Melkote, Srinivas R., and Rao, Sandhya (Eds.)

Critical issues in communication: Looking inward for answers—essays in honor of K.E. Eapen. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001. 491pp.

Reviewed by

Shelton A. Gunaratne

Minnesota State University Moorhead

Two former students of Indian mass communication educator K.E. Eapen—one a professor at Bowling Green state University, the other an associate professor at Southwest Texas State University—have edited this book as a festschrift with the help of Eapen’s peers, professional colleagues, and former students. The editors say they organized the book to reflect "two themes that best describe Eapen’s work and philosophy" (p. 20): looking inward for solutions, and the Socratic spirit of questioning.

The book comprises 26 chapters written by 31 authors. The two editors have written the introductory chapter highlighting the thrust of each chapter, as well as an additional chapter each. The first three sections, comprising 15 essays, are meant to reflect the first theme. The next two are meant to reflect the second theme. My choice of the best chapter on the first theme is Babbili’s "Culture, ethics and burdens of history: understanding the communication ethos of India"; and my choice of the best chapter on the second theme is Dervin and Huesca’s "Practicing journalism communicatively: moving from journalism practiced as ideology to journalism practiced as theorized procedure." On the whole, however, the content of the book is uneven in quality, a weakness inherent in a compendium of invited essays lacking rigorous refereeing.

Babbili, in his 33-page essay, "advances the premise that doing ethics depends on where you do it; it presumes that the schemata used for the study of ethics in one society cannot be applied effectively for the study of ethics in another society—particularly if that society and culture do not share a given civilization, thought or language" (p. 145). Babbili says that the Hindu concepts of dharma (construed as duty, righteousness, customs, traditions, law, nature, justice, virtue, merit, and morality) and ahimsa (non-violence) form the basis of the entire superstructure of ethics in Hindu philosophy. Dharma takes three forms: virtues of the body—charity, helping the needy, social service; virtues of speech—truthfulness, benevolence, gentleness; and virtues of the mind—kindness, unworldliness and piety. Ahimsa requires absolute harmlessness and friendliness toward all beings. Babbili asserts that a "native ethics" based on these concepts is much more appropriate to India’s communication environment than an ethics reflecting "the trappings of a Western paradigm" (p. 146). Babbili’s reasoning thus fits in with Eapen’s exhortation to look inward for solutions. However, this line of reasoning seems to conflict with a guiding principle of Indian philosophy—the belief pertaining to oneness of things or interconnectedness of things. Ideally, Babbili should have shown the interconnectedness of the fundamentals of Hindu ethics to the world at large. But that would have negated the "inward looking" theme imposed by the editors.

Dervin and Huesca’s essay "spins out an argument [that] calls for re-theorizing journalistic practice" (p. 322). They propose a communication-based journalism that can systematically deal with human concerns, formerly thought of as subjective, by focusing attention from content to process—"a new journalism guided by a theory of the universals of human sense-making: the facing, defining, and making and unmaking of bridges" (p. 339). This communication theory of journalistic practice would make "craft secondary to and derivative of the communication purpose" (p. 339). Thus their focus is on procedure—the hows of journalism practice, not the whats or the whos. They argue that such a procedure should be able to handle "differences in how individuals see and make sense of their worlds" (p. 322). Current journalistic procedures, they say, tend to focus on "transmission ideas of communication" rather than on "dialogic ideas of communication" (p. 322) thereby contributing to "power solutions, [which] … are not the most useful kind of solutions" (p. 323). Furthermore, in their view, the practices of every journalist/communicator within the whos framework "will of necessity decay to [unintentional] authoritarianism over time" (p. 326) "by empowering and privileging the observations of a selected few over the many" (p. 330). In a recent essay (in Journalism Studies, 2 (4), November 2001), Glasser bluntly asserted that any good study of journalism required a theory of good journalism. Dervin and Huesca have provided the framework of such a theory even though their abstruse language stands in the way of dialogic communication.

In the first section of the book, Eapen reflects on his early years, his journalism/ communication training work, communication for development, and journalism/ communication education. Harold Fisher, who examines Eapen’s views on media and development, claims that Eapen’s "most enduring contributions have been those involving human relationships"—particularly the "empowerment and participation of all involved in development, research, and education."

In the second section of the book, co-editor Rao further elaborates on Eapen’s views on mass media and development: that the relevance and place of mass media in the modernization process needs to be established empirically rather than taking for granted; and that social scientists should look for contextual solutions and in the case of developing countries not be "Westward looking, but inward looking" (p. 100). Eapen’s views are more or less consistent with the chorus of objections to Eurocentrism we see in the works of Said (Orientalism, 1978), Amin (Eurocentrism, 1989), Goonatilake (Anthropologizing Sri Lanka, 2001) and other scholars of Third World origin. However, Eapen’s "inward looking" approach appears inconsistent with the world system theory, which owes much to a fundamental principle of Oriental philosophy: that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Because the parts (i.e., individuals, communities, nation states) are interconnected with the whole (i.e., world as a single unit) in a complex web, looking inwards for solutions to the exclusion of looking outward (not necessarily toward the West) may not be the wisest course of action. If looking inward was the best solution, insular countries such as North Korea, Myanmar, and Afghanistan (under Taliban) would have resolved many of the problems facing developing countries. Perhaps a sounder developmental philosophy could follow the Buddhist concept of the middle path: looking both inward and outward to place the problems in context.

The third section of the book, which focuses on the media’s role in development, largely suffers from excessive reliance on the "inward looking" approach. Mowlana, in an essay sans citations, advocates "anthropological, linguistic, cultural, ethnographic, and philosophical" approaches to communication and development (p. 187). Melkote and Kandath advance the thesis that "real change is not possible unless we deal with the crucial problems in human societies: lack of economic and social power among individuals at the grassroots" (p. 194). They advocate a shift from the social equilibrium model to a social system change model. Just like public journalism advocates, they want "people handling their problems in local settings" (p. 198) devoid of paternalism. Muppidi writes in favor of the sangham model of the Deccan Development Society—a model that combines "local knowledge, indigenous talent, and action … to find local solutions to local problems" (p. 215). Vishweshwar Rao pushes for the right to information—the right of "the rural poor to know how the development programs meant for them were being implemented" (p. 222). White denounces the linear model and extols the virtues of community-oriented communication that guarantees the right of every person "to participate in the creation of community culture" (p. 239). Of all the writers, only Muppidi refers to the world system theory and Servaes’ multiplicity paradigm. This section would have been richer had the editors produced a "middle-path" chapter that connected the merits of the "inward looking" approach to faster development within the core-periphery structure of the world material economy. Although the empowerment of local communities has an inherent appeal, the empowerment of nations within the world system has a much greater appeal—a task that requires "outward looking" as well.

The fourth section of the book begins the Socratic spirit of questioning associated with Eapen. Halloran works on the thesis that "all research is politicized and that … there is no necessary incompatibility between theoretical refinement, methodological rigor, and social/political commitment" (p. 264). He pinpoints the need to accept differences at all levels of international research while identifying the common denominators or universals. His essay gives the reader a sense of "old wine" because he does not cite any references after 1993. In the next chapter, McQuail discusses the emerging challenges to media theory. He argues that the intellectual tools of an industrial society reflected in existing media theory are inadequate to the current challenges of a society "increasingly influenced by the application of communication technology" (p. 305). Rush, in her chapter, advocates environmental and ecological communication that are directed toward integrative, interactive, and interdisciplinary modeling where all living and non-living entities matter—an approach that some may consider to be too idealistic.

Continuing the Socratic spirit of questioning, the final section of the book attends to international communication and technology issues with contributions by Sparks, Hamelink, and Schiller, among others. This review would be incomplete without a comment on Sparks’ essay on the paradigm shifts in international communication. His is a very systematic analysis of development communication theories, cultural imperialism theories, and globalization theories. He demonstrates the significant conceptual shifts that occurred from one phase to the next. He asserts that neither the development communication model nor the cultural/media imperialism model provides an adequate framework for the analysis of international communication because they were "blind to internal conflicts, other than those arising from the stresses of modernization" (p. 382). He questions the theory of globalization, which is a companion theory to post-modernity, because it fails to engage with the issues of inequality and oppression. He proposes an alternative framework—a theory of cultural consequences of imperialism—that is sensitive both to the fact that states are neither homogeneous nor all-powerful. He says, "It also begins from a clear recognition that not all states are equal, and that not all denizens of any state are equal" (p. 382). The merits of Sparks’ claims have yet to be debated. By coincidence, his alternative model also implicitly questions Eapen’s "inward looking" approach.

Overall, the book is a fitting festschrift to Eapen, who stands side by side with Lakshmana Rao as one of India’s first and most well known mass communication scholars.