MEDIATING KINSHIP: Country, Family, and Radio in Northern Australia

Abstract

In Aboriginal Northern Australia, request programs are a ubiquitous, marked format for Indigenous radio broadcasting. Emerging from the activist drive of Indigenous media producers, and often instrumentally geared toward connecting prison inmates with their families and communities, such request programs invariably involve performative “shout‐outs” to close and extended kin. These programs bring together a lengthy history of Aboriginal incarceration and the geographic dispersal of kin networks with country and rock musics, the charged meaning of family in contemporary Indigenous Australia, and the emergent expressive idioms of radio requests. The essay discusses the performative, mediated interweaving of speech and country song in such request programs, analyzing their significance as recursive forms of an emergent, Indigenous public culture.

Contemporary Anthropologies of Indigenous Australia

“…Certain technologies have also been powerfully brought into anthropological view to show how objects mediate social relations: vehicles, acrylic painting, computers, film, radio, and video (Fisher 2009;Frederick & Stefanoff 2011;Myers 1988;Peterson 2000;Redmond 2011;Stotz 2001). At the same time, the technological determinants of built space seem so deeply embedded that they resist analysis: Quarries, plumbing systems, building regulations, electrical systems, or room layouts tend to be ignored (see Lea & Pholeros 2010).…”

“…Michaels's early focus on new media technologies in the indigenous domain was a foil for what he saw as the inherent conservatism of Australian anthropology and the ideological state complex it served (Michaels 1994). He invited anthropologists to see the sociopolitical possibilities of such expressive technologies as art, radio, film, television, and now social networking (Biddle 2007;Christen 2009;Fisher 2009;Ginsburg 1994;von Sturmer 1989von Sturmer , 2009). For reasons that remain unclear, Michaels's work was celebrated more within cultural studies than within establishment anthropology (O'Regan 1990).…”

Music, Language, and Texts: Sound and Semiotic Ethnography

“…These practices are harnessed in turn to an ideological revalorization of the voice contrasting the new prestige form with others that are metonyms for the national past. Kunreuther (2006Kunreuther ( , 2010 shows how urban Nepali subjectivity is constituted through the mutual constitution of two constructions of voice that unite in radio-listening practices (on related issues raised in the context of indigenous Australian radio, see Fisher 2009). Kunreuther discusses the ways national and international institutions promote voice as the central sign of modern, democratic, neoliberal subjectivity, whereas local ideologies about vocal "directness" position the voice as the locus of emotional authenticity; both are made manifest through radio broadcasts of intimate telephone conversations among members of the Nepali diaspora.…”

Dichotomous identities? Indigenous and non‐Indigenous people and the intercultural in Australia

“…Reflecting on particular kinds of subject matter which might ‘show signs of ways forward’ for anthropology into the contemporary, Lea (: 187) identifies the analysis of technology use and forms of multimedia as realms where anthropologists are locating fruitful avenues of enquiry. However, while noting the work of Christen (), Dalley (), Deger (), Fisher (), Hinkson () and Kral () in this area, to restrict the focus of analytical attention to the use of the technologically new offers a no less perilous means of interpreting the binary between tradition and modernity or, indeed, in the construction of relationships with those comprising the broader society . While the modernity seemingly captured in digital radio, laptops, mobile phones and social networking sites offers a seductive contemporaneousness, it is important to emphasise that less technologically new things are similarly contemporary.…”