Mediation: A Focus for Modern Anthropology

William Mazzarella’s 2004 article “Culture, Globalization, Mediation” analyzes, broadly, how we engage in productions of the local in an increasingly global culture. More minutely, he is interested in how such productions are shaped and influenced by mediation, i.e. how media influences the productions and reproductions and subsequent understandings of certain social practices. He argues that these processes of mediation are especially fertile ground for anthropological study when considered within the context of increasing globalization. As Mazzarella outlines in his essay, the study of “culture” (i.e. anthropology) has been problematized in recent decades by widespread globalization and the subsequent blurring of cross-cultural boundaries. Gone is the plethora of niche cultures clearly defined by formerly insurmountable geo-political boundaries to be replaced by a kind of constantly repeated and greatly more homogenous planetary culture. This left the respected tradition of ethnography based anthropological study like a house floating without its foundations, searching for a base of research and methodology to fill in the rapidly expanding abyss created by globalization.Mazzarella argues in his essay that this gap can be and should be filled with the study of mediation processes around the world, in other words, anthropologists should shift their gaze from understanding specific cultures to attempting to understand how it is that we are creating, constituting, demonstrating, and defining culture on a global scale. In this way, he sees globalization not as the slow death of anthropology but as a kind of rejuvenation of the discipline. 

While Mazzarella’s interest in mediation is wide-ranging, he constantly harps on the importance and arguable existence of what one might call baseline mediations, those that get at the very beginnings of how we understand culture. He points out that the argument put forth by many others, that mediation is a representation of cultural premise is assuming culture is defined prior to being expressed by media. This, he says, is not the case and mediation, in fact has a constant role in creating, defining, and recreating our understandings of culture; in a way, it is as much part of “culture” as the shared social assumptions that supposedly constitute it.

Further fueling his argument that globalization and media are ample bases for anthropological study, he is keen to examine how certain global forms of culture are localized (for example, MTV around the world and localized reiterations of entertainment such as soap operas). Examples such as these directly relate processes of mediation to the changing cultural world through increased globalization, as do forms of media tied to the modern, decentralized ‘wired-world’, i.e. the internet and all its processes of mediation.

Source:

Mazzarella, William.
   2004 Culture, Globalization, Mediation.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33.1: 345-67.