MUSIC ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIANA

Beginning in the early 1980s Aboriginal Australians found in music, radio, and filmic media a means to make themselves heard across the country and to insert themselves into the center of Australian political life. In The Voice and Its Doubles Daniel Fisher analyzes the great success of this endeavor, asking what is at stake in the sounds of such media for Aboriginal Australians. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in northern Australia, Fisher describes the close proximity of musical media, shifting forms of governmental intervention, and those public expressions of intimacy and kinship that suffuse Aboriginal Australian social life. Today’s Aboriginal media include genres of country music and hip-hop; radio requests and broadcast speech; visual graphs of a digital audio timeline; as well as the statistical media of audience research and the discursive and numerical figures of state audits and cultural policy formation. In each of these diverse instances the mediatized voice has become a site for overlapping and at times discordant forms of political, expressive, and institutional creativity.

• Mediating kinship: radio’s cultural poetics
• Aboriginal country
• From the studio to the street
• From radio skid row to the reconciliation station
• Speaking for or selling out? Dilemmas of aboriginal cultural brokerage
• A body for the voice.
• Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Communication in anthropology — Australia, Northern
• Aboriginal Australians in mass media
• Radio — Production and direction — Australia, Northern
• Sound — Recording and reproducing — Australia, Northern
• Communication and culture — Australia, Northern
• Politics and culture — Australia, Northern
• #141224
• pp. 344 First Edition
• “. . . The Voice and Its Doubles is an eloquent, thoughtful, and original work of anthropology. It makes a valuable contribution to sound studies, the anthropology of media, Aboriginal studies, and deserves to be read also by those compelled by broader questions with regard to critical Indigeneity.”
  ―Jennifer Deger, The Australian Journal of Anthropology