Anthropological Approaches to Media in Africa

Abstract

Anthropologists began to study media relatively late in the history of the discipline. Research on media -in particular, mass media -tended to be associated "with the societies most anthropologists came from, and thus with the self rather than the other" (Krings 2015, p. 5), and except for a few rare exceptions, "it was not until the late 1980s that anthropologists began to turn systematic attention to media as a social practice" (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002, p. 3, also Spitulnik 1993). This was true even for older media, such as songs, dance and theater, since those topics were associated with the other late research focus of urban anthropology. A similar situation can be observed in the context of African studies, where scholars began to concentrate consistently on the analysis of media only during the 1990s, in response not only to processes of "deterritorialization of culture" (Gupta and Ferguson 1992) -the challenge to the reified boundaries that characterized functionalist approaches -and to the ongoing disciplinary shift toward an anthropology of "the present" (Fox 1991), but also as a reaction to changing conditions in the field. As Tilo Grätz underscores, during the 1990s "the proliferation of new media institutions such as independent newspapers, radio and TV stations … brought about a new media landscape in many African countries" (2011, p. 152) and researchers were compelled to account for the transformations that were taking place in front of their eyes.