Work in the Field: Public Ethnomusicology and Collaborative Professionalism

We’re used to you people coming here and doing your projects, but then you leave, and leave nothing behind. When do we get something out of this? What the fuck, man?

—Gung Alit, July 17, 2012¹

In early 2009, several months into ethnographic research on the development of an independent music industry in post-bomb Bali, I attended a book launch by a communication studies scholar with whom I share an interest in Bali’s youth cultures.² The launch was held within the walls of a family compound in southeast Denpasar at the headquarters of Taman 65, a grassroots community organization founded by the surviving family members of individuals murdered during Indonesia’s 1965–66 massacres.³ As I entered the modest, open-air clearing forming the heart of the compound, I was intrigued by the author’s choice of setting. I expected a book launch for a scholarly text—customarily targeting an audience of scholars—to be held in a setting like a local university and attended by academic peers. Instead I encountered a mostly Balinese audience, including several of the author’s research consultants for her dissertation and book.

I scanned this archetypal Balinese compound, in which the proceedings of daily life continued at the periphery, irrespective of the gathering happening in the center. I observed a grandmother grinding spices on a stone mortar in the outdoor kitchen, chickens pecking in the yard, a naked toddler bouncing on an older sibling’s knee, and a mother laying a Hindu offering of rice, flowers, and incense at the entryway. The center clearing, however, was transformed into a space for scholarly debate, unfolding in rousing oratories, thoughtful counterpoints, and moments of approving acknowledgment for the honored author’s achievement.

During the feedback portion of the event, when the moderator solicited questions and comments from the audience, a public dispute arose. Several people criticized the author’s representational medium on several counts but particularly for its inaccessibility: the book was published in English, a language that only a handful in attendance could confidently read; and it employed analytical prose common to the social sciences but frustratingly convoluted to the majority of individuals upon whom the book was based. Although the author provided free photocopies of her book to research consultants, several admitted they had not yet read it. They were not uninterested in the subject matter, however; rather, they could not understand the foreign register of this Western scholarship. The audience reached a general consensus that if the book had been written about them, why was it not written for them?

Observing these proceedings, I was astonished by the unequivocal criticism of this carefully researched and theoretically grounded scholarly text. Of course, the concerns about research value and accessibility were also common themes within the publications, graduate seminars, and professional conferences that guided my own research questions and methods. But I was suddenly alarmed that, as an ethnomusicologist pursuing a PhD and planning a career in the university environment, I would also be expected to produce a similar textual representation for a scholarly audience that would likely have little or no value to the people who formed the focus of my research. I was also humbled by the masterful articulation of analytical critique I previously assumed fell within the exclusive domain of academic scholarship. By entering the “field” of scholarly debate, former “subjects” breached the divide between researchers and researched and asserted themselves as “co-theorizers” (Rappaport 2008). These intellectual coequals brought into sharp focus the fact that my university degrees or professional achievements did not permit me a corner on the market of theoretical debate.

That evening, my understanding of my social and professional positioning was sent into a tailspin: I was no longer sure who I was in this so-called fieldwork setting or how I was to proceed with my self-serving intellectual goals. Were we, the countless scholars who passed months and years pilfering social knowledge in Bali, doing nothing more than hoarding that knowledge for the benefit of our own scholarly communities, behind the...