Shadows in the Field : New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology

Shadows in the Field : New Perspectives for Fieldwork in EthnomusicologyShadows in the Field
Second Edition
Edited by
1 2008
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shadows in the field : new perspectives for fieldwork in ethnomusicology /
edited by Gregory Barz & Timothy J. Cooley. — 2nd ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-19-532495-2; 978-0-19-532496-9 (pbk.)
I. Barz, Gregory F., 1960– II. Cooley, Timothy J., 1962–
ML3799.S5 2008
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Fieldworker’s Progress
Shadows in the Field, in its first edition a varied collection of interesting, insightful
essays about fieldwork, has now been significantly expanded and revised, becoming
the first comprehensive book about fieldwork in ethnomusicology. Because eth-
nomusicologists think of fieldwork as the defining activity of their endeavor, one
may be surprised to find, looking through our literature, not much that tells what it
was really like to work in the ‘‘field,’’ nor much about the methods employed in
gathering data for any particular project in ethnomusicology. But one does get a
sense that fieldwork meant—means—many different things to different scholars;
many different things, indeed, in the career of any one scholar. As the history of
ethnomusicology proceeded through the twentieth century, fieldwork changed
radically, and many times, in its basic assumptions and execution; it has changed,
as well, in my own several decades of attempts—and surely in the life of any of us
who have been at it for several years.
In North America through the twentieth century (and, for that matter, in my
own experience since 1950), the configuration, very, very roughly, went somewhat
like this. Starting with simple ‘‘collecting’’—we found an ‘‘informant’’ and asked
him or her to sing for our recording devices, posing such questions as ‘‘What do
you use this song for?’’ and ‘‘Where did you learn it?’’—we proceeded to more
general ‘‘hanging out’’ in a distant community, spending a summer, a year, at-
tending events as they occurred and asking random questions. We began to engage
in fieldwork by participating in the music we were studying—learning how to play
and sing it—first often at our home institutions, then continuing in the culture’s
home ground, putting ourselves as pupils in the hands of competent teachers,
joining local groups or classes. We moved on to the idea of projects to answer
specific questions. For example, in my research, I tried to figure out how the minds
bruno nettl
of improvisers of Persian music worked, by making and collecting many record-
ings of one dastgah, or ‘‘mode,’’ and getting help from the musicians in analyzing
how they had used the basic material of the radif.
We came to realize that we should do field research in our own communities,
something that was both easier (it’s our turf ) and harder (be ‘‘objective’’ about
one’s own family and friends?) than working abroad. We began to question the
role we were playing in the ‘‘field’’ communities, whether we were doing harm or
good, and about our relationship to ethnomusicologists from those host com-
munities. We worried that our very presence would result in significant culture
change (and sometimes it did). It may have come as a bit of a surprise that the
particular identity (nationality, ethnicity, gender) and the personality—shy, out-
going, quick on the uptake, contemplative—of the fieldworker makes a lot of
difference in the research enterprise. We learned that fieldwork may include the
gathering of ethnomusicological data from seemingly impersonal sources such as
recordings and the Internet. And we have devoted quite a bit of energy to criti-
cizing our discipline, largely in terms of the approaches and methods in the field.
In its very comprehensiveness, this nutshell history of fieldwork hides dramatic
events that become defining moments in one ethnomusicologist’s progress.
Dramatic events for me: The Arapaho singer Bill Shakespear telling me in 1950
that two songs that sounded identical to me were different, and two that sounded
very different were actually the same, ‘‘although very little difference in tone,’’
teaching me that different cultures have very different conceptions of what makes a
unit of musical thought. Calvin Boy, my Blackfoot teacher in 1966, telling me ‘‘the
right Blackfoot way to do something is to sing the right song with it,’’ putting the
culture’s conception of music into a single sentence. My teacher in Tehran telling
me, perhaps with a bit of exasperation, that I’d never be a cultural insider and that
any uneducated Persian would understand the music instinctively better than
I ever could, with a little sermon in 1969 that began, ‘‘You know, Dr. Nettl, you will
never understand this music.’’ A Carnatic music lover in Chennai, to whom I was
talking in 1981 about Mozart, exclaiming, ‘‘He is your Tyagaraja!’’
Writing about Fieldwork
That’s a precis of fieldwork—history and autobiography, in tandem. What, now,
more specifically, about the history of the literature about fieldwork? Considering
the centrality of fieldwork in the ethnomusicological enterprise, it’s surprising that
Shadows in the Field was really the first book devoted completely to this entire
complex—and that there were few in the related disciplines of anthropology and
folklore. (An early exception I’d draw to the reader’s attention is Hortense Pow-
dermaker’s classic Stranger and Friend [1967], which lays out the similarities and
differences of experience in four cultures in the author’s lifetime career). And there
were only very few chapter- or article-length extended discussions of fieldwork as
vi Foreword
a whole. Or maybe it wasn’t so strange, when we consider the small amount of
attention given to the actual activities of fieldwork in the vast majority of the
typical research studies, the ethnographic and musicological reports that make up
the core of our recorded knowledge—most notably in those published before 1980.
Many papers hardly tell us more than ‘‘this study is based on three months of
fieldwork in . . .’’ If we compare these reports with those in the hard sciences, where
everything—from number and grouping of subjects to precise times and detailed
procedures of all activities—must be accounted for, we may wonder why ethno-
musicologists, in describing their research, are so private about the fieldwork.
Here is one likely cause of this development: As most of the essays in this
volume demonstrate, our informants-consultants-teachers become part of our
family; or even more likely, we become part of theirs. I’m reminded of the joke
about the structure of the Native American family—two parents, two children, one
anthropologist. Talking about our fieldwork relationships would in some ways be
like talking about family relationships. Our consultants and teachers do often treat
us like wayward children (my elderly Persian music teacher scolding me: ‘‘Why do
you go around Tehran talking to other musicians when you know I am the real
authority?’’); or like uncles or aunts (a Blackfoot dancer informing me, a bit
condescendingly, ‘‘Things are very different from when you first came here’’); or
like siblings (we may help them with transportation or a bit of money; they often
get us out of embarrassing social pickles). The fieldworker may relate to them as if
they were parents, grandparents, lovers—the kinds of relationships that are diffi-
cult to write about, and especially to integrate into a scholarly, informative, and in
some ways ‘‘objective’’ account. How we felt about them, emotionally, and perhaps
how we think they saw us, may be virtually impossible to report on. As Helen
Myers wrote, ‘‘In fieldwork we unveil the human face of ethnomusicology,’’ and
‘‘Fieldwork is the most personal task required of the ethnomusicologist’’ (1992:21),
suggesting that in contrast to the kinds of disciplines in which one may study
manuscripts and texts, or statistically survey vast numbers of people through brief
questionnaires, ethnomusicological data gathering is essentially a human ex-
change, and the quality of the human relationship between fieldworker and con-
sultant, student and teacher, is at the heart of the endeavor.
But in contemplating the history of ethnomusicology from the perspective of
fieldwork (rather than, say, analysis or interpretive theory), I am astonished at the
large number of activities, as well as concepts, that fieldwork encompasses and thus
should properly be included in its discussion, and at their interrelationships. The
activity receiving the most attention in print has been the process of sound re-
cording: selecting and learning to use (and maybe to repair) equipment and de-
veloping recording techniques, a profession by itself in modern musical life, but
something ethnomusicologists had to absorb along with everything else. There are
the associated problems of recording verbal information, making and organizing
field notes (in the field, and later). But before all that should have come acquiring
Foreword vii
linguistic and cultural competence; finding or selecting informants, consultants,
and teachers, and dealing with the complex question of who is a proper spokes-
person for the culture being studied; apprehending the culture- and community-
specific methods needed for acquiring, as an ethnomusicologist, the three kinds of
information that Malinowski (1935) specified for social anthropology—texts
(maybe the songs and pieces); structures (the system of required behavior in
musical activity, and the system of ideas underlying music); and the most in-
triguing, because it tells how these structures are actually observed in life, the
‘‘imponderabilia of everyday life’’ (who talks to whom, what kinds of things mu-
sicians actually talk about, what’s the course of a lesson). Then come decisions:
What does one do if one’s consultants disagree? Is there unanimity? What is the
distribution of beliefs? What are the subjects of local debate?—I’m just at the
beginning of the list. Most important, the fieldworker needs to find a niche for
himself or herself in the host society, where one is inevitably an outsider, but, if
I can put it this way, an outsider of the insider sort.
There are so many things that are distinct about ethnomusicological field-
work, one wonders why it hasn’t received a lot more attention in the history of our
literature. The question is particularly remarkable because this is a field which has,
more than most, devoted a great deal of attention to its own methods and tech-
niques, developing, indeed, a tradition of self-examination and critique. We would
have expected some ‘‘how-to’’ books, textbooks for courses in field methods; works
that theorize the problems of the interpersonal relations involved; books about the
changing concept of ‘‘field’’; and detailed accounts of individual experience. But
most of our literature treats these matters at best as an essential step toward what
we are trying to find out and not as a central activity. And yet, let me not neglect to
mention some important surveys of fieldwork: Two massive chapters in Mantle
Hood’s The Ethnomusicologist (1982[1971]); two chapters in Helen Myers’s edited
compendium Ethnomusicology: An Introduction (1992); six short chapters in my
own Study of Ethnomusicology (2005); and Herndon and McLeod’s comprehensive
and thoughtful Field Manual for Ethnomusicology (1983).
Shadows among the Landmarks
I have been complaining about the absence of literature about fieldwork in the last
hundred years of ethnomusicological writing. But there has all along been a thin
strand of such writing, and Shadows in the Field, while it is a unique contribution
that fills an important niche, should also take its place among a number of im-
portant landmarks that go back to our earliest literature. A few words about the
experience of collecting do appear in some of our earliest classics. Carl Stumpf
(1886) gives us a fairly detailed (if sometimes curiously ethnocentric) account of his
brief relationship with a member of the Bellakula, and his eliciting and transcribing
sessions. Walter Fewkes (1890), writing about the earliest recording work, tells
viii Foreword
something of what it was like. But it is somewhat baffling to read the many
pioneering studies of George Herzog or the first book to attempt a comprehensive
account of a small musical culture, by Alan Merriam (1967), and to find very little
about the way this information was acquired. Later on, I must quickly add,
Merriam produced two articles that qualify as classics in fieldwork literature—the
unprecedentedly detailed account of the making of a drum among the Bala of
Congo (1969) and the story of his revisit to the Basongye after fourteen years of
absence, where it turned out that his earlier visit had come to be seen by his hosts as
a defining moment in their music history (1977b).
And to be sure, beginning in the late 1970s and snowballing by the 1990s,
authors of book-length ethnographies made the fieldwork process increasingly part
of the discourse. Among the classics here are Paul Berliner’s The Soul of Mbira
(1993[1978]) and his descriptions of his interviews and lessons with prominent jazz
artists in Thinking in Jazz (1994); and Steven Feld’s work on the Kaluli in Sound and
Sentiment (1990), with the intriguing attempt to have the result of his work
critiqued by his teachers in a process he called ‘‘dialogic editing’’ (1987). Among the
works I consider recent classics in their explanation and description of fieldwork,
I wish to mention Anthony Seeger’sWhy Suya Sing (1987b); Helen Myers’sMusic of
Hindu Trinidad (1998); and Donna Buchanan’s Performing Democracy (2005),
which extends the subject to an urban society. These are outstanding examples,
but there are now dozens of others, and they show that we have come a long way
in understanding how much the process of fieldwork affects the final outcome
and how important it is for the reader to get a sense of the relationships the
author developed in the field. Everything that comes later—analysis, interpreta-
tion, theory—depends on what happened in the ‘‘field.’’
Aside from its primacy as a comprehensive book on fieldwork, Shadows in the
Field, in its first edition, and even more, a decade later, in its second, concentrates
on telling us how fieldwork affected the fieldworkers themselves. When first
published, it was immediately seen as a book of great importance, and unsur-
prisingly it began quickly to be used as a text or required reading in seminars of
students heading for the field. Many of its individual articles have been widely cited
and it has become a mainstay of the central literature of the field. This second,
expanded edition adds a new level of comprehensiveness. Preferring, in most
instances, comprehensive works by individuals giving a personal synthesis in a
unified perspective, I am persuaded in the work at hand that the diversity of
fieldwork—the many kinds of attitudes and activities, the variety of host cultures
and communities, and of relationships between fieldworker and teacher—could
not be adequately represented by one author. We have here a plethora of pre-
sentations, most by well-established American, European, and Asian scholars with
records of distinguished publications (among them, incidentally, six former or
current presidents of the Society for Ethnomusicology), but also including, in the
spirit of the first edition, voices of junior scholars. The authors have worked on all
Foreword ix
continents and in villages and cities, telling us what it was like, what they tried to
do, how they solved (or didn’t solve) their central problems, how they related to
their teachers, but also—and this strikes me as most significant—how the field
experience changed them and their ideas, and how they as visitors changed their
hosts.
Introduction 3
2. Knowing Fieldwork 25
3. Toward a Mediation of Field Methods and Field Experience
in Ethnomusicology 42
Ethnomusicology at the Juncture of Cultural Studies and Folklore 62
Harris M. Berger
and Back Again 76
Timothy J. Cooley, Katharine Meizel, and Nasir Syed
7. Fieldwork at Home: European and Asian Perspectives 108
Jonathan P. J. Stock and Chou Chiener
8. Working with the Masters 125
James Kippen
and the Transmission of Tradition 141
Kay Kaufman Shelemay
Research Project Twenty Years Later 157
Judah M. Cohen
11. What’s the Difference? Reflections on Gender and Research
in Village India 167
Michelle Kisliuk
13. Confronting the Field(note) In and Out of the Field:
Music, Voices, Texts, and Experiences in Dialogue 206
Gregory F. Barz
Examples from Arctic and Subarctic Fieldwork 224
Nicole Beaudry
Philip V. Bohlman
16. Theories Forged in the Crucible of Action: The Joys, Dangers,
and Potentials of Advocacy and Fieldwork 271
Anthony Seeger
References 289
Index 313
xii Contents
Contributors
Carol M. Babiracki is associate professor of ethnomusicology in the Fine Arts
Department of Syracuse University. Before joining Syracuse, she taught on the
faculties of Brown and Harvard Universities. She holds a PhD in ethnomusicology
from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has spent many years in
India researching classical and folk music and dance, with a focus on folk and tribal
music and dance in the state of Jharkhand over the past twenty-five years. Her
research interests there include ethnicity, identity, gender, politics and cultural
policy, oral epics, repertory studies, and flute performance. She is the recipient of
Syracuse University’s Meredith Teaching Recognition Award, and her publications
have appeared in the journals Ethnomusicology and Asian Music and in the books
Women’s Voices Across Musical Worlds, Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives on
Field Research in Ethnomusicology, Comparative Musicology and the Anthropology of
Music, Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History, and The Western Impact on
World Music.
Gregory F. Barz has engaged in field research in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania,
Rwanda, and South Africa for the past fifteen years. He received the PhD from
Brown University and the MA from the University of Chicago. He is currently
associate professor of ethnomusicology and anthropology at the Blair School of
Music at Vanderbilt University. He is also the general editor of the African Sound-
scapes book series and served as African music editor for the New Grove Dictionary
of Music and Musicians and as recording review editor for the journal World of
Music. His latest book is titled Singing for Life: HIV/AIDS and Music in Uganda
(2006). His book Music in East Africa: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture was
also published by Oxford University Press, and he has published an ethnography of
East African choral communities, Performing Religion: Negotiating Past and Pres-
ent in Kwaya Music of Tanzania. He is currently engaging collaborative medical
research regarding music and HIV/AIDS in Uganda, continuing his ongoing
fieldwork as a Senior Fulbright Research Fellow in the African AIDS Research
Program. His CD Singing For Life: Songs of Hope, Healing, and HIV/AIDS in
Uganda was produced by Smithsonian FolkwaysHis topic for today’s talk is
"Singing for Life: Music, Medicine, and HIV/AIDS in East Africa" and draws on
materials from his recently released CD with Smithsonian. He recently served as
producer for the God in Music City CD produced in Nashville.
Nicole Beaudry teaches ethnomusicology at the Universite du Quebec a Mon-
treal. She specializes in the musical traditions of North America’s northern native
cultures and is particularly interested in issues of performance and the relation
among music, belief systems, and social behavior. She is currently working on the
musical traditions of the Dene Indians in Canada’s Northwest Territories.
Harris M. Berger is a scholar working at the intersection of ethnomusicology,
folklore studies, popular music studies, and performance studies. An associate
professor of music and associate head in the Department of…