Interpretation, authorship and cross-cultural representation: A study of Childhood , a public television documentary series

This is an ethnographic study of the making of Childhood, a seven-hour documentary series, for public television. The study focuses on interpretive frameworks and professional practices producers employ in making a documentary series within the present context of public television. My central theoretical focus concerns how an interlocking set of practical and symbolic forces within a field of cultural production structures the communicative work engaged in by producers, and thereby the meanings encoded in the text. The analysis draws on theory from media studies, the sociology of culture, the ethnography of communication, and the critique of cross-cultural representation. This research is based on fieldwork conducted primarily in Childhood\u27s New York offices (at WNET), and on shooting locations. WNET is a powerful, prolific institution in the PBS system, and Childhood represented a major production for WNET and the system. Childhood, aired nationally in October, 1991, presents a cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary portrait of child development and the history and study of childhood. The research examines how the present setting of the series--contemporary pressures on public television, the producers\u27 and WNET\u27s place within the system--situates the series in a field of production possibilities and constraints. The specific territory of genres of public television documentary provide models and formal possibilities in relation to which producers evaluate their own work. Drawing on reception theory, I analyze authorship as a process of interpretation and negotiation, and consider formal dimensions of the series, working from producers\u27 conceptualizations of, and debates about the text\u27s formal features. Childhood\u27s producers negotiate and construct a representation of other cultural worlds, and of the comparison between cultures, operating in a tension between social scientific relativism and televisual humanism, a communicative framework that seeks audience participation and identification with other cultural worlds. In conclusion, I consider how the producers\u27 agency, and the practical logics producers employ, are constrained by financial and symbolic capital