ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the critique of “culture” within anthropology and the ways beyond this critique that have recently suggested a different mode of cultural analysis. It explores how that general debate about “culture” plays out when we think specifically about mediated culture and media uses: what contribution can media analysis make to an ethnography of “places” within a wider analysis of cultural complexity. The older model pictures the space of culture primarily in terms of a series of separate “cultures”, with the interactions between them being of secondary importance. Paradoxically, that older model on which classical anthropology depended was formulated most clearly by its anthropologist critics. The old holistic model of culture has, however, been extremely influential not only in anthropology but also in sociology and cultural studies, where its influence on Raymond Williams” early account of culture as a way of life is obvious.
