Barry Dornfeld: notes

In his study of the PBS documentary Childhood, Dorfeld raises interesting new ideas for the methodologies involved in usefully analyzing a text and drawing conclusions from it about a cultural space. In particular I like the way he suggests:

1. particular inadequacies and suggested new areas of study for media anthropological theory itself, that are more holistic, and include production, text and viewership all together.

2. the usefulness of considering the production process in a way that links it essentially to both text and viewer. Mazzarella does this really well in "Shoveling Smoke," relating the prodcution of an advertising image not just to consumer experience but also to the industry discourse, the advertising meetings, and the interactions between clients and agency, 'creatives' and account managers.

3. the way that debates and decisions over what will be popular, and the ultimate verdict- whether it was popular or not, point to the very interesting contradictions that put the producers in such a tight bind in the first place. His view of the production process of Childhood reveal the ways in which the producers themselves were in argument about how ‘highbrow or lowbrow’ its content should be, and their disagreements about the capacities of the ‘average viewer.’ The difficulty of mediating between “education and entertainment” here, he feels, reflects particular divisions and in deed, hostilities between groups within the U.S, directed towards “cultural elites” from the Northeast. Just in everyday conversation at the University, these kinds of tensions are evident, just in the way people make embarrassed jokes about the “Midwest.” It is great that he takes this seriously as something to be studied, worth bringing out in an academic paper, not just, uncritically, as a ‘fact of life.’

4. the refreshing idea that answers to tough questions may be found by an analysis of the surface of people’s debates and speech, that they are obvious, and even the obvious conclusions can be useful.

This has been lauded as a useful philosophy for anthropology in general. It reminds me of Dale Pesmen’s ethnography, Russia and Soul. Pesmen immerses herself in the poetic figurations and contradictions that her informants use to describe the concept of Russian ‘soul.’ She then uses the emergent complex data to reflect on the way in which theories that seek meaning in ‘depth’ can be reductionist and too paradigmatic. By choosing to see the contradictions, she problematizes the way we, as theorists, are always out to find “wholes”: “Despite strong theoretical arguments against “essentialization" and classical social-scientific categories, including "culture," our descriptions of individuals and groups often continue to be shaped by normative expectations of the visual and static and systematic, especially when we are talking like people and not like scholars, [Russia and Soul, p. 301]


5. In his conclusion then, his refusal to settle for easy connections between the program and the ‘national imaginary’ allows him to redress some of the classical theories of public culture. He suggests first, that in the midst of conflicted and socially disjunctive forces in the United States, theories that describe “monolithic national identity” are inadequate. This implicates Anderson’s Imagined Communities right away: though this (imagined) community aspires to some shared national participation, in the end it remains…(largely based in) exclusions…”

6. My only point of confusion was when he claimed that his study of the program did not just reflect the tensions in public culture but actually produced and reinforced them. How? Because the production team came from different places? Because by trying to do two things at once, the program would inevitably anger someone or the other?