RESPONSE TO CHALLENGE QUESTION

Although fieldwork has been an enjoyable experience there have also been some challenges and problems that have come up. I always get a ride to sessions. Dance Sundays provide a whole different experience from a day without dancers. Doing fieldwork on dance Sundays and non-dance Sundays alike can be quite challenging but there seem to be marginal ramifications to what I am doing. There are a few things I would do differently; though on the whole I am content with the way my research has been progressing.

Getting a ride to sessions has an obvious positive: without the ride I would not be there at all. I don’t drive and there are no bus lines to Goff Hall. I usually get a ride with two or three other people. It’s about a half hour drive both ways, which means that there is a lot of time to chat. Sometimes what comes up in conversation is relevant to what I am doing. Usually, especially lately, it is dark outside leaving and coming back, so I can’t write anything down. Also, since I have interviewed most of the people in the car, I consider what is said as conversation among friends and not research material.

Dance Sundays are obvious research material—I plan on writing the performance ethnography paper about the November 23^rd dance—but there are challenges in doing fieldwork there. It’s an extremely small dance, and the potluck that occurs beforehand is a chance for people (the musicians and the dancers) to sit down and talk to each other. I am still a relative newcomer to this community so I generally sit quietly and listen to people, most of whom known each other for at least a decade, talk to each other. I have not asked “research questions” in this setting, although I think it would be fascinating to hear what people had to say about their contra dancing experiences and what makes a good dance. I almost never have a pocket notebook with me and have never brought a tape recorder, so I have no way to take down what anyone says until after the dance.

In fact, I have generally only taken “fieldnotes” after I have gotten back to my dorm room. For the first three weeks, I hadn’t talked about my project all that much, and so it would have felt very weird just pulling out a notebook and starting to write things down. There also isn’t time, in the structure of a session, to do any writing. Each person picks a tune or set of tunes, and calls out the page number and title. Then you have to find it in the book, which has gotten slightly out of order, especially after page 130 or so. If there’s a set of two tunes, you probably need to set up the pages so you can see both of them. After that tune or set has been played three or four times, it is the next person’s turn to pick. It last two hours, encompasses two dozen tunes, and affords very little writing time. At the end of the session, people linger to chat, eat, brownies and put away chairs and music stands. Rather than retire to a corner to scribble, I help out, talk, and eat. Writing this makes me realize that I could take notes if I really wanted to. Perhaps I am focusing more on the participant end of the participant-observation?

I have tried very hard to be a good participant because I would like to keep playing with group after this project is over, which is probably also part of the reason I refrain from taking notes during the rehearsal. Note-taking would probably not set me that far apart from the group. The interviews I have done have given me a very interesting perspective on how the project has been perceived. (Note: I have not transcribed all of the interviews yet, so I am writing entirely from memory.) At least two people told me they enjoyed the interview because it made them think about things they hadn’t thought about before. One person jokingly said, “We’ve never felt so important in our lives before!”

There are several things I would do differently if I were a “real ethnomusicologist.” One would be to conduct much more structured interviews. Although I had a list of ten questions, I tried to let people go in the direction they wished. This has lead to some lengthy recordings (I think the shortest is forty minutes long.) I am so grateful the Jammers were comfortable talking to me, but it means I have a lot of transcription left to do, and I will unfortunately use only a small portion of the fascinating and valuable things all of them said. I would also let everyone know about it a lot earlier, although I would probably still send out the initial request to work with group by email. If I were doing this project as a professional ethnomusicologist, I would probably be a lot more mindful of the observer side of participant-observation, and would find a way to write during sessions and dances and talk to people about the project during social time.