British Forum for Ethnomusicology

Preface
Author(s): Timothy J. Cooley
Source: British Journal of Ethnomusicology, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2003)
Published by: British Forum for Ethnomusicology
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30036865
Accessed: 06/01/2009 19:50
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=bfe.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the
scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that
promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
British Forum for Ethnomusicology is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
British Journal of Ethnomusicology.
http://www.jstor.org
Preface
The authors in this volume consider the proposal that ethnomusicologists
impact the world through the fieldwork process itself at least as much as they
do through the publication of ethnographies, films, recordings, etc. On the one
hand, this proposal appears anti-academic in that it de-emphasizes the act of
representation in scholarly publications. On the other hand, we suggest that
recognizing our roles as fieldworkers active in communities outside academia
is a claim for the broader relevance of ethnomusicology. The most prominent
direction towards which such calls for broader relevance have taken us is so-
called "applied", "public sector", "engaged", etc. ethnomusicology. And though
those practising applied ethnomusicology are actively theorizing their impact,
they rarely consider specifically the impact of fieldwork itself. If it is fieldwork
that takes us individually into the broader world - that puts us in contact with
the very people we propose to represent or interpret - are we not obligated to
try to understand fieldwork's impact on those among whom we do fieldwork?
Fieldwork is a defining method in ethnomusicology, but is it understood?
While scholars in fieldwork-based disciplines have been prolific in theorizing
the effects of ethnographic representation (see, for example, Fabian 1983;
Marcus and Fischer 1986; Brettell 1993), the impact of ethnographic fieldwork
on the people and communities studied is largely unexamined. Here we do not
wish to construct a false divide between fieldwork, ethnography and represen-
tation, and several authors do include representation in writing and published
recordings as an influence on their fieldwork (Bithell, Jones-Bamman, Plastino,
Rees). Our goal, however, is to gain a more balanced view of ethnomusicology
by recognizing the significant potential for influencing people and culture
through the interpersonal interactions we call fieldwork.
The idea for this special issue of the British Journal of Ethnomusicology
(BJE) originated at the annual conference of the British Forum for Ethno-
musicology held in Sheffield, England, in April 2000. Fieldwork was the theme
of the conference, and my friend Gregory Barz and I had been invited to take
part in the keynote panel. In my address I took a few steps towards theorizing
fieldwork impact and effectively initiated the call for papers that populate this
journal issue. Three of the articles (Bithell, Hellier-Tinoco, Rees) are expanded
versions of papers read at the Sheffield conference. When I proposed this
special issue to the BJE editorial board, they were anxious to ensure that not all
the articles should be positive accounts of individuals' heroic fieldwork
achievements. With this in mind, I posted a request on the Society for Ethno-
musicology's e-mail list for accounts of "failed fieldwork" that had produced
decidedly negative impact on those studied. This posting generated some
interest, and ultimately one of the articles in this volume, but no one seemed
eager to tell the world that they had negatively impacted their field consultants.
I still maintain that this is a flaw in this journal issue, and in the ethno-
musicological literature in general, even though I understand my colleagues'
(and my own) reticence to publish accounts of "failed fieldwork" (see, how-
ever, Kent 1992). Perhaps such stories are best told in hushed tones to select
trusted colleagues, or perhaps poetry provides the required licence (Maryniak-
Halstead in this volume). But this collection does not completely fail in this
regard; the authors of several articles openly express deep concerns about how
they are affecting those they study. After working on my own contribution and
editing the others I have come to the conclusion that it is phenomenally diffi-
cult to recognize and understand one's own fieldwork impact. All the more
reason to encourage dialogue on the topic, which is exactly what we hope this
issue of the BJE will accomplish.
The editors join the British Forum for Ethnomusicology in acknowledging
the generous support of the British Academy, which helped to enrich the 2000
BFE conference (University of Sheffield), and, by extension, this volume.
Timothy J. Cooley
References
Brettell, Caroline B. (1993) When they read what we write: the politics of
ethnography. Westport, Connecticut: Bergin and Garvey.
Fabian, Johannes (1983) Time and the other: how anthropology makes its
object. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kent, Linda L. (1992) "Fieldwork that failed." In Philip R. DeVita (ed.) The
naked anthropologist: tales from around the world, pp. 17-25. Belmont CA:
Wadsworth Publishing.
Marcus, George E., and Fischer, Michael M. J. (1986) Anthropology as cultural
critique: an experimental moment in the human sciences. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
Note from the Editors
Gerry Farrell 1951-2003
It is with great sadness that we report the untimely death, after a long illness, of
our friend and colleague, Gerry Farrell. He is perhaps best known for his book
Indian music and the West (Oxford University Press, 1997/1999), but readers of
this journal will have read his article "The Senia style of sitar playing in con-
temporary India" published in our most recent issue (11/2 2002). Gerry was a
senior lecturer at City University in London and was himself a fine sitar player.
He will be sorely missed both internationally and here at home by members of
the British Forum for Ethnomusicology and by the ethnomusicological commu-
nity as a whole.