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4 Is Fieldwork Still Necessary?
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
T his chapter examines the nature of fieldwork, both fieldwork as defined by ethnomusicology, which uses it as a major method of data collection, and fieldwork as a more general everyday process of coming to terms with difference. I use here some of my own fieldwork and life experiences as illustrations, trying my best to communicate the essence of the process through these words, understanding that all words are mere shadows of experience. My immediate reason for writing this chapter is my concern over two trends I have seen in recent postmodern scholarship in ethnomusicology, one questioning fieldwork as a primary method of data collection and the other responding to changing notions of the field itself. My concern focuses on what I see as a moving away from real people in on-the-ground social and musical contexts where real differences are confronted and negotiated in a face-to-face reality. It is often difficult to confront difference and I’m not suggesting here that I have answers. In fact, as you will readily see in my examples, my own struggles to deal with social and musical differences did not always end satisfactorily . It has always been easy for me to profess a tolerance for difference , but actually being tolerant, especially of my own intolerance, is far more difficult, especially in the on-the-ground reality of the fieldwork process, where one is face to face with differences of all kinds. Earlier in my life as an ethnomusicologist, I worked with Lubavitcher Hasidim, mainly in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, using participant observation 101 Is Fieldwork Still Necessary? ellen koskoff FOUR as my main method of collecting data. I went to live for periods of time in Crown Heights, went to schule and to the kosher eateries with my “community,” slept in their houses, watched them cook, pray, and do music. In ethnomusicology, fieldwork at that time was defined as “the observational and experiential portion of the ethnographic process,” in which we sought musical meaning in different contexts (Barz and Cooley 1997, 4). In retrospect, I see that a certain amount of exoticism permeated this practice. After all, I had chosen the “field site” assuming difference—I was not like Lubavitchers, or so I thought. My job was to document this difference , process it, put it into understandable categories, and bring it back, so to speak, to an academic audience in a recognizable form. In short, my job was to reify difference, spin it through ethnographic theory, and perform it for a (mostly) friendly family. In the mid-1970s we did not have a good handle on how to understand the fieldwork process itself as implicated in larger power dynamics . This was uncovered later, in the 1980s and 1990s, during the so-called “crisis of representation,” which is well documented elsewhere. (See, for example, in Timothy Cooley’s introduction to his and Gregory Barz’s book, Shadows in the field: New perspectives for fieldwork in ethnomusicology , 1997.) One of the most powerful ideas to emerge from this self-conscious moment was the notion that fieldwork, like most human interactions, was a power-laden process in which subtle codes and cues that signalled various social structures and positions of status, deference, and opposition were continuously performed by socially situated actors. As early as the midtwentieth century, sociologists, such as Herbert Blumer (1969), who coined the term symbolic interactionism, and Erving Goffman (1959; 1967), among others who refined this theory, were examining how “in time,” largely symbolic human interactions could be analyzed to uncover social structures in ritual, drama, and even in everyday life. Later scholars, such as Richard Bauman (1986), Edward L. Schieffelin (1998), and Judith Butler (1990), among others, developed some of these ideas into a theory of performativity, the “expressive processes of strategic impression management and structured improvisation through which human beings normally articulate their purposes, situations and relationships of everyday social life” (Schieffelin 1998, 195). Further, writes Schieffelin (1998, 205), “performativity is not only endemic to human being-in-the-world but fundamental to the process of constructing a human reality.” A certain anxiety set in: What was the point of writing 102 Ellen Koskoff [44.215.110.142] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:31 GMT) ethnographies if reality was socially constructed and performed into being by constantly changing selves and others? Who, exactly, was participating in the field experience? Was any of this “true”? Perhaps it was time, hinted major scholars, such as James Clifford and George Marcus...