Broadcast intellectuals as mediators? The South African Broadcasting Corporation within the political transformation of South Africa.

• Applicant: Dr. Julia Koch Tshirangwana
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology ; Communication Sciences
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 495261022

Until the 1990s the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) held a monopoly over broadcasting more or less although competition from the media industry and broadcasting from neighboring countries respectively the so-called ‘independent homelands’ increased gradually in the 1980s. Since its foundation in 1936 and in particular during the transition period of the early 1990s, the SABC was a desired object respectively instrument of political actors and it is so today. As media anthropologist I analyze the SABC’s employees’ construction and mediation of knowledge and non-knowledge. As a relevant group for ethnographic research I address journalists, media producers and managers under the umbrella term “broadcast intellectuals” in order to transcend the dichotomy of ‘creative’ and ‘bureaucratic’ practice, which haunt media anthropological discourses of journalism. The project aims at a description of mediations, the public broadcaster’s work of producing and disseminating “knowledge” and “ignorance”. I argue that the parastatal’s organized media production should be historized and localized by a social anthropological approach taking off from the problems of complexity and social political change.With its globally received political history, which tells about apartheid and democracy, South Africa is one of the prime localities for memory studies. Contemporarily one can observe the transition from ‘communicative’ to ‘cultural’ memory, as Jan Assmann would phrase it. The living memory of apartheid and the republican South African lifeworld is fading forty years after the first constitutional reforms under PW Botha. Contemporary witnesses now look back and publish their memoirs or autobiographies and particular interpretations of the past become visible. I want to look at this transition from memory to history or collective memory on two levels. For one, I (re)construct biographies with (former) SABC employees of the middle-range of the corporate hierarchy through conversation and interviews. On a second level, I analyze the practice of funeral reporting of the SABC and the narratives offered there about the past. In this, the project contributes to current trends in memory studies and widens the field to include the role of journalism’s construction of social realities into the perspective. Moreover, the medial dimension of biographies comes to the fore. Thus, the project is situated at the intersection of Anthropology, Communication Studies and Historiography and it combines the methods participant observation, interviews and media content and discourse analysis.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position