, CC BY 2.0; bottom, “©UNICEF/ECU/2020/Arcos” by UNICEF Ecuador/flickr, CC BY 2.0) 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. To see how Gutenberg’s printing press worked, watch this video of a demonstration of the world’s most complete working replica at Crandall Historical Printing Museum in Provo, Utah. 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. Watch Darkness of Sorrow to see an example of a Ghanaian movie. 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. mass media mechanically reproduced forms of communication targeting large audiences. media tools for storing and sharing information. technophilia the love of technology; characteristic of societies and eras of increasing technological innovation and its incorporation into everyday life.

Social Sciences


Putting Culture into Media Studies Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Describe how an anthropologist might use participant observation to study media. Explain the relationship between modernity and media. Give an example illustrating the complex relationship between media and culture. Define the concept of cosmopolitanism. In this section, the author of this chapter, Jennifer Hasty, describes her own experience using participant observation. In the early 1990s, I went to the West African county of Ghana to study media and politics. I was specifically interested in the role of newspapers in the great wave of democratization across many African countries in that decade (Hasty 2005). Because I had some undergraduate training in journalism, I decided to volunteer as an intern at several newspapers and learn how news is produced in Ghana. I wound up working as a journalist for five different news organizations in the Ghanaian capital city of Accra over a period of several years. Through these experiences, I learned a great deal about how culture and history shape local news production, texts, and reception. When people outside of anthropology ask me about my fieldwork, I tell them (maybe too much) about working as a journalist in Ghana. They often respond with a perplexed look, saying, “Wait, I thought you said you were an anthropologist.” When most people think about anthropological fieldwork, they think of quaint villages and rural locations, seemingly disconnected from the rest of the world. When they think of the topics anthropologists typically pursue, they think of religious rituals, political pageantry, complex kinship systems, and folk arts. That is, they think of the realm of “tradition.” In fact, the contexts in which anthropologists work are not cut off from the rest of the world at all—and they never have been. People all over the world, in both rural and urban communities, are hooked up to global flows of information, images, ideas, commodities, and people. Newspapers, photography, radio, television, and the Internet are woven into daily life nearly everywhere one might go in the world. Recall the discussions of modernity in previous chapters. Historically speaking, modernity is the whole way of life associated with industrial and postindustrial societies—that is to say, the institutions and features of modernity emerged alongside industrialization and mass production. However, the features of modernity have spread across the globe to societies that are not primarily industrial or postindustrial. Features of modernity such as mass media, wage labor, and the nation-state shape the everyday lives of people in primarily agrarian, pastoral societies and gatherer-hunter societies. Anthropologists have abandoned the idea that some people live traditional lifestyles while others live modern ones. Rather, all people are modern in distinctive ways, shaped by local historical and cultural forces. Since the early 1990s, anthropologists have been increasingly interested in the various forms of modernity that have emerged in non-European and non-American contexts. As a key tool of modernity, mass media have become the object of growing fascination in anthropology over the last three decades. My own first fieldwork was part of an early wave of media studies in anthropology, culminating in the establishment of an entire subdiscipline, media anthropology (Spitulnik 1993; Askew and Wilk 2002; Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002). By examining the use of media in contemporary sociocultural life, media anthropologists have learned that nearly all forms of culture are shaped by various genres of media. People take photographs and videos to commemorate cultural events and share their memories with others. They report on cultural topics in print media, radio, and television and discuss those issues on talk shows and social media. In fact, it’s fair to say that mass media have become primary tools for defining, reinforcing, and reproducing local cultures. Rather than being opposed to tradition, mass media are key instruments for preserving and transmitting traditional cultures as well as modernity. A few months ago, a Ghanaian journalist friend of mine, George Sydney Abugri, emailed me to ask if I could help him self-publish several books on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). Now retired, Abugri wanted to share his essays, poetry, and memoirs with Ghanaians, journalists, and scholars all over the world. In order to publish on KDP, you need a bank account from the United States or another “approved” country, and Ghana was not on that list. After a bit of textual wrangling, I was able to set up an account for him and get his books online so that he could find his global audience. Anthropologists have a term for the kind of worldly orientation evident in Abugri’s desire to speak to a global audience about global issues: cosmopolitanism . Cosmopolitanism refers to a type of worldly knowledge and sophistication. Contemporary anthropologists, working in rural, village, and urban contexts, find that people in all settings have remarkable awareness of current world issues such as climate change, the Arab Spring, and the Me Too movement. One of Abugri’s poems describes an incident on the German airline Lufthansa in which a White flight attendant claimed she could not understand Abugri’s request for a glass of water. Cosmopolitan writers such as Abugri link their personal experiences to global issues such as race, environmentalism, and gender equality. Global issues and modern media forms are tightly integrated in the lives of both rural and urban peoples in cultures all over the world. cosmopolitanism worldly knowledge and sophistication, often associated with involvement in global forms of media.

Social Sciences


Visual Anthropology and Ethnographic Film Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Give examples of the early use of visual media in ethnographic fieldwork. Define the field of visual anthropology. Describe two examples of ethnographic film. 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. An image from Margaret Mead’s film Trance and Dance in Bali . Margaret Mead was an early pioneer in the use of visual media in anthropology. (credit: Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain) 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 . Promotional poster for Nanook of the North , considered by some to be one of the most significant examples of early documentary filmmaking. While based on field experience, a number of events in the film were staged. (credit: Robert J. Flaherty/Pathe Pictures/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain) 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 . ethnographic film the use of film in ethnographic research, either as a method, a record, or a means of reporting on anthropological fieldwork. visual anthropology the use of visual media as a method of research or its study as a topic of research.

Social Sciences


Photography, Representation, and Memory Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Define the gaze and list important features of this concept. Give an example of the imperial gaze in popular photographic media. Describe the use of photography in colonial contexts. 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. National Geographic cover from 1961 featuring the “exotic other.” Researchers have noted that during the latter half of the twentieth century the magazine commonly portrayed non-Western people as exotic and close to nature. (credit: “NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC Magazine - October 1961 - South Vietnam Fights the Red Tide - Nam Việt Nam chiến đấu chống thủy triều đỏ” by manhhai/flickr, CC BY 2.0) 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. Hornberger’s photograph of “emancipated” children. These children, who had been sold into servitude by their parents, were purchased by White missionaries and brought to live with them. Many were unhappy in this unfamiliar setting and ran way to reunite with their families. (credit: “L R and 2 Native Children, Congo, ca. 1900–1915” by Unknown/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain) 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 jikko . 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 juuntuwaay 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 jamano , a sense of fashionable novelty and change. the gaze a specific mode of looking at images shaped by the identities of viewer and viewed. imperial gaze a set of conventions for how people in imperial or colonizing societies view the people and landscapes of subjugated territories. male gaze a set of conventions for how men look at women. voyeuristic describes a gaze aimed at people who do not know they are being viewed.

Social Sciences


News Media, the Public Sphere, and Nationalism Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Describe the worldview presented in news media. Define the concept of the public sphere. Explain the importance of the public sphere to the study of news media. 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, When I first came to Ghana, I wanted to understand the role of newspapers in the wave of democratization sweeping across the African continent in the 1990s. In my first few days in Ghana, I bought as many newspapers as I could find and read them studiously, marking stories with marginal comments and comparing front pages side by side. The state-sponsored newspapers highlighted the benevolent actions of government in promoting economic development and social stability. Frequently, the front pages of such publications featured an enthusiastic headline about a government project to build a new road or market complex, illustrated with a color photograph of President Jerry Rawlings wielding a pickax or operating a bulldozer to officially launch the project. Most stories foregrounded the official speeches of government officials, emphasizing themes of national cohesion and responsible citizenship. In contrast, the front pages of the private newspapers shouted out bold allegations of corruption among government officials with stories often based on anonymous sources and rumor. In these papers, Rawlings was often depicted wearing mirrored sunglasses and army fatigues, portrayed as a barely reformed military coup leader with no interest in real democracy. These two versions of the national political reality were completely at odds with one another. And yet, in my initial interviews, both state and private journalists maintained that they were the true forces of democracy in Ghana, protecting the interests of the people. Both maintained strong commitments to journalistic neutrality and objectivity. How could they produce such wildly different optics on the political sphere? How could state journalists fervently believe that they were promoting democracy when, in daily practice, they were echoing the public pronouncements of government officials and providing strategically flattering coverage of the actions of the state? How could private journalists claim to be responsible purveyors of truth when their sensational stories were so often based on rumor and stirred up political and regional conflicts? Anthropologists frequently discover such contradictions between what people say they’re doing and what they’re actually doing. This is one of the advantages of long-term fieldwork; it gives anthropologists time to get behind the official story presented in texts and interviews by conducting extended periods of participant observation. Working at the premier state newspaper, the Daily Graphic, I discovered that the whole working life of a state journalist is structured in such a way that the state does indeed seem to be a benevolent patron and the words uttered by state officials do seem to be the superior and responsible version of national reality. Every working day, state journalists were invited to state ministries to cover official events. They didn’t have to scramble around trying to gain access to government officials, as private journalists did, and they never faced rejection or exclusion when they showed up at state functions. Instead, they were politely ushered into the realm of the state to witness some important (or not) announcement or action. After the event, state journalists were given copies of the speeches they’d just heard and provided with snacks and a beverage—and an envelope with a small sum of cash. This small gift was referred to as soli , short for solidarity, and it symbolized the implicit reciprocity between state officials and state journalists. When they got back to the newsroom, state journalists sat down, printed speeches in hand, and wrote stories depicting the state in the way they themselves had just experienced the state: a kind and thoughtful patron supporting the welfare and development of the people. At the three privately owned newspapers I worked for during my fieldwork, the working day was much more stressful and antagonistic. Considered divisive and irresponsible by the state, the private press had been banned by Rawlings’s military government in the 1980s. In the 1990s, the private press was just reemerging as part of the overall process of democratization, but the government still considered private journalists to be political enemies. Rawlings issued angry public diatribes against the private press, threatening criminal libel suits with long prison terms. Not only were private journalists not invited to daily government events, but they were not even allowed to attend. Many government officials dodged the phone calls of private journalists, and some refused to speak to them at all. Ordinary Ghanaians, still spooked by the government repression of the previous decade, often demanded anonymity as a condition of speaking to private journalists. Excluded from official channels of public discourse, the private press was forced to rely on unnamed sources and rumors. From their point of view, the antagonistic representation of the state as corrupt and repressive was the truth as they experienced it every day. Taken together, the state and private news media created a highly contentious public sphere with competing ideologies—versions of political reality associated with particular groups. While the government used the state press to build national unity, the private press challenged the legitimacy of the state and its commitment to democracy. Visit the news website Graphic Online , the online news platform of the Daily Graphic. Elizabeth Bird Personal History: Elizabeth Bird was born and raised in Newcastle upon Tyne in northeast England. As a child, she was an avid reader, especially drawn to historical and fantasy literature. Reading about various societies in different time periods, Bird developed an early interest in other cultures and the past. As a self-described “shy and rather unsociable” child (personal communication), she developed a more analytical view toward social groups. She remarks, “I have heard that many anthropologists grew up feeling they don’t quite fit in—that would be me!” Bird studied anthropology at Durham University and folklife studies at the University of Leeds, both in England. She then earned an interdisciplinary PhD from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. A few years later, she moved to the United States, where she earned an MA in journalism from the University of Iowa. She then became a professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida. Area of Anthropology: Bird pioneered the anthropology of news media. At Iowa, she wrote about the connection between folklore/myth and journalistic narratives, especially in tabloid newspapers. Accomplishments in the Field: Anthropologists in the 1980s generally dismissed media as a topic for research, but Bird considered this view shortsighted given the ubiquity of media in societies all over the world and the centrality of media to contemporary culture. In her first book, For Enquiring Minds: A Cultural Study of Supermarket Tabloids (1992), Bird argues that tabloid newspapers such as the National Enquirer build on and feed larger cultural narratives in the general folklore of American life. In interviews with readers of the tabloid press, she discovers that they are attracted to tabloids for a variety of reasons and deploy a diverse set of strategies for finding meaning in these texts. Prescient of the conspiracy theories and “fake news” controversies of the early 21st century, Bird’s work on tabloids the 1980s and 1990s found that many readers are alienated from mainstream American culture. In this part of her career, Bird’s main focus was on the audiences of media, using ethnographic and qualitative research to understand how people in a culture read and use media in their everyday lives. This research came together in her book The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World (2003). In this book, Bird explores how people pick and choose different elements of media as they construct their class and ethnic identities, participate in religious or political communities, and contemplate the meaning of scandals and other publicized cultural narratives. While much mass communication research has focused on “the audience” as a monolithic, unified entity, Bird shows how an ethnographic approach reveals “the audience” to be a highly differentiated assemblage of people using a wide variety of techniques to comprehend and use mass media as a cultural reservoir. Importance of Their Work: Elizabeth Bird was among the first anthropologists to take media seriously as an object of serious academic study. While many mass communication scholars were analyzing the texts of news media, Bird used interviews and participant observation to explore how people actually make sense of these texts and weave them into their thoughts and practices. Around 2009–2010, Bird moved away from media as an exclusive object of study, returning to earlier research on social history, heritage, and memory in a Nigerian community. Incorporating media analysis and oral histories, she now conducts research on a traumatic massacre that took place in that community in 1967. She documents how print and broadcast media have erased popular memory of the event and how social media has revived and activated personal memories of it. Bird has described the Asaba Memorial Project as “the highlight of [her] career.” independent media forms of print and broadcast media that are privately owned. public sphere a domain of social life in which people represent, learn about, and discuss the important issues of the day. soli short for solidarity ; a small sum of money given by news sources to journalists at the end of an assignment in Ghana. state media forms of print and broadcast media that are financially supported by the state and subject to government control.

Social Sciences