Speaking For or Selling Out?: Dilemmas of Aboriginal Cultural Brokerage

This chapter focuses on the work of the Top End Aboriginal Bush Broadcasting Association (TEABBA). This organization manages a remote satellite network of thirty Indigenous broadcasting facilities across five distinct language groups in the Northern Territory. The chapter analyzes a distinct moment in the organization’s history when its producers were asked to refigure their remote Aboriginal constituents as a market under state-driven demands that Indigenous media embrace commercial modes of production. The tensions such demands entail are apparent in two opposing rituals of recognition—one a widespread ceremony that draws the teabba into kinship and ritual relations in remote Australia, and the other the bureaucratic recognition afforded by the enumeration of listeners as market share. As TEABBA’s producers were drawn into relationships figured on lines of kinship and ritual responsibility, forms of intra-Aboriginal recognition (smoking ceremonies) and governmental recognition (statistical enumeration) began to work at cross-purposes