OFFICE: 309 Anthropology and Art Practice Building (Formerly Known As Kroeber Hall)
E-MAIL: dtfisher@berkeley.edu
Special Interests
Sound, Music, Photography and Cinema, Australia, Climate Change, Fire
Research
Across a range of ethnographic and other projects my work focuses on questions of indeterminacy and those aspects of social and material worlds that lend insight into their unfinished, plastic character. In part this has meant an ethnographic and analytical focus on the political, epistemic and worldly work of undecidabilty. These conceptual interests animate writing that concerns sound, image, fire, and the emergent material, ecological, and social coordinates of the urban.
I am currently pursuing several ethnographic and archival projects, grounded on long term work in Australia and more recent work in North America. Supported by the National Science Foundation’s Cultural Anthropology Program, the first concerns Indigenous urbanism and new Australian ecologies, focusing in part on urban fire, its transformation by climatic instability, and its mediatization via image, story, and market logics of carbon capture and exchange. This accompanies ongoing research into forms and figures of the urban in relation to sound and audio media. My new book manuscript, Long Grass Variations, and a series of photography and sound-based projects under the shared title of Fire’s Image, address these different phenomena from the bush spaces and laneways of Darwin, capital of Australia’s Northern Territory.
Earlier research addressed the efflorescence of Indigenous music and film production, and the still unfolding entailments of that success across northern Australia. This work focused primarily on sound and voice (and increasingly smart phones and related applications and platforms), relating these to enduring and emergent Australian understandings of relatedness and mediation itself, and led to my first book, The Voice and Its Doubles (Duke UP, 2016).
In addition to these projects in Northern Australia I have conducted research in New York City and Peru, and in 2001 produced the ethnographic documentary "A Cat in a Sack," focused on the performance practice of New York's Hungry March Band. I also continue to pursue improvisation and composition as components of my broader research practice.
At UC Berkeley I am affiliated faculty with the Program in Critical Theory, the Department of Music, Global Metropolitan Studies, and the Center for Race and Gender, and director of UC Berkeley’s Media Studies Program. I also direct the Experimental Ethnography Lab, a teaching and research studio housed in the Department of Anthropology and dedicated to ethnographic media in all forms. In this capacity I teach and advise ongoing research projects in domains of experimental ethnography, sound studies, animation and materiality, cinema, and music- and art-centered ethnography.
Beyond UC Berkeley I hold affiliations with the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney, and the Center for Creative Ethnography at Queens University, Belfast.
Profile
PhD, Department of Anthropology, NYU 2005; Certificate in Culture and Media; 2001.
Representative Publications
Books and edited collections:
2016. The Voice and Its Doubles: Music and Media in Northern Australia. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
2012. Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century (with Lucas Bessire). New York University Press.
Special Issues:
2021. Witnessing Environments (with Sarah E. Vaughn). Special section of Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 11(2).
2013. Becoming Like the State (with Jaap Timmer). Special issue of Oceania 83(3).
Articles and Chapters:
2024. Fire's Habit: Elemental Media and the Politics of Apprehension, in Epistemic Attunements -- Regenerating Anthropology's Form. TAJA 35(1-2). [Intermedial and open access photo/audio article] https://doi.org/10.1111/taja.12504
2024. "Phenomenological Displacements,” in Harris Berger, Friedlind Riedel, and David VanderHamm, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures, pp. 549-575. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2021. Smoke’s Screens: Fire, Media and the Politics of Apprehension. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 11(2):475-490. https://doi.org/10.1086/716556
2021. Witnessing Environments. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 11(2): 387-394. (with Sarah E. Vaughn)
2021. A Movie for Your Ears. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology. 22(2–3): 241–244
2020. “Fire,” in Cymene Howe and Anand Pandian, eds. Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon. Punctum Books.
2019. To sing with another's voice: Animation, circumspection, and the negotiation of Indigeneity in northern Australian new media. American Ethnologist. [early view 10.1111/amet.12732]
2019. “Spun Dry: Mobility and Jurisdiction in Northern Australia,” in Marianne Constable, Leti Volpe, and Bryan Wagner, eds. Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places: Justice Beyond and Between. Pp. 62-84. New York: Fordham University Press.
2018. A Subject Deferred: Exposure and Erasure in an Ethnographic Archive. Oceania 88(3):292-304.
2018 "On Sonic Assemblage," in Morten Michelsen, Mads Krogh, Steen Nielsen, and Iben Have, eds. Music Radio: Building Communities, Mediating Genres. Pp. 49 - 69. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
2018. Untidy Times: Alexis Wright, Extinction, and the Politics of Apprehension. Cultural Anthropology 33(2):180-188.
2016. “Experiencing Self-Abstraction: Studio Production and Vocal Consciousness,” in Kalpana Ram and Christopher Houston, eds. Phenomenology in Anthropology: A Sense of Perspective, pp. 153-174. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
2015. An Urban Frontier: Respatializing Government in Remote Northern Australia. Cultural Anthropology 30(1): 139-168.
2015. “Radio” in David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, eds. Keywords in Sound. Duke University Press.
2013. Intimacy and self-abstraction: Radio as new media in Aboriginal Australia, Culture, Theory and Critique 54(3): 372-393.
2013. Becoming the State in Northern Australia: Urbanisation, Intra-Indigenous Relatedness, and the State Effect. Oceania 83(3): 238-258.
2013. The Anthropology of Radio Fields. Annual Review of Anthropology 42:363-378 (with Lucas Bessire).
2012. Running amok or just sleeping rough? Long-grass camping and the politics of care. American Ethnologist 39(1):171-186
2012. “Radio Fields.” Introduction to Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century. NYU Press. [co-author]
2012. “From the Studio to the Street: Producing the Voice in Indigenous Australia” in Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st century. NYU Press.
2010. On Gammon, Global Noise, and Indigenous Heterogeneity: Words as things in Aboriginal Public Culture. Critique of Anthropology30(3):265-286
2009. Speech that Offers Song: Kinship, Country Music, and Incarceration in Northern Australia.” Cultural Anthropology 24(2): 280-312.
2004. “Local sounds, popular technologies: History and historicity in Andean radio.” In Jim Drobnick, ed. Aural Cultures. pp. 207-218. Montreal and Banff: Walter Phillips Gallery/YYZ Books.
Books
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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. |
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Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century 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. |