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Anthropologists as journalists
Brian McKenna, CounterPunch
When Anthropology Disparages Journalism It Shortchanges Citizens, Damages Profession
… A common refrain among academic anthropologists is this: “I never talk to journalists, they always get me wrong. I just can’t trust them.” Whenever I hear this my mind churns, “Then why don’t you become the journalist and write it yourself?” Applied anthropologists are more inclined to write an occasional journalistic piece, but it’s not viewed as a central focus of applied work. Again, why not become the seasoned journalist?
… Too many academic anthropologists are marooned in the coffin-boxes of university classrooms, their pearls of wisdom echoing wistfully off of hermetically sealed-walls. Paradoxically, just outside of campus bounds, local TV and radio programs – which can potentially educate millions – are staffed by their freshly minted (and inexperienced) former students! These are campus graduates of journalism, broadcast communications, speech, and/or theater programs where they were groomed in the practical arts of elocution and head bobbing for the airwaves and/or TV cameras. According to the FCC, these are supposed to be democratic public airwaves. But in practice, under corporate hegemony, they are mostly off limits to Ph.D.s, social scientists and even investigative journalists, i.e. thinkers and social critics. Anthropologists must fight for access to these spaces. Meanwhile they must circulate their voices in a multitude of public fora in local newspapers, the alternative press, the Internet, public television and public radio.
… What makes a good journalist? In a telling Slate Magazine article, “Can Journalism School Be Saved?” editor Jack Shafer said that “I’d rather hire somebody who wrote a brilliant senior thesis on Chaucer than a J-school M.A. who’s mastered the art of computer-assisted reporting. If you can crack Chaucer, you’ve got a chance at decoding city hall.” (Zenger 2002)
Anthropologists can crack Chaucer and much more. Anthropologists can debate Foucault, survive in foreign lands with little more than the grit of our teeth and write insightful interpretations of the global/local intersections of capital. Anthropologists would make great journalists, albeit if they learned to write more quickly, urgently, succinctly and in a public voice.
… Unfortunately, anthropologists rarely write urgently about the local culture for the general public. It’s even rarer for them to do it in their own hometowns where they live. But journalists – particularly investigative muckraking journalists – do. And at a time when corporate media has fired too many investigative journalists, anthropologists need to pick up the slack. Both professional anthropology and professional journalism are in free fall.
… In short, anthropology programs need to bridge with communications departments and create courses and programs in “Anthropology & Journalism” to help create the critical public intellectuals of the 21st century. Such programs will not only attract journalism majors to anthropology but will help equip students with skills to popularize critical knowledge.
One thing is certain. We need a new wave of writers and journalists, unafraid to do the most radical thing imaginable: simply describe reality. Their ranks will largely come from freethinkers, dissenting academics and bored mainstream journalists who rediscover what got them interested in anthropology in the first place, telling the truth.
A version of this article was published in the Society for Applied Newsletter, February 2009 edition, Tim Wallace, Editor
(10 March 2009)
A version of this article was originally published in the newsletter of the Society for Applied Anthropology (Feb 09). It’s on page 24. PDF here.
Scientists on the streets
Simon Lewis, Guardian
To get the climate change message across, environmental scientists need better arguments – and more public protests
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Scientists are taking an increasingly political stance towards action on climate change. In 2005, the science academies of the G8 countries, plus China, India and Brazil, collectively called for governments to place climate change at the top of the international agenda. By 2008 they were calling for a planned transition to a low-carbon economy. Similarly, this week’s international climate change conference in Copenhagen, at which I am speaking, is deliberately organised to try to influence the UN conference in December (also in Copenhagen), which will discuss placing global limits on carbon dioxide emissions. Indeed, the website calls the conference “science for politics”.
Yet these are potentially dangerous times for scientists who move into political arenas.
… Another example [of the effects of climate change] is that few realise that we are changing the basic rules of agriculture. For the last 8,000 years the game has been the same: judge the likely weather based on past experience, deploy your best technology, hedge your bets, work hard, and hope that you end the year with surplus food. Increasingly the past will be a poor guide to the future, with much-increased chances of major crop failures. This is extremely worrying when we have 6.7 billion people to feed, and the recent food crisis shows the rapidity with which social unrest unfolds across the globe when food becomes expensive.
Simon Lewis is a Royal Society research fellow at the Earth & Biosphere Institute, University of Leeds
(10 March 2009)
Plan B: scientists get radical in bid to halt global warming ‘catastrophe’
Jonathan Leake, Times Online
THE director of a Nasa space laboratory will this week lead thousands of climate change campaigners through Coventry in an extraordinary intervention in British politics.
James Hansen plans to use Thursday’s Climate Change Day of Action to put pressure on Gordon Brown to wake up to the threat of climate change – by halting the construction of new power stations and the expansion of airports, with schemes such as the third runway at Heathrow.
The move by a leading American researcher is the highest-profile example to date of the way climate change is politicising scientists.
(19 March 2009)
Heavily related to the Simon Lewis article above. An interesting question: how to reconcile political activism with scientific “objectivity”? KS.
