Anthropology in the news? (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate) |
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| Authors: | Hugh Gusterson |
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| Institution: | Professor of Cultural Studies and Anthropology at George Mason University. He is an authority on the culture of nuclear weapons scientists and antinuclear activists, with a regular editorial column in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. |
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| Abstract: | It is part of our informal culture of anthropology to complain about the way the media portray us, and yet there has been little systematic analysis of media representations of anthropology. I look at stories about anthropologists, stories that quote anthropologists and opinion pieces by anthropologists over a six‐month period in The New York Times. I conclude that biological anthropology and archaeology are over‐represented in these stories, and that the media portrays anthropologists primarily as authorities on exotic others abroad, or ritual behaviour at home. Anthropologists who write about neoliberalism and militarism have had difficulty getting into the high‐end mainstream media, where it is economists rather than anthropologists who are seen as experts on general human nature. |
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