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9 “Well, That’s Why We Won’t Take You, Okay?” Women, Representation, and the Myth of the Unitary Self Having finally had my fill of the generalities of cross-cultural surveys, I jumped to the opposite pole of abstraction here, examining one small portion of a longer conversation with one of my Lubavitcher informants, Miriam Rosenblum, whom you met in chapter 6, “Miriam Sings Her Song.” I hope here to deconstruct our dialogue and uncover, as Bonnie Morris writes, “conflicting approaches to the subject of [Jewish] womanhood” (1995, 161). This article also marked a turning point in my thinking about gender and music more generally. First, it signaled the end of my attempts to find viable answers to questions of unequal power relations in cross-cultural comparisons . Second, I began with this article to more fully understand the usefulness of deconstructing language to uncover the rhetorical interactions and negotiations between multiple voices in real-time conversation. Here, I was greatly influenced by the earlier work of anthropological linguists and performance studies scholars Dell Hymes (1974), Edward L. Schieffelin (1985), and Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs (1990). Most important, however, I began here to work out what I saw as the deep significance of fieldwork and to more fully distinguish data-gathering, analytic , and interpretive methods of ethnomusicology from those of historical and critical musicology. These issues are framed here by some of the ethical implications of these different disciplinary methods and their scholarly lineages. (This issue is explored further in chapter 12.) I decided to write the article in somewhat of an experimental form, as a sort of play, or conversation between the multiple voices of the many Ellens and Miriams who emerge as the conversation goes on. These different versions of my selves (and my others) seemed to uncover the less visible assumptions 134 part ii: 1990–2000 and agendas that drove the conversation, as I played with the notion that there are not only many different kinds of women, but also many different performative versions of one single woman. This article was written in the mid-1990s, but not published until now. * * * This article examines some of the ethical issues inherent in ethnographic and historical research on music and its social context. Speaking through the filter or lens of a feminist analysis, I assert that the fieldwork process, that quintessential method of data collection that most distinguishes ethnomusicologists from historical musicologists, creates tensions for the ethnographer that are different in kind from those of the historian, tensions that must be resolved on an ongoing basis within real-life contexts and cannot be neatly modeled using a feminist epistemology, as it is now defined. Ethnomusicologists, whose subjects are living people with whom they form real relationships, differ from historical musicologists, whose subjects, no matter how vital they may appear from their works, are historical, and therefore unable to counter contemporary interpretations of their lives. Feminist analysis, essentially drawn from a Western political ideology, does not always work outside that context, and indeed the feminist ethnographer may find her- or himself quite at odds with an informant who argues back. To illustrate these issues, I draw examples from my own fieldwork, analyzing the tensions that can result from competing agendas in the field. The first half of the title of this paper comes from an actual statement made by Miriam Rosenblum, a Lubavitcher Hasid, mother of six, teacher, and the wife of Rabbi Ephraim Rosenblum, a prominent Lubavitcher musician with whom I worked over many years. It was made a few days after a conversation between Miriam and me, when I first learned about the intricacies of the Orthodox Jewish position concerning men hearing women’s voices, the socalled dictum of kol isha, about which I have written extensively elsewhere (Koskoff 2001). I present the scene between us below, but first I would like to situate it within the context of recent trends in postmodern scholarship that have dealt with two interrelated issues of great importance to the study of music in its social context: the twin issues of representation and the myth of the unified self-other. To do so, I take a short journey backward into the history of the culture concept to show how culture has come to mean very different things in its modern usage within cultural studies and cultural anthropology. Actually, the subject of this article was motivated by a series of mostly e-mail conversations between historical musicologist Suzanne Cusick and me...

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