Page 79 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

ULF HANNERZ

number of hard news stories out of Africa to tell the world in recent years.
Many of them had witnessed the fall of President Mobutu in Zaire; several
had followed the Hutu–Tutsi conflict in Rwanda in different phases; some
had reported from the wars in Somalia and in southern Sudan, and the
internal upheavals of Liberia and Sierra Leone. And then there had been
stories of famines and of AIDS epidemics. The point certainly cannot be
that such events should go unreported. It is rather that when this is all we
hear, or see, we may get a very biased view of a part of the world. Actually,
the situation was not so very different in the case of black America, as
portrayed to the world, and by the world, in the late 1960s, when I was in
Washington. Again, the ‘hard news’ involved trouble; those days when the
National Guard was in the neighborhood got infinitely more publicity
than any other days.
What are the implications of such foreign news reporting for culture in
the global ecumene? At times, it may be that the view, on the television
screen, of starving children in Ethiopia, or of victims of a grenade thrown
into a Sarajevo market, provokes a kind of electronic empathy. The television
medium in particular allows a sense of a direct experience of the faces and
bodies of other human beings far away, and sometimes an understanding of
their terrible circumstances. Yet places defined only by hard news may take
on a sort of on-and-off, episodic quality; we do not know what had hap-
pened before, and lose track of what happened afterwards. And overall, as
conflicts and catastrophes are relentlessly pressed upon us as more or less
willing news consumers week after week, year after year, the result may just
be a heightened feeling that the world is a dangerous place, and some parts
of it particularly so. The foreign news editor of Dagens Nyheter, the largest
morning newspaper in Stockholm, said to me that she was aware of the
possible bias towards trouble and danger, and that her paper tried to avoid
supporting such a view of the outside world, as it could foster isolationism
and xenophobia among the public. Yet all media organizations may not be so
concerned with the issue, and in any case it may be a tendency not so easily
counteracted.

Conclusion: cultural analysis as an everyday practice
That leads me to some final reflections. Recently, some of my colleagues in
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anthropology have become critical of the culture concept itself. For some
time, there have been warnings that anthropologists have had a bias toward
exoticism: it is more rewarding to report from the field that things are different
there than to have to say that they are much the same as at home. And to speak
of culture – especially cultures – tends to become a way of underlining, even
exaggerating, difference. The critics find it a matter of ‘making other’, creating
distances. In a world of very real greater interconnectedness, this could become
more dangerous than ever before. In Europe, characterized in recent decades

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