Confronting the Field(Note) In and Out of the Field: Music, Voices, Texts, and Experiences in Dialogue

Abstract

Abstract Field research is performed. The performance of field research is one of the most meaningful processes engaged by ethnomusicologists to define themselves. And writing about field research—ethnography, field diaries, fieldnotes-is often part of the process of re-performing field research. In this period of post-postmodernism the social sciences can no longer claim that the fieldworker escapes significant participation in the total cultural performance of field research. Performance is, after all, according to Johannes Fabian, “not what they do and we observe; we are both engaged in it” (1990:xv, emphasis added). In recent literature on field research and representation, ethnographers assign greater importance to writing in the field; experiences are transformed into texts, and fieldworkers, informants, friends, and teachers emerge as actors in a social drama.1 Reflections on ethnographic writing often neglect texts produced while still in the field-fieldnotes. Fieldnotes are for many ethnomusicologists an essential aspect of knowing; they are not only critical in determining what we know, but also illustrative of the process of how we come to know what we know. In this chapter I suggest that fieldnotes are part of the process that informs both interpretation and representation, understanding and analysis of experience—in and out of the field.