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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 sensibilities 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-

Radio Fields
An Afierword
FAYE GINSBURG

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 associated 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 exciting new rea of research (Samuels et al. 2010). Indeed, if the 2011 American 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. 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 practices such as kinship, religin, technology, personhood, and social movements, to ame a few key reas explored in this collection.
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"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 attention to the innovative workbeing done on radio as an object of anthropological 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 anthropologists. 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. Nonetheless, 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 wellknown. Arguably, it is currently the most widely used media form on earth
1

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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 introduction 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 ethnographic 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

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FAYE GINSBURG

this sort was then a proposal motivated by his dissertation research. Radio
had not been part of Lucas's initial plan when he headed out to the Gran
Chaco regin for extended fieldwork with Ayoreo-speaking people; rather,
it was something he encountered while there, the kind of happy inductive
accident that so often gives anthropological work its edge. In his case, local
two-way radio practice was connecting small groups of Ayoreo speakers
across the Bolivian- Paraguayan border not of their making, providing an
unexpected and complex form of collective self-production, as Bessire makes
clear in his riveting piece in this volume. But it was his concern to make
sense of their social practices around radioand his surprise at how little
anthropological literature existed on the topic more generallythat generated that conversation in my office.
As a longstanding radio enthusiast who had encouraged Ph.D. students
for years to consider research on radio as a radically understudied yet widespread media form just waiting for ethnographers, I responded to the idea
with enormous enthusiasm. I suggested that he partner with Danny Fisher,
whose extensive experience studying Aboriginal radio and music in northern
Australia, in many ways, made him one of a small group of pioneering scholars (along with some in this volume) carrying out outstanding ethnographic
research on this mdium, a position which is evident in the sophistication of
his piece in this book. Currently teaching in the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, Danny is another former
N Y U Ph.D. student, influenced by his studies with Steve Feld on music and
sound. Like Lucas, he had also trained in the Culture and Media Program at
N Y U , a course of study that provides a broad framework for understanding media ethnographically, theoretically, and with a healthy respect for
the insights that practice can ofFer. Lucas took Danny's email and scribbled
down the ames of the handful of other anthropologists who had been carrying out research on radio in many different parts of the world, from Europe to the Pacific, to the Arctic, to central Australia. We brainstormed possible book titles, and Radio Fields captured the same capacious sensibility of
media as a social practiceencompassing the social, the technological, the
phenomenological, the material, the transnationalas had the title Media
Worlds for the book edited by Lila Abu-Lughod, Brian Larkin, and myself in
2002 (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002).
4

Like many such talks in which the germ of an idea is planted, it was hard
to judge if this one would bear fruit. However, within a month or two, the
idea for a book featuring recent ethnographic work on radio started to take
shape in earnest as Lucas and Danny went forward with plans for this volume. Together they were able to mobilize a first-rate, wide-ranging group of

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contributors, from the foundational work of the snior anthropologist Lynn

Stephen with indigenous women activists in Oaxaca to the exciting contribution of Andy Blanton, an emerging scholar recently back from his dissertation fieldwork in Appalachia, and of course, everything and everyone in
between. As the volume you hold in your hands makes clear, their combined
forc as editors has been extraordinarily productive, and anthropology
along with media studiesis much enriched by their effrts.
Shaping Radio Fields
Like the contributors in this book, the editors exemplify two key pathways
to research on radio among anthropologists: happy accident and strategic choice. As noted earlier, Bessire had never expected to stumble on the
surprising and intellectually challenging uptake of two-way radio among
Ayoreo speakers in the Gran Chaco regin with whom he had been working
as an anthropologist and filmmaker. In the case of Fisher, indigenous radio
had been at the center of his original and ongoing research with indigenous
Australians living in that country's Top End. Despite their difTerent trajectories, both editors carried out the requisite, rewarding, and demanding fieldwork expected of anthropologists, in this case with Indigenous communities
in the kind of places that are off the map of most media scholars. Their work
renders evident how this kind of anthropological research on media in "out
of the way" placesin this case radiooffers a crucial contribution to the
"de-Westernizing" as well as decentering of media studies. Indeed, this paradigm-shifting framework characterizes the entire volume and underscores
its significance for a greatly enriched understanding of the place of this kind
of "small media" in everyday life across the planet, whether among Islamic
women radio preachers in Mali or in the experiential sensibilities of radio
listening in (i)homes of middle-class multigenerational Britons.
The considerable differences that characterize the radio fields covered in
this book make clear the valu of this kind of broad perspective that renders
this work so lively. The authors collectively offer a wide range of approaches
that demnstrate the generativity of the ethnographic approach, from projects based in metropolitan centers, as in Jeffrey Juris's piece on prate radio n
Mxico and Kira Kosnick's work on Radio MultiKulti, to radio in Indigenous
communities in Latin America and Australia. At the same time, the editors
have structured the volume to demnstrate distinctive overlapplng concerns.
The grouping of the contributions along five "axes" (a word that draws on the
mathematical concept that describes a number of sites that cluster together
in a way that resembles an imagined line) underscores this sense of shared

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orientations. The axes are particularly helpful in calling the reader's attention
to some of the key features raised by the study of radio as a social practice
and which bear discussion here:
Axis I: The Voice encompasses the actual mediatized voice that is central
to radios form of production, transmission, and interpellation of "listening
publics" as well as other collectivities, along with the notion of voice as a trope
for ideas of social agency and personhood that are key concepts that shape at
least the ideal if not the reality of local radio. This axis includes Laura Kunreuther s piece on the critical role played by F M broadcasting in the 1990S democracy movements in Nepal, calling attention to "voice" as a sign for agency
in discussions of ideas of neoliberal citizenship, as well as the inaudible but
essential social relations' of cultural production, station ownership, and programming. Danny Fisher's chapter based on his work with Indigenous F M
radio producers goes to the heart of the matter of "voice consciousness" in his
analysis of how voice works simultaneously as an expressive practice and as a
location for cultural activism, a project of "Indigenous self-fashioning" which
also extends to the appropriation of global musical genres.
-

Axis II: Radio and Nation draws on the robust notion of "imagined communities" first introduced by Benedict Anderson in 1983 in his foundational
study of the role of print media in constituting a sense of national identity
beyond face-to-face community. Extending that idea to radio, Bessire and
Fisher use this concept to cluster those chapters that demnstrate the different ways in which a sense of a citizenship or at least national belonging is
fosteredalthough not necessarily encompassedby radio and its capacity
to produce not only the infrastructure of mass mediation to people living
within the nation but also the sounds, narratives, and sentiments that characterize particular national imaginaries. For example, Danny Kaplan, in this
section, focuses on radio engineers and the part that their editorial nterventions play in crafting an Israeli national narrative and soundscape, from the
mundane "sound" of weather reports to emergency broadcasts, thus playing
a crucial though largely unseen role in shaping a sonic sense of Israeli citizenship. In contrast, Dorothea Schulz examines how private F M radio stations in Mali have become the site for Muslim women to take on authority
as radio preachers, emphasizing particular attributes of voice that lend them
authority in the context of contemporary Islamic moral renewal.
Axis III: Community Radio emphasizes the form most frequently considered to be the site for the formation of a counterpublic/minority sphere in
much of the writing on radio by activist scholars in particular. As the editors point out, whether community radio in fact constitutes (or reflects) alternative communities or is built on antihegemonic sentimentideological

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positions strongly attached to the idea of community radiois an empirical

question that is central to the chapters in this section. Such inquiry extends
even to the variety of "technological assemblages" that characterize smallscale radio that typically are associated with this form, from low-power radio
that targets particular loCalities to Internet streaming that can bring together
constituencies that are geographically dispersed. It is important to recognize
that while community radio as such may speak to a particular form of shared
identitythat may fall to the left or the right on the political spectrum
people addressed by this form of media may simultaneously hold a range of
subject positions. In this section, Lynn Stephen asks why radio became the
target for a takeover by Indigenous women in Oaxaca, Mxico, in 2006 during a popular uprising there and shows how that act became a catalyst for
expanding the integration of testimonial speech in regional radio as a way of
integrating minoritized voices into the political process. Melinda Hinkson
covers the history of the Warlpiri Media Association in central Australia from
its inception in 1984 to its current status as part of the Pintubi Anmatyerre
Warlpiri (PAW) radio network, which operates across eleven communities.
She demonstrates how Warlpiri youth, in their on-air dedications, carry out
a renewed if transformed expression of Warlpiri cultural imperatives via the
novel modes of address offered by radio. Jeff Juris's study of the role of Radio
Autnoma, an urban youth prate radio station in Mxico City advocating
"communicational autonomy," explores this case in relation to two distinct
models for community radio: A M A R C (World Association of Community
Radio Broadcasters) is a longstanding group that promotes communication
rights, including the legalizaton of community radio, while the free media
movement, including Radio Autnoma, advocates piracy of the airwaves.
Axis IV: Transnational Circuits incorporates chapters that address the
capacity of radio technologyand especially but not exclusively airwaves
to cross national borders, creating a mediascape that connects communities separated by geopolitical boundaries but connected by strong ties of
language, culture, affect, religin, and kinship. Kira Kosnick, building on
her ethnography of Radio MultiKulti, Berlin's public service radio station,
shows how radio practices have helped to crate new social imaginaries
and expressive modes of cultural citizenshipthat render ethnic diversity
audible on the airwaves. Lucas Bessire's transnational location is far from the
urban multicultural West in his chapter on the solar-powered two-way radio
network created by Ayoreo-speaking people of the Bolivian and Paraguayan
Gran Chaco. Yet he shows how this technological capacity is deployed as
a "transcendent acoustic space" through which Ayoreo amanees are built
across the border, via linguistically stylized reports of illness and suffering,