Shadows in the Field - UNAM

1 Shadows in the Field Second Edition This page intentionally left blank Shadows in the Field New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology Second Edition Edited by Gregory Barz & Timothy J. Cooley 1. 2008. 1. Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With of ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright # 2008 by Oxford University Press Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

2 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shadows in the eld : new perspectives for eldwork in ethnomusicology /. edited by Gregory Barz & Timothy J. Cooley. 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-532495-2; 978-0-19-532496-9 (pbk.). 1. Ethnomusicology Fieldwork. I. Barz, Gregory F., 1960 II. Cooley, Timothy J., 1962 . 2008. dc22 2008023530. 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper bruno nettl Foreword Fieldworker's Progress Shadows in the Field , in its rst edition a varied collection of interesting, insightful essays about eldwork, has now been signi cantly expanded and revised, becoming the rst comprehensive book about eldwork in ethnomusicology.

3 Because eth- nomusicologists think of eldwork as the de ning activity of their endeavor, one may be surprised to nd, looking through our literature, not much that tells what it was really like to work in the eld,'' nor much about the methods employed in gathering data for any particular project in ethnomusicology. But one does get a sense that eldwork 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, eldwork 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 con guration, very, very roughly, went somewhat like this.

4 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 eldwork by participating in the music we were studying learning how to play and sing it rst 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 speci c questions. For example, in my research, I tried to gure out how the minds vi Foreword 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.

5 We came to realize that we should do eld 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 eld'' 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 signi cant 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 eldworker makes a lot of difference in the research enterprise. We learned that eldwork may include the gathering of ethnomusicological data from seemingly impersonal sources such as recordings and the Internet.

6 And we have devoted quite a bit of energy to criti- cizing our discipline, largely in terms of the approaches and methods in the eld. In its very comprehensiveness, this nutshell history of eldwork hides dramatic events that become de ning 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.

7 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 pre cis of eldwork history and autobiography, in tandem. What, now, more speci cally, about the history of the literature about eldwork? Considering the centrality of eldwork in the ethnomusicological enterprise, it's surprising that Shadows in the Field was really the rst book devoted completely to this entire complex and that there were few in the related disciplines of anthropology and folklore.

8 (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 eldwork as Foreword vii a whole. Or maybe it wasn't so strange, when we consider the small amount of attention given to the actual activities of eldwork 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 eldwork 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 eldwork.

9 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 eldwork 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 rst 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).

10 The eldworker may relate to them as if they were parents, grandparents, lovers the kinds of relationships that are dif - 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 eldwork 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 eldworker and con- sultant, student and teacher, is at the heart of the endeavor.