Page 77 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

ULF HANNERZ

and television makes up a major part of that flow of information from and
about other parts of their world which is a part of the rhythm of many people’s
daily routine experience.
And then, for me, there is another angle. Foreign correspondents are a sort of
anthropologists, or anthropologists are a sort of foreign correspondents, in so far
as they both engage in reporting from one part of the world to another. How
do the ways media correspondents practice their craft in foreign lands compare
with the fieldwork of anthropologists? And what do they report, how do they
mediate to their audiences the foreignness of foreign news? Perhaps it follows
from this that I am not really equally interested in all foreign correspondents. I
have wanted to concentrate on those correspondents who, rather like many
anthropologists, specialize in reporting from regions which are not only geo-
graphically but also culturally and socially more distant from their audiences.
Thus I have paid particular attention to the reporting from Asia, Africa, and the
Middle East to Western Europe and North America. So far, by planning or by
some degree of serendipity, this has led to meetings with correspondents or
ex-correspondents in a variety of places: New York, Los Angeles, Stockholm,
Frankfurt, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, Hong Kong. Moreover, of course, I try to
keep up with the ongoing flow of news in the press, on radio, and on television.
The field can thus be with me in some way even in periods when I cannot
venture far from my desk in Stockholm. And after I have had my own
encounters with the correspondents in one setting or other, I may continue to
read their stories in the papers, hear their voices on the radio, see their faces on
television. These informants do not vanish from your horizon the moment you
leave the distant field site.
One way in which foreign correspondents are very di fferent from most
anthropologists, clearly, is a matter of space. Anthropological fieldwork has
conventionally been quite localized, as mine was in Washington and
Kafanchan. Foreign correspondents are often ‘Africa correspondents’, ‘Asia
correspondents’, or ‘Middle East correspondents’, for example, responsible for
reporting on very large regions. It is true that many of the latter whom I met in
Jerusalem actually engaged mostly with Israeli and Palestinian affairs, and thus
found most of their stories no further than a couple of hours away by car. But
the ‘Africa correspondents’ I talked to in Johannesburg often had to try and
deal with the entire continent, at least south of the Sahara. And so the practi-
calities of dealing with such a beat have been a major topic of my conversations
with correspondents.
Yet this is a research project where the handling of time is equally important,
because what foreign correspondents produce is ‘news’. There is a connection
here to what I said before about a processual point of view towards culture. We
may be in the habit of taking culture to be something fairly persistent and
stable, but then the flow of meaning in the world may consist in large part of a
never-ending stream of quickly forming events and impressions, some of which
are repetitive and some not, and from which we perhaps form more enduring

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