Abstract
Anthropology has a lot to offer to media researchers but researchers from the two fields have only recently begun to show interest in each other’s work. This is what Anna Cristina Pertierra claims in her book Media Anthropology for the Digital Age. She argues that ‘with the advent of the digital era, the anthropology of media and communication has boomed, and the methods and theories of anthropology have acquired a significance in media scholarship that was not previously the case’ (p. 21). The aim of her book is to ‘show how the theories and methods of anthropology offer valuable ways to study media from this ground-level perspective and thus to understand the human experience of media in the digital age’ (p. 2). Pertierra calls for ‘an in-depth exploration’ (p. 2) of people’s media experiences. She reminds us about the frequent convergence in recent years between the field of media and communication, and anthropology. Her book tells the history of that convergence and the emergence of media anthropology as a field of study. It is targeted not just at anthropologists but also at scholars and ‘upper-level students’ from other fields who are looking for ‘an accessible guide’ (p. 3) into media anthropology and its methods. By the author’s own admission, she engages most closely with ‘the work of British cultural studies as an area of research that came into direct contact with media anthropology’ (p. 4). Pertierra starts by summarising the four main premises of anthropology. The first one is cultural relativism, namely, the belief that human cultures and media practices, respectively, are not ‘inherently “good” or “bad”’ but are ‘tremendously variable but all equally valid, and equally worthy of serious and respectful investigation’ (p. 6). The second one is ‘a commitment to holism; rather than dividing elements of practices of a community into different parts’ (p. 6). The third principle is of ‘deliberate esotericism’, namely, a focus not on typical, most common, representative cases but on ‘unusual and surprising cases’ (p. 7). The fourth principle, which Pertierra considers to be the most important one, is the close link between ethnography and anthropology – ‘the methods of anthropological research are traditionally described as ethnographic, and the written product of this research as an ethnography’ (p. 8). The book is split into seven substantive chapters. The first two chapters explore the early history of the convergence between media/communication studies and anthropology while the third chapter looks at ‘the alliance of cultural and media studies with ethnography’. Chapters 4 and 5 then focus on the digital era by analysing Internet ethnography, mobile cultures and social media. Chapter 6 discusses examples of anthropologists making media such as ethnographic films and reality TV shows. The final substantive chapter delves deeper into the overlaps between anthropology and ethnography, including the challenges of doing digital ethnography. Finally, in the conclusion, Pertierra summarises the four main points of her book. First, that while it ‘took a while’ for anthropologists to ‘embrace the study of media’ once they started doing it, they approached it ‘with enthusiasm’ (p. 155). Second, that while digital technologies have brought about a lot of changes, anthropologists have shown that the changes in terms of the human experience are not as profound. Third, that the best approach to doing media anthropology is a holistic one, not a media-centric one. Fourth, that as Pertierra puts it, ‘anthropologists cherish ethnography, but they are not its exclusive owners’ (p. 156). All in all, Pertierra makes a valuable contribution to the field of media anthropology, which would be of interest to non-anthropologists as well.