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053 - AAA2017 - Arielle Milkman
70 Plays6 years ago
Paper: Who's afraid of journalism? On anthropology's (unhappy) relationship with mainstream media and what anthropological podcasts might take from journalists
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Transcript
Introduction to the AAA Meeting and Anthropod Podcast
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You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
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This is the recording of a paper presented at the 116th annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Washington D.C. on December 1st, 2017. The session was entitled, Podcasted Anthropology, Exploring Approaches to Multimodal Research and Communications, and was organized and chaired by Nushin Setigasamy and Kyle Olson, both of the University of Pennsylvania.
00:00:30
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This paper was presented by Ariel Milkman of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and was titled Who's Afraid of Journalism on anthropology's unhappy relationship with mainstream media and what anthropological podcasts might take from journalists. So, hi, my name is Ariel. I'm a cultural anthropologist and I'm interested in development, housing and displacement in urban contexts in the Americas. I'm also the associate, an associate editor for Anthropod.
00:00:58
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With Catherine, that's a podcast for the Society for Cultural Anthropology. And I recently produced an episode called Drone, Anthropology, Poetry, and Military for Anthropot that I'm going to be using as one of the examples in my talk. And I'm also the executive producer. Thank you. Is it better? No, that's great. I'm the executive producer of the Anthro-Bites series that Siobhan McGurk has been doing for our podcast.
Anthropology vs Journalism: Credibility and Transparency
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So I want to start by talking about journalistic and anthropological rivalries and what we might learn from journalists who have been in the podcasting game for a while. Then I want to talk about listening modes and what I see as the pedagogical and ethnographic promise of multimodal anthropology. So at the 2016 AAA meetings, I noticed a tension in the room between practitioners of anthropology and journalism. As I discussed on a panel, Ruth Bahar told an audience full of anthropology faculty and students that in order to be more transparent,
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more public and credible, anthropologists should use real names for their interlocutors. They should report facts accurately and precisely making ethnography both easily legible and easily fact-checked to increase its credibility in the public eye. David Price, speaking on a panel about public anthropology, encouraged anthropologists to invite readers in by decreasing the amount of reporting about minutiae
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and by strengthening the evidence used to make broad claims and big arguments. These are tools that journalists have embraced to make their work reproducible and transparent. And although we can and should talk about how the desire for reproducibility may raise ethical problems, Bahar and Price's call to action could also mobilize us to look to journalists for tricks of the trade.
Anthropology in Journalism: Ethnography and Critiques
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These disparate and sometimes contradictory musings on the role of ethnography betray an uneasy relationship between anthropology and the non-academic field
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with which it's most closely aligned. I wonder if we can theorize this relationship and find its historical precedence in order to proceed with action-oriented steps for a future of public anthropology. Similarly, in a September 2017 talk at the University of Colorado, Paige West ended her meditation about ecological violence with a discussion of what ethnography is doing. In a world where large scale effects are important and big data valued, West wondered what ethnography contributes to this assemblage.
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Or are we just journalists? She said, referring to a type of scholarship that is flawed in its inability to go beyond description. On the other hand, some US-based journalists in the wake of the 2016 election have called for descriptions of white rural voters in the US that are less, quote, anthropological. This harnessing of anthropology recalls a trope of anthropological thinking as that which makes the strange familiar for the cappuccino drinking bourgeois, usually city dwelling listener.
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Rather than take the US rural south as its site of radical difference to be studied, this perspective suggests that journalists should seek to represent the everyday. This reveals the disciplines of anthropology and journalism in opposition and using each other as boundary making devices that clearly establish what practitioners in each genre should be doing.
Impact of Radio and Podcasts on Society
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Anthropologists who want to play in the podcasting game arrive to a world where journalists, bloggers, activists, and community organizers have staked a fierce claim.
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As such, we do well to learn from some of their tactics, questioning others and using the features that make our discipline unique. As Michelle Helms has indicated, radio, more than print capitalism, which were made a local medium for most of the 20th century in the US, united and amplified the national character of the imagined community Benedict Anderson discussed. Beyond just uniting the nation, radio made people think about themselves and about others in new ways.
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If radio made feelings public, it also brought the public into intimate spaces, moving politics and other types of news literally to the dinner table. It also had the potential to foment racial, gendered, and class transgressions, producing a slippery danger of connectedness that might erode established social distinctions. According to Helms, the arrival of NBC in 1926 and CBS in 1928 tamed and made radio's transgressive poll safe.
Engaging Listeners: Listening Modes and Techniques
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In a society,
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based on visual culture as a form of proof, radio also opened the door to all sorts of auditory play. While seeing might invite a fixed or overdetermined notion of reality, hearing produces a condition of automatic doubt. Do you hear that correctly? Where did it come from? The explosion of podcasts in the past five years, particularly emanating from the Anglophone world, has rattled this imagined community of NPR listeners.
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While podcasts are still mainly a one-to-many listening mode, as opposed to something like Twitter, Facebook, or other social media, which flips the script with many-to-many listening, podcasts invite the possibility of choosing with which to identify. So Michel Chion has identified three forms of listening, which we might use to think about how to make podcasts that are more ethnographic in nature. So causal nature, listening, occurs when we are meant to strive to
00:06:13
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identify a cause or a subject for the sound that we're hearing. Semantic listening occurs when the primary purpose of hearing is to decipher a code, language, or to understand a message. In other words, what is important is what is being said, not how it's being said. The third form of listening called reduced listening occurs when we listen to fully consider the sound being produced simply as it is, without trying to identify a cause or a meaning behind it.
00:06:41
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Xiong has written about reduced listening as the most difficult type of listening to practice on its own. As visual thinkers, we're conditioned to associate a sound with a visual indicator or metaphor for something else. Of course, these types of listening don't occur in a vacuum, and they often occur at the same time. I argue that the most compelling podcasts exploit all three listening modes. They invite us to semantically decipher a code, to listen for a cause for a familiar sound,
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such as the recognizable sound of a clock ticking, or even the infamous Ira Glass voice that we're all familiar with, and to practice reduced listening in pauses and immersive moments in which the only purpose of listening is to feel the sound that dwells within.
Podcast Production: Drone Warfare Episode
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Paul Henley has also advocated for ethnographic filmmakers to use more reduced listening in their work. Particularly, he has written against the despotism of the eye.
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and has encouraged ethnographic filmmakers to pursue more careful sound editing and particularly to collect more environmental sound recordings and integrate them into their filmmaking. Environmental sound, according to Henley, can be used to convey a sense of place suggesting a rich sonic world beyond the limits of the ethnographic interview or the podcast itself. Internet and new media scholar Kate Crawford has elaborated a number of listening modes for the era of social media.
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Listening modes change based on the ways of paying attention that our historical era demands, so they're not static. For the era of social media, and particularly for Twitter, Crawford proposes reciprocal background listening and delegated listening as the three primary auditory modes. Background listening refers to the ways in which radio can circulate in the background and become part of the texture of everyday life. Radio produces a sense of ambient intimacy.
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And while podcasts may do the same, they allow for a more intentional focusing in and out of oral content. While radio created the possibility for abandonment of choice, allowing listeners to give themselves up to the whims of the station they were listening to, podcast listening modes encourage choice in active decision making. So users choose a program that fits best with their politics, personality, and aesthetics decisions, and of course they can turn the episodes on and off when they like.
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podcasts therefore produce an ambient immersive intimacy that may become background noise when we wanted to, when we zoom in and out of listening channels to practice multimodal listening. Additionally, the combination of radio intimacy with internet browsing and social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook creates the possibility for reciprocal listening or the possibility for hosts and podcast creators to listen back to audiences no longer conceived as passive receptors of airways.
00:09:34
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So now I want to shift to discuss the podcast I mentioned in the start of this talk, Drone, Anthropology, Poetry, and Military for Anthropod.
Storytelling in Anthropology Podcasts
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In March 2017, the University of Colorado at Boulder brought together anthropologists, geographers, military personnel, and artists for a conversation about the social science of drone warfare. So I interviewed and recorded audio with anthropologist Hugh Gusterson, who wrote a book called Drone, Remote Control Warfare.
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I also interviewed and recorded audio with Kim Garcia, a poet and author of another book, also called Drone, which was a different kind of book because it was a poetry book. And finally, I spoke with a US military drone operator who was also there. The conversation between Gusterson and Garcia, a social scientist and an artist who have not experienced drone warfare but who have tried to describe it through ethnography and poetry, and active military personnel who are reading their work
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was critically productive. So the episode started with a simple question, what happens when these people come together? It sought to speak to an anthropology of science and technology and the limits of participant observation. So how far should anthropologists and artists go to understand the experiences of others? Can we reasonably write about drone warfare and other militarized states without participant observation? And finally,
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What are the slippages that are produced when anthropologists and research informants confront each other in a public forum? Contrary to more journalistic work, this episode started with an inductive approach, taking shape fairly organically using a grounded theory and through finding themes and conversations that arose between interlocutors. In the edited product, I sought to create opportunities for listeners to experience the three listening modes, causal, semantic, through the interplay of different voices,
00:11:26
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and reduced through ambient transitions and experimental music. I didn't shy away from agonism or portraying conflict between interlocutors, which is something that journalists are good at doing. Finally, I sought to introduce a slightly different style of storytelling to anthropod than what we usually do, which is long interviews with one person. So instead of that, this episode used audio from multiple people and ambient recordings. And so I sought to
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start telling a story much as one writes in ethnography based on lived encounters. So in the last section of this paper, I would like to explore possibilities for developing more collaborative podcasts and points of departure for using podcasts as pedagogical artifacts and rhetorical creations.
Educational Use of Ethnographic Podcasts
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Ethnographic filmmakers have long been interested in process-based work and identity construction. A similar interest, diverging from the polished feel
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of many journalistic podcasts could solidify in ethnographic podcasting. While participation and participant observation has been called into question by a number of scholars in the field, it remains a central conceit of the ethnographic project. Jackson, for instance, does not suggest doing away with participation, but rather suggests reframing the ethnographic encounter in terms of sincerity.
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that existentially inescapable doubt that flags the kinds of potential dissimulations and duplicities that always map our fears of betrayal, uneasiness, and confusion across the ethnographic axis. An ethnographic podcast then might more explicitly acknowledge the uncomfortable nation of co-creation, self-doubt, and sincerity that occurs in the audio recording and broadcasting process, making podcasts that encourage different listening modes.
00:13:20
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causal semantic and reduced listening, along with Crawford's reciprocal background and delegated listening, might also make our podcast more full of thick description. Finally, I suggest that ethnographic listening might hold particular promise in liberal arts curriculums that have an ethnographic component. I teach in the program for writing and rhetoric at the University of Colorado, where instructors are regularly encouraged to incorporate more visual rhetoric education into their curriculum.
00:13:49
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In the age of Instagram, visual rhetorical literacy is more important than ever. But the focus on written information literacy and visual rhetorical knowledge I feel leaves important gaps in how we think or don't think about sound. And as we know, sound forms a crucial part of the audiovisual contract. Composition scholar Eric Ellis has advocated for the use of the multimedia essay, partly to help bridge the audiovisual gap in undergraduate composition classes.
00:14:17
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Based on Pat C. Hoy's conception of the essay as a playful and nuanced grouping of ideas, not feces, a deeply original product grounded in curiosity and discovery, Ellis has his students create multimodal essays. They use original content and edit their work with voice thread, garage band, and iMovie. I suggest that we might move to incorporate auditory literacy into liberal arts curricula by teaching and practicing ethnographic podcasting.
00:14:47
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Previous research on pedagogy and participatory film has shown ethnography, collaboration, and participation to be messy concepts that are not without conflict in and outside the classroom. But they may yield process-based products that speak volumes about how their co-creators view audible worlds. Thank you.
00:15:09
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This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.