Channels

Channels are often treated as basic conditions affording communication. The anthropological research reviewed here, however, collectively demonstrates that channels are themselves subject to other forces—social, material, and political—and that channels can be deployed to limit or prevent communication. Channels are experienced as specific—as relating specific sentiences under specific conditions, often demanding specific choices. Because channels are vitalized by the specific and multiple sentiences that are connected to or cut out by them, channels both afford and depend on multiple, diverging perspectives. Attending to channels thus brings questions of social relation into relief: We check channels not only for fidelity but also for how they map shifting social locations. When we attend ethnographically not only to how people make, imagine, use, distort, check, block, and rechannel channels but also to who does so, and to what purposes, we discover many points of agency for upholding or changing social orders and infrastructures.