Listening to “the Human Without a Soul” – Outline for an Audience-Centred History of Broadcasting in Communist Albania
Keywords:
Radio, Albania, anthropology of development, audience studiesAbstract
The paper proposes a study of broadcasting in one of the most tightly isolated regimes of the communist Eastern Bloc, beyond the paradigms of radio as a pure propaganda medium and of radio history as pure institutional history. Instead of a macro-history from above, this contribution proposes an ethnographically grounded micro-perspective alongside the lines of “audience studies”, informed by “oral history” methods. It proposes to focus on the social effects of radio listening and, in a broader perspective, on how radio broadcasting was embedded into larger modernization agendas of the regime of Enver Hoxha.
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