Shadows in the Field Second Edition This Page Intentionally Left Blank Shadows in the Field

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 offices 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 www.oup.com 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 field : new perspectives for fieldwork 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– ML3799.S5 2008 780.89—dc22 2008023530 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper bruno nettl Foreword 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 ethnomusicologists 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 vi Foreword of improvisers of Persian music worked, by making and collecting many recordings 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 communities. 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 prećis 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 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 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 ethnomusicologists, 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 recording: 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.

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