Collaborative Fieldwork, “Stance,” and Ethnography

Abstract

Engaged with a discipline built on music, participant-observation, and fieldwork, ethnomusicologists position the experience of music and culture as a lens for studying the social creation of meaning. Ethnomusicologists' methodologies (e.g., approaches to fieldwork, analysis, and ethnography) are collaborative social acts and defining elements of the discipline. Yet in the second edition ofShadows in the Field, a foundational reader on ethnomusicological field research, Bruno Nettl laments that “most of our literature treats these matters at best as an essential step toward whatwe are trying to find out and not as a central activity” (2008:viii). While increasing numbers of ethnomusicologists are engaging fieldwork and its theories as objects of inquiry, this area would benefit from still greater scholarly attention. In this article, we explore the methodological implications of collaborative fieldwork by analysing what happens when ethnomusicologists deliberately go into the field together.