The concepts of anthropology and communication have a number of interpretive elements and themes in common: the importance of relationships, the place of man in nature, the human way of knowing. There are also differences: ethics and violence are part of the anthropological domain, but not of communication. This does not prevent the SIC to claim that they have something new to say about mankind. So what could an anthropology of communication be? A sort of ethnography describing how individuals communicate? This is not enough. Communication research also includes presuppositions about humans which support its positions on the relationship with machines, the comprehension of information and the reception of the media. Finally one would define anthropology of communication as various images of human elements which exist more or less explicitly in the minds of researchers working in communications and to which they refer for their interpretation as well as their hypotheses. We therefore have not ONE SINGLE anthropology of communication but A RANGE OF anthropologies which form the basis of communications research. One needs to unearth them through an epistemological approach.
