Arrival
I have arrived in the “field.” It’s a little town in the northern Plains of the United States, on the surface hardly different from many other crossroads I’ve just driven through. When I stop at a filling station, a bit of a chill crawls up my neck: The attendant is a Native American, one of the people with whom I now wish to spend some months, whose music and musical culture I wish to study and describe. He is an old man with a tattered shirt, speaking English with a tiny bit of an accent. I’ve arrived, I would like to say to him, I’m here because I want to learn what you know, because you have something to offer that is different from all I’ve learned before, because you live and think dif-ferently. This is a great moment for me: I have finally made it to the “field,”
and fate somehow selected you to be the one to introduce me. I am wonder-ing how to put these thoughts into more informal words, can’t quite get up the nerve, and he just says, “Three dollars, please; don’t look like you need any oil,” and starts attending to another customer. I drive on into the tiny town, park at a sandwich shop. Several people sitting at the counter, white, Indian, maybe some others, some in between? The server looks Native but gives me my hamburger like any midwestern waitress. All these people—there must be one with whom I could strike up a conversation! But if this is a great occasion for me, my coming into that restaurant means nothing to them.
I turn to my neighbor, a man dressed like a road worker. “Nice day,” he says.
“Goin’ to the mountains?” I clear my throat, getting ready my prepared speech about wanting to learn about Native American music, but before my thoughts
collect sufficiently he has gone. I pay my check, begin a walk through the dreary streets. Stop in a store or two, in a bar, at a bench where several old men are passing the time of day. Long ago I had determined that this would some day be my town, and now I’m surrounded by “my” people, but they don’t know it, and I don’t know how to begin. Each time I reach a point at which I think I have found someone who will listen, to whom I can somehow make known my lofty wishes, needs, desires, I’m defeated, and I begin to fear that I’ll never have the courage to reveal myself. When I do, they will laugh at me, probably a city dweller who should know better than lowering himself to learn something so useless as old Indian songs, or maybe a white man who aspires to study things an Indian had to spend a lifetime learning, surely one of the exploiters, or possibly someone who could provide badly needed help if only he weren’t involved with a frivolous subject like music. I begin to fear that I’ll end up a hermit in this town, never meeting anyone with whom I can talk.
Fear and anxiety. Several hours have passed, and I have made no progress. I’m on the verge of turning around, giving up on these people. I have come to them, my “field,” ready to give them energy and heart; they see me as just another white tourist, or perhaps they don’t see me at all.
Where does one go in a strange town, lonely and despondent? The pub-lic library? A bar? I enter a barbershop; one can always use a haircut. The bar-ber is Native. “Just passing through?” he asks, and I blurt out, no, I would stay the summer. “Here?” he says, astonished. “Nobody spends a summer here if he don’t have to.” I’m doing research, I tell him self-consciously. “Re-search? Are you one of them anthropologists?” A bit of distaste evident in his voice. Well, not really, but I’m interested in learning about Indian songs.
“Oh, you ought to talk to one of them singers. There’s one lives just two houses away, usually sits on the stoop. Joe F., an old timer, knows a lot about the old days.” Heart skips a beat: my chance, has it come after all? I pay, tip heavily, walk down the street. Just as the barber said: a ramshackle hut, prob-ably just one room, old man sitting in front staring into space. I greet. “Got any cigarettes?” came the answer. I didn’t. “Got a dollar so I can buy some?”
Sure. “I hear you know a lot of the old songs of your people.” “Naw, I don’t know nothing. My brother, he knows a lot, lives fifty miles away, he’ll be com-ing to see me in a week or some time.” “Sure, I’d like to meet him. But I was told you know more than anybody else in this town.” “You want me to sing some songs on your tape recorder?” He seemed to know something about ethnomusicologists. “That’s Indian work; I’ll have to charge you a lot.” I have some money, not much. “Well, you’ve got a car,” he says. “Come back and see me next Tuesday, and bring your machine.” He took a swig from a bot-tle of cheap bourbon. Dismissed.
Through this one conversation I felt that I had made my entry, had sud-denly become a fieldworker, graduating from my first role as tourist pass-ing through town. By the next Tuesday I had actually met several men whom I could ask to work with me. Some were willing on the spot, others made it clear they wished to have nothing to do with me, most of them temporized and postponed. I told them that I had met Joe F., who had promised to help me, and some were impressed by that.
Tuesday I presented myself at Joe’s little house. “I have to go to G. [a town forty miles east],” he said. Fortunately I knew my proper place in this rela-tionship, and so I spent that day taking Joe in my car, with four other mem-bers of his family, all of whom treated me rather like a chauffeur to whom one gave directions but otherwise didn’t speak, attending to various bits of personal business. At the end I asked about recording some songs. “I don’t have time today, but come back in a few days,” I was told.
To make this long story from the 1960s short, it was another week before Joe consented to be interviewed more or less formally and to sing a few songs, in a weak voice, with a poor memory, for my recorder. I learned less clumsy tech-niques, and after a few weeks Joe had become a friend with whom one could converse easily about many things. I joined his family on picnics, moved from outsider to observer to something approaching participant-observer. Why had he made me wait, come back twice? Some of my consultants didn’t but were ready at once, said they had time, which Joe in fact also had but wouldn’t admit. Was it to teach me some respect for his way of doing things, to tell me that I couldn’t just rush in, or to test whether I had more than a casual inter-est? I have since heard variants of “come back and see me next Tuesday” in other countries. Getting started in the field is actually a time of stress, the mo-ment of entry sometimes one of great tension, self-searching, requiring cour-age, patience, wit. A number of ethnomusicologists have described or com-mented on their more recent experiences in a volume edited by Barz and Cooley (1997), showing that the same problems may still be around—plus some others. This chapter presents some thoughts on the general nature of ethnomusicological fieldwork.
A Very Private Matter
Others in my situation, of course, would have handled the matter more efficiently and given absolutely different explanations, reactions, feelings from those I’ve just described. In contemplating the concept of fieldwork, the first question to which we should attend asks whether there is, or should be, a
unified field methodology, or whether each scholar develops an individual ap-proach. Ethnomusicological literature, throughout its history, has had a good bit to say about fieldwork as part of research design, ways of dealing with recording and filming machinery and video, general principles of intercultural relations. But it had much less to say—at least until the period after around 1990—about the day-to-day personal relationships that are the heart of this kind of research. All subsequent analysis and interpretation of data depends so heavily on fieldwork, but it is also the most personal part of the job, the part that cannot really be taught, that all of us have had to learn on our own, find-ing ways of mediatfind-ing between our own personalities with their strengths and weaknesses and the individuals whose shared beliefs we will learn and inter-pret, using confidence and mastering timidity. In considering fieldwork, Helen Myers (1992: 21) wrote: “We unveil the human face of ethnomusicology.” Since fieldwork principally involves interaction with other humans, it is the most personal side of the profession, a very private matter, and only with difficulty do we let others in on what we said and heard, and how we felt.
The professions of anthropology and folklore are the principal mentors of the ethnomusicological fieldworker. They claim fieldwork as theirs par excellence, though they, too, like ethnomusicologists, until recently, have rarely told in detail what happened in the field. In the earlier parts of the twentieth century, one did not often find straightforward accounts of daily life and feel-ings in an exotic environment, such as the posthumously published diary of Malinowski (1967), a scholar often cited for his prowess as a fieldworker. Very occasionally were transcriptions of interviews or field notes provided (Mer-riam 1969a; Slotkin 1952). But like the foregoing little parable on my experi-ence, most publications dealing with fieldwork focus on the role of the con-sultant and culture-bearer, the person through whom the ethnographer learns a culture, and whose moods, empathy, attitude toward a visitor, idiosyncratic ideas, genius for discovering the instructive, and interest in looking at life in a structured fashion all determined the quality of understanding that ensued.
An anthropologist may begin by seeing informants as faceless representatives of a homogeneous mass, but that fallacy quickly becomes apparent and—as illustrated already a half-century ago by the many warm and emotional es-says in Casagrande’s (1960) collection of portraits of “favorite” informants by outstanding scholars—special kinds of human relationship develop. A major change in attitude was exhibited in the development of the so-called new ethnography of the 1960s (see, e.g., Tyler 1969) explicitly displaying the contrast between insider and outsider views, to be elaborated in chapter 11.
It is in the importance of fieldwork that anthropology and
ethnomusi-cology are closest: It is the “hallmark” of both fields, something like a union card. Members of both professions are expected to have some fieldwork under their belts. Early on, theoretical statements on the strengths and limitations of fieldwork were made, though usually buried in ethnographies. Thus Ma-linowski (1935: 317) gave general impressions and advice: The anthropologist must not only observe but constantly interpret, structure, relating isolated bits of data to each other; be highly self-critical, realizing that many ap-proaches inevitably lead to false conclusions and dead ends; and be ready to start over. He found that byproducts of his main work often provided the most valuable insights and suggested that one subordinate but also impose one’s self on the “field.” Malinowski insisted that the culture concept plays a major role in the nature of the fieldwork, which “consists only and exclusively in the interpretation of the chaotic social reality, in subordinating it to gen-eral rule” (1954: 238).
Much earlier, Malinowski (1935) recommended three kinds of data to be gathered. I’ll paraphrase: (1) texts—he meant things like tales, myths, proverbs in nonliterate cultures, and presumably all kinds of writings elsewhere, but for us this importantly includes songs and pieces of music; (2) structures, by which he meant things people say that permit the fieldworker to abstract prin-ciples of behavior, such as rules about social organization, property, power-relations, and that for us might include rules and contexts for performances, such as the structure of concerts; and (3) the “imponderabilia of everyday life.” It is in the third that the genius of anthropological perspectives comes into play, as it includes noticing what might not be noted by just any ob-server—who speaks with whom in a society, what body language is used in various relationships, the many details that people everywhere take for granted but that are essential to acceptable behavior, the quality of their dis-course. Malinowski’s may be as good a statement of the general nature of fieldwork as has been developed, and it shows that while in its interpretive as-pects, and in its technology, anthropology has changed enormously through the twentieth century, there are important respects in which it has remained constant.
Within this standard, though, the variety of field techniques and methods in cultural anthropology is immense, comprising everything from bio-graphical approaches to parallel interviews on the same subject with many informants, the collection of texts, questionnaires, outright participation, teamwork, and much more. Interdisciplinary teamwork, from conventional associations (e.g., teams of social, linguistic, and archeological anthropolo-gists) extending to the imaginative description of an African society from
the perspective of an anthropologist and a novelist (Gottlieb and Graham 1993) has been significant, but the personal nature of fieldwork that I have been emphasizing has prevented anthropology from becoming team-centered as have many of the “hard” sciences. If there is an overriding issue characterizing anthropological fieldwork through its history, it may be the interface between data gathering in a scientific, replicable way and the sig-nificance of the personal relationships developed in the field (see, e.g., Turner and Bruner 1986). The concept of restudy, to assess change but also to test replicability (see Mead 1928 and Freeman 1983; Redfield 1930 and Lewis 1951), has some fascinating insights. But in general, interpretation and the recog-nition that the stance of the observer is of paramount significance charac-terizes anthropology at the end of the twentieth century.
A body of theoretical and instructional writing about fieldwork has emerged in anthropology, but major works from such classics as Harris’s his-tory of the field (1968) and Ingold’s (1994) encyclopedic treatment eschew the coverage of fieldwork as a specific subject and activity. An extended essay by Morris Freilich (1970) illustrates attempts to circumscribe the field. He divides fieldwork activities into fourteen areas, beginning with such mundane things as preparing a research proposal and finding funds, but concentrating on problems faced in the field. Informants see their culture in a special way, play particular roles in their societies, and have peculiar views of their roles in the quests of fieldworkers. Freilich divides them into three groups—traditional-ist, operator, and speculator—and subdivides them further, in accordance with the ways in which they are willing to tackle problems of their culture as expressed in the fieldworker’s questions (1970: 572–73). He classifies kinds of information that may be gathered—public, confidential, secret, and private (549)—weighs social and economic risks faced by both partners, and so pro-poses a formal theory of fieldwork.
Freilich’s approach can be a valuable guide to the prospective fieldworker, and it can give the nonanthropologist a sense of the complexity of relation-ships that are involved. Most textbooks and guides do not so much tell you what to do as provide case studies as examples (see, e.g., Freilich 1977; Georges and Jones 1980; Wax 1971). Hortense Powdermaker (1967), in one of the first books devoted specifically to the nature of fieldwork, suggested such funda-mental steps as making a census, providing a sketch of the society to be stud-ied before proceeding to more specialized tasks, ascertaining matters of tabu and etiquette. That all this can be a difficult, frustrating, slow process is ob-vious; but realistic accounts of what was actually done in a particular situa-tion have finally become significant in anthropological literature (see, e.g.,
Dumont 1978; Farrer 1991; Foster and Kemper 1974; Spindler 1970; and the hu-morous but realistic Barley 1983).
Fieldwork in the History of Ethnomusicology
In ethnomusicology, by contrast, fieldwork as a theoretical concept does not often appear as a subject to be discussed out of a broader context of research design. Ethnomusicologists and folklorists seem to need more practical in-formation than anthropologists about techniques of recording, filming, video-taping, special problems of text-gathering. Thus, the earlier publications that concern fieldwork involve mainly the practicalities. Karpeles (1958) provided an early attempt at suggesting standardization of techniques. Goldstein (1964) gave a detailed volume of advice, and there are many guides to making record-ings, among the most thorough and thoughtful being Hood’s book The Ethno-musicologist (1971). In all of this literature the stress is on techniques suited to a particular situation. Occasionally there are also suggestions of generally ap-plicable procedures. Hood’s book and Herndon and McLeod’s text (1980) are exceptions, each devoting two insightful chapters to the problem, discussing concepts as well as giving specific advice. Hood, despite his attention to other matters and interesting accounts of personal experience, does seem to be mainly concerned with the gathering of recorded material. A chapter in Myers (1992: 50–87) provides a comprehensive account of recording and other data-gathering procedures.
Before about 1950, fieldwork and “research” were often separated. Ethno-musicologists such as Hornbostel were obliged to work with the results of the field research of others, and the voluminous correspondence of George Herzog with dozens of anthropologists gave them advice on making record-ings that, he assumed, would be turned over to ethnomusicologists for tran-scription and analysis. Hence the earlier emphasis on techniques over the-ory. Fieldwork and desk work could be seen as separable processes. In the second half of the twentieth century it became more or less axiomatic that researchers do their own fieldwork, and Merriam (1964), reflecting the view that separation is not really thinkable, discussed it as an aspect of research design and general theory. In this book he does not tell specifically what to do in the field and, for that matter, like most authors, avoids giving in de-tail what he himself did. In later works (1969a, 1977b) he comes closer to giv-ing such an account; indeed, self-revelation may be becomgiv-ing a trend, as indicated by the appearance of musical ethnographies with great attention
to the activities and experiences of the fieldworker (e.g., Berliner 1978, 1994;
Keil 1979; Myers 1998; Sugarman 1997; among many others). Also impor-tant in the last four decades is the growing concern with the ethical aspects of researchers’ interrelationships with their informants and teachers (see chapter 15; for critical appraisal of the issue, see Gourlay 1978; Slobin 1992a).
As the main interest of ethnomusicology is in total musical systems, the
As the main interest of ethnomusicology is in total musical systems, the