Popular Culture and Archaeology
Archaeology as a field of study has often been incorrectly portrayed by popular culture and mass media. False stereotypes glamorise it with the use of violence and thrill. Relic Hunter is an example of how a profession can be altered to fit public interests. Although Relic Hunter has faults in its portrayal of the profession, the overall concept of searching for relics and uncovering historical archives is relevant. While Fox is portrayed as a young professional to the field, her sex appeal is used to intrigue viewers and place a different spin on a female archaeologist/professor.
Read more about this topic: Sydney Fox
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)
“Let a man attain the highest and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad collision, or other accident, and all America will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him; that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the best use to put a fine person to is to drown him to save his board.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)