The concern with "media" has greatly increased over the last decade in Anglo-American anthropology. This growing interest in media has opened the way for "media anthropology", an emergent sub-field of sociocultural anthropology. This paper first examines the concept of media, and then critically reviews the two prevalent kinds of Anglo-American media anthropology. The purpose of the paper is to clarify the scope of media anthropology and to provide a new framework for future studies. Chapter two takes up the concept of "media". First, I examine the concept of media and define it broadly as "something people use as a means of encoding, transmitting, decoding, storing, or converting socially significant information". Secondly, I focus on "mass media", that is, newspapers, TV, radio, and other print and electronic media, because in Anglo-American anthropology, and for that matter in Japanese anthropology, the recent concern has been almost exclusively with mass media. Most Anglo-American anthropologists equate the word "media" with the term "mass media"; I would, however, like to make a distinction between the two, as stated above, and to take into consideration forms of media other than mass media. Broadly speaking, media theorists recognize four major forms of media : oral language, written symbol systems, print media, and electronic media. As a sub-field of the discipline with perspectives on the history of humankind, media anthropology should take all these major forms into consideration and recognize the particular characteristics of each of these forms, even if the focus is on mass media. Thirdly, I introduce the model of social communication proposed by Toshiro TAKEUCHI to clarify the scope of media anthropology. TAKEUCHI provides four ideal types of social communication in terms of anonymity of participants in communication : interpersonal communication, club (or small group) communication, organizational communication, and public communication. TAKEUCHI's model is, I think, more exhaustive than models given by other communication theorists because he does not connect each type of communication (e.g. public communication) with a particular type of medium (e.g. mass media), as other theorists often do. Using his model, we can take an overall view of carious types of communication, such as interpersonal communication by electronic media, or public communication by oral language, both of which have been frequently ignored by other theorists. I would like to include the use of mass media as a means of interpersonal communication, club communication, or organizational communication, among the scope of media anthropology. It is also important to take into account social communication by various other media that grows out of mass media (e.g. media fandom). Chapter three critically reviews the two prevalent kinds of Anglo-American media anthropology. For convenience, I would like to call one of them "Media Anthropology I", and then other "Media Anthropology II". Media Anthropology I, that has been emerging since the 1990s, comprises "ethnographically informed, historically grounded, and context-sensitive analyses of the ways in which people use and make sense of media technologies". I argue that cultural studies, especially those works by British scholars such as Raymond WILLIAMS and Stuart HALL have provided the prevalent framework for Media Anthropology I, while other media studies have been almost completely ignored. The concern with mass media as an object of anthropological study is, as stated above, only a recent affair. Media Anthropology II, however, emerged as early as the 1970s. It can be defined as a field "that synthesizes aspects of journalism and anthropology for the explicit purpose of sensitizing as many of Earth's citizens as possible to
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