The politics of the cartoon in anthropological context: Charlie Hebdo as trans/cultural

Abstract

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo controversy, debate has focused largely on press freedoms and the (in)capacity of Muslims to comprehend political cartoons. To better understand the range of responses to the cartoons, this article draws on the anthropology of media to demonstrate the cross-cultural interpretive complexities of media texts in general, and political cartoon in particular. Outlining political cartoon’s history and colonial circulations, it argues, on the one hand, that political cartoon is a transparent genre with near-globally recognized conventions. On the other, referencing ethnographic case studies, it demonstrates the intracultural nuances of satire; liberal democratic assumptions about press freedom; and disparate beliefs about the nature of representation, which render considerations of social context paramount. In this way, the article argues that Charlie Hebdo’s political cartoons are “trans/cultural,” requiring that we move between transcultural transparency and sociocultural conte...