Introduction: Mediating Publics and Anthropology

Media, Anthropology and Public Engagement looks at how changing public media and arts practices are enabling the emergence of a new public anthropology. In doing so, we address a set of key questions about anthropology's public role. Each of the key terms in this phrase - public, anthropology, media, engagement - needs to be considered, since each has multiple referents and contested meanings. In this introduction, we set out the premises for understanding what an engaged anthropology can be, and how new media can be put to work to broad eff ect. The chapters in this collection demonstrate which questions must be asked, and how they can be addressed in practical terms as well as through intellectual argument, and illustrate how initiatives by a range of anthropologists in diff erent (largely anglophone) countries have adopted media into their practices.