Where Journalist and Anthropologists Overlap

The Arkansas Traveler - opinion,opinion/









If you dig deep, you will find similarities in areas that seem complete opposites, like anthropology and journalism. Very different disciplines, but similar cores.  











Journalists want to put some sort of message into the world. It could be advice, reality or just something fun. It could also be from personal experience or research.






Anthropologists want to understand societies of the past and present and their social norms.





They both want to figure out how people work.





Journalists go after the what, why, when, who, where and how of anything and everything, just as anthropologists do. One thing they have in common is their insatiable curiosity. The desire for the next story is the same as the desire for the next discovery.





While traveling to interesting places may be an important aspect in anthropology, there are more sides to it than that. It has four main subdivisions: archaeology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology and linguistic anthropology. However, there are other areas of study like medical and forensic anthropology.





Journalists transmit their pieces in multiple mediated messages through TV broadcast, photographs and print. Anthropologists can do the same.





I once took a biological anthropology class and one of the few things I learned was the physical features of different species. In lab we held and observed different bones of different creatures. It was weird at first, but after a while it became OK and interesting in a non-creepy way. In the lecture we looked at different images of apes, humans and even squirrels of the past and present so that we can understand the evolution of these species and how they work and how much they have changed, if at all.





When you look at journalism, it's not much different. Journalists want to report the latest news. It could be about a murder that happened, NASA finding new planets or new laws – the ...


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