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. 

 

"Fisher’s writing will be valuable for all kinds of classes in the anthropology of communication, political anthropology, sound and media studies, and ethnomusicology. Radio producers and students of media production will enjoy the stories of festivals and radio production studios and the lives of young Aboriginal workers and their mentors. Fisher’s dedicated ethnographic work serves as an example and model for anthropologists working with the social and political complexities of media production."

"The Voice and Its Doubles expands and challenges our ideas about Aboriginal cultural expression. It helps us (especially non-Aboriginal readers) to hear Aboriginal radio and music as a hidden and powerful language. It expands our notion of what is possible in ethnographic study—the ethnography of the staged voice. And it challenges us to think about the political power embedded in everyday phenomena, such as radio talkback or the oversaturation of country music hits, and demands that we understand the politics embedded in the production of the voice."

"Fisher has made impressive work of characterizing the messy strands of [an] unstable and transforming social field. The Voice and Its Doubles makes for compelling reading, not only for students of media but for anyone interested in grappling with the contemporary contested politics of Aboriginality."

". . . 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."
 

". . . The Voice and Its Doubles is a thoughtful, well-written, and beautifully printed book that is timely in challenging readers to understand the important and often-marginalized work of Indigenous Australians in their attempts to reinforce social cohesion and build better opportunities for their communities through the medium of radio."