The Journalist and the Anthropologist

What can journalists learn from engaging with theory and the social sciences?

Once upon a time, I had a really bad feeling I would end up being a teacher. I wouldn’t quite call myself a “teacher’s pet” when I was a kid, because I got on the teacher’s nerves a lot, but I had this sort of respect and interest in the work that they did, and I now believe that’s why I was always seeking their attention. I always viewed teachers as this amazing source of knowledge itself, and if my life was to have any worth, I needed their approval in some shape or form. Fast forward to my undergraduate years, and although I bounced around between disciplines from neuroscience to public health, I always went about my course of studies with the intention to go on and become a professor.

But here I am in November of 2019, not a teacher, not a doctoral student, but a journalist.

So how did I get here?

My final fad-interest in undergraduate academia was anthropology. I enrolled in a medical anthropology course in the Fall semester of senior year just because I had some credit leeway, and it quickly became the most interesting discipline I’d entered yet. I was voraciously reading Arthur Kleinman, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Paul Farmer, and Michel Foucault. I became fascinated with post-structuralist and post-colonial theories of power, subjectivity, and health. I started practicing ethnographic writing in class, and began to position myself for pursuing a Ph.D. in anthropology, particularly of the “public” sort.

Public, activist anthropology rejects the moral relativism of the past when it engages with the subjects of ethnographic research. Scheper-Hughes argues that when you deploy moral relativist views, that each culture may have a different sense of morality and who is the anthropologist to pass judgment on those sensibilities, that the anthropologist “suspends the ethical.”

Sound familiar? (Re: “Big, structural change” and reinventing journalism)

A helpful professor and friend, an anthropologist, encouraged me to not go into anthropology. It’s too wrapped up in all of the other problems of academia; low wages, long hours, elitism, privilege, no ‘real world’ applicability. I knew that if I dedicated my life to a Ph.D. that I was ambivalent about that I’d starve, spending my life fueling the academic machine that made me into one of its foot soldiers.

So with sagacious foresight, I decided to starve in journalism instead! (Kidding, kidding…)

When I started to think about other possibilities for careers, journalism became highly appealing. I was already someone who was an active news consumer, and it appeared that being a journalist could do all of the things I wanted to do as an anthropologist: tell stories that dove deep into context, parse together data both qualitative and quantitative, and engage a community to reexamine power relations between the community and the journalist/researcher.

Then I found the M.A. in Social Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and knew it would be the only place I would apply to.

This week in our Community Engagement class, we got to speak with Professor Lisbeth Berbary from the University of Waterloo, who teaches humanist qualitative research methods. And from reading Dr. Berbary’s “A Very Basic Review Packet for Humanist Qualitative Research,” my suspicions that journalism and the social sciences shared common ground and common goals were confirmed.

In anthropology and other social sciences, reality is grounded by different ontologies; how things subjectively ‘are.’ This traditionally gives way to epistemology, or the area of philosophy that explores how we know what we know, and how truth is established between a subject and an object. Berbary asks: does the object have meaning that the subject uncovers? Or does the subject create and impose meaning on the object?

Coming down from the clouds, this has profound implications on how the process of journalism is conducted. How do communities view and organize themselves? How does the epistemological viewpoint of the journalist impact its relationship with the community? Is it that the community or the story has a sense of objective truth to be discovered? Or does the community or the story become subjected to whatever meaning or context the journalist wants to impose on it?

Your head can spin a full 360 degrees thinking about it, and there may not be any satisfactory answers to these questions, or even a limit to the questions that can be asked once you start applying theory to journalism. I had my opportunity to dabble in the social sciences and I left it behind, so I’m not here to answer these questions definitively. But what I do know is that there is something rich to take away and bring to journalism from studying qualitative methods and critical theory in the social sciences.

Instead of reacting to the current moment of crisis surrounding ‘fake news’ by trying to assert an ultimate objectivity in our reporting, Berbary argues, why not dispense with the central idea that a truth matters at all? By showing complexity instead of truth, you can show the interconnectedness of facts and details that create a rich web of storytelling for the audience to discern what is meaningful or true.

Just as Scheper-Hughes argues that the morally relative suspends the ethical, Berbary argues that the objective eliminates the empathic. By attempting to achieve a state of objectivity, we risk throwing away the qualities that make us human.

I don’t regret my decision to become a journalist instead of an anthropologist. By focusing on community reporting, I can engage with concepts and theories that may not have been employed in previous storytelling. And unlike anthropology, I can write and create both with and for an audience that will be impacted by our work together, rather than just for the glory of the academy.

There’s a lot to learn in journalism from the social sciences. By being open to those kinds of knowledges, we enable ourselves to create knowledge with others in a more expansive and egalitarian way.