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Edmund Carpenter: "The Tribal Terror of Self-Awareness"

The document discusses Edmund Carpenter's thesis on the powerful effects of technology and media. Carpenter argues that (1) media have overwhelming influence and can conquer and reshape all cultures by how they force people to think and see the world. He asserts that (2) the medium itself is the primary message, not the content, and that different media like print, photography, and radio fundamentally change human cognition, social organization, and sense of self and culture. The document examines some of Carpenter's specific arguments, such as how visual media cause alienation and loss of community.

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65 views

Edmund Carpenter: "The Tribal Terror of Self-Awareness"

The document discusses Edmund Carpenter's thesis on the powerful effects of technology and media. Carpenter argues that (1) media have overwhelming influence and can conquer and reshape all cultures by how they force people to think and see the world. He asserts that (2) the medium itself is the primary message, not the content, and that different media like print, photography, and radio fundamentally change human cognition, social organization, and sense of self and culture. The document examines some of Carpenter's specific arguments, such as how visual media cause alienation and loss of community.

Uploaded by

marisaregua
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Session 3: Media Effects I: The Medium is the Message and

Technological Determinism, Part 1

Edmund Carpenter: “The Tribal Terror of Self-Awareness”

Æ individualism & private self-reflection versus collectivity &


communality

Æ A thesis of an “all powerful West”? More about an all powerful


technology, which reinvents all societies

“I think media are so powerful they swallow cultures. I think of


them as invisible environments, which surround and destroy old
environments. Sensitivity to problems of culture conflict and
conquest becomes meaningless here for media play no favorites;
they conquer all cultures.”

Æ technology itself carries cognitive and cultural effects that reshape


how we think and see the world
ANTH/SOCI 398G – MEDIA ETHNOGRAPHIES – WINTER 2011- Max Forte – Concordia University 1
Æ “medium is the message”: print forces us to see the world in linear
terms, in terms of causation, in rationalist terms, it teaches
individualism

Æ Carpenter: one sense dominates all others – sight


Æ Sight creates the detached observer

Æ Effect of being introduced to a photograph of one's self was instant


alienation.

Æ Visual media cause people to:


(1) dissociate from themselves,
(2) lose communion with their pre-existing collective cultures

Æ Carpenter: we become our media

Æ Dancers in floral skirts & feather headdresses put on the jungle

Æ Now they wrap themselves in information


ANTH/SOCI 398G – MEDIA ETHNOGRAPHIES – WINTER 2011- Max Forte – Concordia University 2
Æ Radio reclothes them
Marilyn Monroe to TIME
Magazine (1952):

“It’s not true I


had nothing on,
I had the radio
on.”

ANTH/SOCI 398G – MEDIA ETHNOGRAPHIES – WINTER 2011- Max Forte – Concordia University 3
Æ we assume the role of our costume
Æ disembodiment
Æ spirit possession is now the norm

The Ethnographic Issue

Æ Is Carpenter’s work “ethnographic”?


Æ “being there”
Æ interviews
Æ observation

Æ A challenge to ethnographers:

ANTH/SOCI 398G – MEDIA ETHNOGRAPHIES – WINTER 2011- Max Forte – Concordia University 4
Carpenter: “The results generally tell more about the medium
employed than about the cultural background of the author or
cameraman. In each case, I had hoped the informant would present his
own culture in a fresh way, and perhaps even use the medium itself in a
new way. I was wrong. What I saw was literacy and film. These media
swallow culture. The old culture was there all right, but no more
than residue at the bottom of a barrel. I think it requires enormous
sophistication—media sophistication—before anyone can use print or
film to preserve and present one’s cultural heritage, even one’s
cultural present. Sensitive autobiographies and films come from men of
the utmost media sophistication, men un-housed in any single culture
or medium.”

ANTH/SOCI 398G – MEDIA ETHNOGRAPHIES – WINTER 2011- Max Forte – Concordia University 5
A Preview of Cultural Imperialism?

From McLuhan:

• Assimilation to the technology itself—we become what we behold—


(therefore, can there ever be an “indigenous” media?)
• “detribalization by literacy”
• print culture creates uniformity
• “Mental breakdown of varying degrees is the very common result of
uprooting and inundation with new information and endless new
patterns of information….accelerated media change as a kind of
massacre of the innocents”
• “the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of
any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is
introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any
new technology”

ANTH/SOCI 398G – MEDIA ETHNOGRAPHIES – WINTER 2011- Max Forte – Concordia University 6
• “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they
are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.
For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried
by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of
the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given
another medium as ‘content’….The ‘content’ of writing or print is
speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or
of speech”

• Much of cultural imperialism theory focuses on contents and their


effects, less on the cultural transformations wrought by the
technology as such

ANTH/SOCI 398G – MEDIA ETHNOGRAPHIES – WINTER 2011- Max Forte – Concordia University 7

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