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Radio is the most widespread electronic medium in the world today.
As a form of technology that is both durable and relatively cheap,
radio remains central to the everyday lives of billions of people
around the globe. It is used as a call for prayer in Argentina and
Appalachia, to organize political protest in Mexico and Libya, and
for wartime communication in Iraq and Afghanistan. In urban centres
it is played constantly in shopping malls, waiting rooms, and
classrooms. Yet despite its omnipresence, it remains the media form
least studied by anthropologists. Radio Fields employs ethnographic
methods to reveal the diverse domains in which radio is imagined,
deployed, and understood. Drawing on research from six continents,
the volume demonstrates how the particular capacities and practices
of radio provide singular insight into diverse social worlds,
ranging from aboriginal Australia to urban Zambia. Together, the
contributors address how radio creates distinct possibilities for
rethinking such fundamental concepts as culture, communication,
community, and collective agency.
Radio is the most widespread electronic medium in the world today.
As a form of technology that is both durable and relatively cheap,
radio remains central to the everyday lives of billions of people
around the globe. It is used as a call for prayer in Argentina and
Appalachia, to organize political protest in Mexico and Libya, and
for wartime communication in Iraq and Afghanistan. In urban centres
it is played constantly in shopping malls, waiting rooms, and
classrooms. Yet despite its omnipresence, it remains the media form
least studied by anthropologists. Radio Fields employs ethnographic
methods to reveal the diverse domains in which radio is imagined,
deployed, and understood. Drawing on research from six continents,
the volume demonstrates how the particular capacities and practices
of radio provide singular insight into diverse social worlds,
ranging from aboriginal Australia to urban Zambia. Together, the
contributors address how radio creates distinct possibilities for
rethinking such fundamental concepts as culture, communication,
community, and collective agency.
Finalist for the National Book Award An intimate reckoning with
aquifer depletion in America's heartland The Ogallala aquifer has
nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less
than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much
of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the
Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining
planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely
personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through
which it gains meaning and force. Anthropologist Lucas Bessire
journeyed back to western Kansas, where five generations of his
family lived as irrigation farmers and ranchers, to try to make
sense of this vital resource and its loss. His search for water
across the drying High Plains brings the reader face to face with
the stark realities of industrial agriculture, eroding democratic
norms, and surreal interpretations of a looming disaster. Yet the
destination is far from predictable, as the book seeks to move
beyond the words and genres through which destruction is often
known. Instead, this journey into the morass of eradication offers
a series of unexpected discoveries about what it means to inherit
the troubled legacies of the past and how we can take
responsibility for a more inclusive, sustainable future. An urgent
and unsettling meditation on environmental change, Running Out is a
revelatory account of family, complicity, loss, and what it means
to find your way back home.
A powerful photographic survey of the impact of irrigation systems
on the landscape of the United States In The One Hundred Circle
Farm, renowned photographer Emmet Gowin (b. 1941) presents stunning
aerial images of center-pivot irrigation systems in the western and
midwestern United States. This type of farming involves a method of
watering crops in which equipment rotates around a centrally
drilled well, creating enormous, distinct circles of irrigated
land, often in the midst of dry terrain. Anyone who has taken a
cross-country flight has likely seen countless acres of these
iconic symbols of industrial agriculture. Through a faithful yet
personal photographic survey, Gowin's powerful images not only bear
witness to the ambitions humans wield in shaping the landscape, but
also attest to how such primal elements-circles, pivots, and
lines-symbolize water depletion and the fragile environment. The
stark photographic compositions, more than one hundred in all, were
created over eight years. Fields resemble lost civilizations; crops
gape like strange new suns. Hauntingly beautiful, the images
highlight Earth's nourishing geology, visual evidence of our
labors. Inscribed onto the earth, these lines are reminders of the
technology extracting unimaginable amounts of water that cannot be
replaced, and raise questions about what large-scale irrigation
must answer for when the water runs out. With an afterword by
anthropologist Lucas Bessire discussing the history and impact of
pivot irrigation on American farming, The One Hundred Circle Farm
stands as a poetic visual record, evidence of the tenuous
connections between human enterprise and our planet's most precious
resource.
Finalist for the National Book Award An intimate reckoning with
aquifer depletion in America's heartland The Ogallala aquifer has
nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less
than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much
of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the
Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining
planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely
personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through
which it gains meaning and force. Anthropologist Lucas Bessire
journeyed back to western Kansas, where five generations of his
family lived as irrigation farmers and ranchers, to try to make
sense of this vital resource and its loss. His search for water
across the drying High Plains brings the reader face to face with
the stark realities of industrial agriculture, eroding democratic
norms, and surreal interpretations of a looming disaster. Yet the
destination is far from predictable, as the book seeks to move
beyond the words and genres through which destruction is often
known. Instead, this journey into the morass of eradication offers
a series of unexpected discoveries about what it means to inherit
the troubled legacies of the past and how we can take
responsibility for a more inclusive, sustainable future. An urgent
and unsettling meditation on environmental change, Running Out is a
revelatory account of family, complicity, loss, and what it means
to find your way back home.
In 2004, one of the world's last bands of voluntarily isolated
nomads left behind their ancestral life in the dwindling thorn
forests of northern Paraguay, fleeing ranchers' bulldozers. "Behold
the Black Caiman" is Lucas Bessire's intimate chronicle of the
journey of this small group of Ayoreo people, the terrifying new
world they now face, and the precarious lives they are piecing
together against the backdrop of soul-collecting missionaries,
humanitarian NGOs, late liberal economic policies, and the highest
deforestation rate in the world.
Drawing on ten years of fieldwork, Bessire highlights the stark
disconnect between the desperate conditions of Ayoreo life for
those out of the forest and the well-funded global efforts to
preserve those Ayoreo still living in it. By showing how this
disconnect reverberates within Ayoreo bodies and minds, his
reflexive account takes aim at the devastating consequences of our
society's continued obsession with the primitive and raises
important questions about anthropology's potent capacity to further
or impede indigenous struggles for sovereignty. The result is a
timely update to the classic literary ethnographies of South
America, a sustained critique of the so-called ontological
turn--one of anthropology's hottest trends--and, above all, an
urgent call for scholars and activists alike to rethink their
notions of difference.
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