Paper short abstract:

In the drive to popularize anthropology, cultural journalism is one way to reach a wider audience. Disseminating research is a university request, yet cultural journalism is not rewarded on ranking lists even though it contributes to the reputation of the discipline and the anthropologist.

Paper long abstract:

Cultural journalism is a feature of outreach activities at many universities. In the framework of Swedish university life, activities of communicating and collaborating with groups and audiences outside the university are summed up by the term "tredje uppgiften", the third task, the other two being research and teaching. Not least by anthropologists, disseminating research results to a wider audience is regarded as a question of democracy, even an ethical one, also according to the argument that "scholars live on tax payers´ money". The Swedish Research Council requests a popular article as a part of the final reporting of funded projects. In this paper, I discuss the anthropologist as cultural journalist in terms of the contradiction between the call to disseminate research to a wider audience, and the fact that such activities do not count in academic ranking and citation indices. Yet, cultural journalism contributes to the reputation of the discipline, not only to that of the anthropologist who writes in newspapers and speaks on television. As to the actual writing, this is a tale of two translations (from data to academic text, from academic text to popular text). One crucial point in relation to reputation and ranking is that cultural journalism by anthropologists tends to be performed in the native language of the anthropologist such as Swedish, Norwegian, or German, while academic publications primarily are in English. Cultural journalism is thus on the whole unnoticed by colleagues in other countries.