Radio Fields
An Afierword
FAYE G I N S B U R G
"Truly groundbreaking" is a much overused phrase, but in the
case of this volume, I feel confident using it; it is the first to
date to bring sustained atten-tion to the innovative workbeing done
on radio as an object of anthropolog-ical inquiry. Part of the
excitement of this book is its rock-solid connection to the best of
current ethnographic theory and method, while also showing the rich
contribution that research on radio offers to people in neighboring
fields such as media, Communications, and sound studies, where
scholars are less inclined to work outside their cultural comfort
zones than are anthro-pologists. Despite efforts to think outside
the box in these related disciplines, their historical attachments
to dominant Western paradigms and practices seem to have grown even
stronger with the "digital age"a term that too often conjures up a
view of the whole world as wireddespite the fact that in 2011 70
percent of the world had limited or no access to the Internet.1
None-theless, it is nearly impossible to keep up with the
publication of books on one or another aspect of life with
so-called new media.
Radio, however, is another matter. Its ubiquity and ease of
uptake is well-known.2 Arguably, it is currently the most widely
used media form on earth
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and certainly one that shaped much of the last century's
experience, from Nazi Germany's use of radio as a central
propaganda tool in the 1930S (Aylett 2011) to the role of radio in
consolidating the affective and political sensi-bilities of the
Civil Rights movement in the United States (Ward 2006), to the
current politically polarized "silos" that characterize current
talk-radio shows. Knowing that, it is even more remarkable that
this book is the first of its kind, given that it is over a century
since radio has become a common-place Communications technology and
anthropology has become a recog-nized discipline. Perhaps the
neglect of radio in anthropology has been in part because so much
of the attention given by the field to media is associ-ated with
the visualfilm, televisin, videotoo often ignoring the other
elements that often constitute those media, such as sound.
Meanwhile, the sonic, for many years, has been assigned to
ethnomusicology. It is only in the past decade, with the
publication of books such as The Audible Past (Sterne 2003) and
Aural Cultures (Drobnick 2004) and a few other works noted in the
introduction to this volume that "sound studies" has emerged as an
ex-citing new rea of research (Samuels et al. 2010). Indeed, if the
2011 Ameri-can Anthropological Association meetings were any
indicator, the number and quality of panels on this topic suggests
that the anthropology of sound is finally coming into its own. 3
Clearly, it is a propitious moment for work on radio to be
recognized. As is evident from the chapters in this volume,
understanding radio requires attention not only to the sonicthe
sound of the human voice, language, music, and even staticbut also
to the ways that radio is embedded in and sometimes constitutive of
"inaudible" social prac-tices such as kinship, religin, technology,
personhood, and social move-ments, to ame a few key reas explored
in this collection.
In addition to the emergence of work on radio in the present
represented by this book, the links between anthropology and radio
over the past one hundred years offer a fascinating and
underreported story that the introduc-tion provides us, laying out
the historical foundations for the work in this volume. Thanks to
the editors, Lucas Bessire and Daniel Fisher, as well as the other
ten anthropologists whose outstanding work is showcased in this
book, the lack of recognition for the significance of radio as an
object of eth-nographic inquiry and theorization is over.
A n Origin Story
I recollect when the idea for this book was first mentioned a
number of years ago in a conversation in my office at New York
University with Lucas Bessire, when he was just finishing his Ph.D.
The possibility of editing a collection of
