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>> 1 1 Introduction Radio Fields Lucas Bessire and Daniel Fisher Radio is the most widespread electronic medium in the world today. More than a historical precedent for television, film, or the Internet, radio remains central to the everyday lives of billions of people around the globe. Its rugged and inexpensive technology has become invested with new import in places on the other side of the “digital divide,” where topography, poverty, or politics limit access to television, computers, or electricity. In metropolitan centers, radio also remains a constant presence, sounding and resounding in public space. It is broadcast from satellites into cars and jets, streamed through laptops and loudspeakers in shopping malls, classrooms, and waiting rooms, and it fills the air at parades, weddings, military bases, and squatter settlements. It is beamed into war zones and native villages, broadcast from cellular phones and homemade transistors powered by the sun. Urban 2 > 3 fundamental contribution to how we might understand radio and ask questions of its social life. Although each of the contributors draws inspiration from a wider body of scholarship on radio, they also suggest several ways in which their work is fundamentally distinct from important intellectual projects currently under way in the fields of communications, media studies and history, sound theory, and cultural studies. Each contributor shows how an anthropology of radio may simultaneously further and redirect these broader trends in radio scholarship and media analysis. One of the principal questions that emerge from our contributors is that of the social definition of radio itself. From investments in two-way radio by recently contacted Ayoreo-speaking people to Nepali engagements with liberal conceptions of the self, radio is never a single technology. Rather, it gains force and traction according to wider formations of meaning, politics, and subjectivity that often remain inaudible to short-term, focus-group or questionnaire-based research. For instance, radio means something different to two different female Muslim radio preachers in Mali or to a development worker in the same place, let alone to a DJ in Mexico City or Nepal. And beyond such hermeneutic questions, radio acquires its form within specific practices, politics, and “assemblages” that give it shape, including its digital transformation and extension through the Internet (Collier and Ong 2005; see also Born 2005). In such ways, it might be approached as an “actornetwork ” (Latour 1991, 2005) or “apparatus” (Foucault 1980, 1988; cf. Agamben 2009), social theoretical terms which call attention to emergent constellations of power, social relations, and things, as well as the historical moments in which they acquire durability and specificity. Radio’s boundaries thus cannot easily be assumed a priori; its objectness is always potentially unsettled by shifting social practices, institutions, and technological innovations and by the broader domains within which it finds shape, meaning, and power. At the same time, radio matters for such domains in ways that can productively be compared across time and space. Diversity of form and content, or effect and distribution, may be most noticeable to ethnographers in the field, but unexpected similarities between radio’s varied apparatuses or assemblages are also strikingly apparent and impossible to ignore. It is no coincidence that Ayoreo-speaking people in the Gran Chaco and Appalachian radio preachers both imagine radio as a suitable prosthesis for the metaphysics of prayer, or that radio stations were occupied by women marchers in Oaxaca in 2006 and Libyan protestors in Benghazi in 2011 and were targeted by FARC guerrilla fighters in Colombia in 2010, or that radio’s historic role as a wartime media technology is being reprised in present-day Iraq and Afghanistan (Ahrens 1998). The challenge for an anthropology of radio is to put 4 > 5 the technological specificities of audio mediation alter the reach of radio sound and its availability to different social projects at different times (Bull 2004; Tacchi, chap. 12 in this volume). Radio fields, as Frantz Fanon noted, are thus impossible to assess in their “quiet objectivity” alone (1959, 73). This collection thereby offers several arguments for the ways culture matters for the study of radio—as the context in which it is deployed and gains meaning but also as the object of its transformative potential. The contributors show how cultural forms and radio’s technologies are mutually constitutive across time and space. As several chapters make apparent, odd things happen to both “culture” and “radio” at their intersection. It is a central premise of this book that the anthropology of radio must begin by taking both...

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