This Week in Ethnography, I have thought about Public Anthropology. Samuel Gerald Collins of All Tomorrow’s Cultures posted a great piece on the subject this week entitled Tagging Anthropology. Public Anthropology is not a new subject by any means. A Google search on the subject will show over 600,000 results and limiting your search to Savage Minds will still give you more than a week’s worth of reading. In fact, this subject is so mature that the The 9th Annual Public Anthropology Conference is just around the corner (not the first or second, but the 9th!) [Incidentally, 300 word abstract submissions for this conference are due by Monday, August 27, 2012.] To get a feel for this conference view or read last year’s keynote by Max Forte here:
Beyond Public Anthropology: Approaching Zero
What I like about Collin’s post is that he demands that we define “public”. Whereas much of this sort or work is on ANTHROPOLOGY with “public” as an afterthought, Collins wants us to seriously consider PUBLIC. What is the public? Who makes up the public?
…Is anthropology the same? In the era of “public anthropology,” isn’t the idea to reach a “public”? But what is this “public”? Despite lots of lip service and theoretical interest in expanding the audience for anthropological research, anthropologists seem to have little more than a vague sense of the public that might exist outside of the immediate academic context. This question becomes more urgent with the advent of web 2.0 social networking. When we’re blogging or putting something up on Youtube, it seems obvious that we’re making our work “public,” but that public is not synonymous with the “public” of television news or major newspapers. via All Tomorrow’s Cultures: Tagging Anthropology.
Collins’ concludes with a call for us all to put some ethnographic effort into the PUBLIC part of the equation.
…a public anthropology in the age of networked media needs to create its public while it’s doing anthropology, a consciously forged interpretive community. via All Tomorrow’s Cultures: Tagging Anthropology.
