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Brian Hochman , Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press , 2014, $27.50). Pp. 312. isbn 978 0 8166 8138 9 .
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The cover photograph of Savage Preservation captures an unusual gathering. Frozen in time, and subsequently consigned to the National Anthropological Archives of the Smithsonian, three visiting representatives of Panama's Cuna people (or tule) pose with the linguist and ethnologist John Peabody Harrington. At the centre of the tableau is a heavy-duty dictaphone. In late 1924 - the date of the photo shoot -sound recording was by no means the stable pursuit we know today, achieved and perfected, but rather one that would continue to evolve as acoustic techniques gave way to a new, electrified system of microphony and amplification. After months of research in the laboratories of Western Electric, and a series of consultations and demos, commercial outfits such as the Victor Talking Machine Company began to cultivate the electrical method, coaxing into its Camden studios the likes of Billy Murray and the saxophonist Rudy Wiedoeft, both of whom contributed to Victor's first electrical disc in February 1925. Something revolutionary was afoot, and yet to look back at the cover photograph, with its clunky dictaphone and besuited sound artists, you'd never know that things were about to change. Harrington and his guests look serene and strangely composed in the moment of their collaboration, apparently deaf to the news that their means and very record of interaction - the mouthpiece, wax cylinder, and unwieldy headphones - had already begun to slip even further into the technological past.
Brian Hochman is especially sensitive to ironies of this kind in Savage Preservation, his new study of ethnography and media innovation. He calls it "the ephemerality of permanence, a fundamental paradox of modern media history that has become increasingly...