Generation X: Anthropology in a Media‐Saturated World

My problem for the present article concerns the relationship between "public culture" on the one hand, and ethnographic inquiry on the other, in the contemporary United States. By "public culture" I mean all the bodies of images, claims, and representations created to speak to and about the actual people who live in the United States: all of the products of art and entertainment (film, television, books, and so on), as well as all of the texts of information and analysis (all forms of journalism and academic production). "Public culture" includes all the products of what is commonly called the "media," but much more as well. Public culture in this sense stands in a very complex relationship to "ethnography." First, public culture is both subject and object vis-a-vis the ethnographer. It claims, and the ethnographer must grant, that it stands as a competing subject, a competing author(ity): many journalists, as well as academics in many other fields, are jostling with ethnographers to tell "the truth" about U.S. culture. As we shall see when we turn to the public representations concerning Generation X, journalists and academics are constantly trying to subsume one another, to claim the position of subject and to turn one another into objects, data. Journalists quote both native informants and academic experts to weave a story about the here and now; academics do the same with journalists, as I will do in this article. Ethnographers' "data" are part of the journalists' stories; journalists' reporting is part of the public culture and thus part of the ethnographic data. In trying to think through this relationship, several temptations need to be avoided. The first is the unmodified "cultural studies" or "media studies" temptation-the fantasy that one can understand the workings of public cultural