Post War
Discharged as a captain in 1946, he returned to the University of Pennsylvania using his G.I. Bill, was awarded a Bachelors degree, and earned his doctorate four years later in 1950. His doctoral dissertation was on the pre-history of the Northeast, entitled Intermediate Period Influences in the Northeast.
Carpenter began teaching anthropology at the University of Toronto in 1948, taking side jobs such as radio programming for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). In 1950, he started fieldwork among the Aivilik, returning to these Inuit in Nunavut in the famine winter of 1951-52, and again in 1955.
When public television took off in Canada with the launching of CBC-TV in 1952, Carpenter began producing and hosting a series of shows.
Moving back and forth between Toronto’s broadcasting studios and Arctic hunting camps, Carpenter collaborated on the theoretical ideas in development by Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. Teaming up with McLuhan, they co-taught a course and together they hatched their core ideas about the agency of modern media in the process of culture change.
In 1953, after a well-received proposal written by Carpenter, they received a Ford Foundation grant for an interdisciplinary media research project, which funded both the Seminar on Culture and Communication (1953–1959) in addition to their co-edited periodical Explorations throughout the 1950s. Together with Harold Innis, Eric A. Havelock, and Northrop Frye, McLuhan and Carpenter have been characterized as the Toronto School of communication theory.
Meanwhile, Carpenter continued his programs on CBC-TV, including a weekly show also titled “Explorations” (which started as a radio program). In his famous article "The New Languages" (1956) Carpenter offers a succinct analysis of modern media based on years of participant observation in different cultures, academic and popular print publishing, and radio and television broadcasting.
Read more about this topic: Edmund Snow Carpenter
Famous quotes containing the words post and/or war:
“A demanding stranger arrived one morning in a small town and asked a boy on the sidewalk of the main street, “Boy, where’s the post office?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, then, where might the drugstore be?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about a good cheap hotel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Say, boy, you don’t know much, do you?”
“No, sir, I sure don’t. But I ain’t lost.””
—William Harmon (b. 1938)
“The man who fears war and squats opposing
My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson
But is fit only to rot in womanish peace”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)