Timothy J. Cooley

Theorizing fieldwork impact: Malinowski, peasant‐love and friendship

In this introductory essay I toggle between my own fieldwork experiences and the historical legacies that I encounter in the field, especially that of Malinowski, who in his youth was a frequent visitor to the Polish mountain region that I study nearly a century later. I propose that Malinowski was influenced by a Slavic “peasant‐love” model of ethnography that shares much with the more current “friendship” model. Though I believe friendship model field‐work is unsurpassed, its relationship to peasant‐love fieldwork causes me to wonder if it too is motivated by ideologies that will be judged harshly by our intellectual descendants.

Folk music in Eastern Europe

This chapter investigates the complex interplay between music, history, and the sacred, by examining broad historical constructions of religion and music in South Asia. In the most recent past, nationalism and communalism have been the agents that justify particular histories of religious music. These are the same histories that tend to stabilize Hindu practices into Hinduism and that oversimplify or ignore much of the creative ideological borrowing that has taken place between Hinduism, its relatives and South Asian Islamic and Christian practices. The chapter explores the performance of sacred music which also addresses ideas about history in addition to repertories and genres being drawn into histories. It examines the relationship of sacred music in South Asian history, and history in South Asian sacred music and reveals how this relationship has been mobilized by large-scale narratives and how musical performance provides opportunities to revise the narratives.

AUDITORY SNAPSHOTS FROM THE EDGES OF EUROPE

This article presents thirty ‘auditory snapshots’ from a wide variety of geographical locations and contexts in order to elaborate several points. First, we believe that the study of history cannot be separated from the study of sound, whether in the form of ‘soundscapes’ or pieces of music. Second, we find that considerations of edges, into which we fold such things as provinces, peripheries and frontiers, can be greatly enriched by looking at a broad range of musical phenomena, from the liturgy of Ugandan Jews to reggae-infused Polish mountain songs and from the sounds of Mozarts Black contemporary Saint-Georges to Silent Night on the Southern Seas. Finally, drawing on certain ideas from James C. Scotts The Art of Not Being Governed , we argue that paradoxically, in music, the middle often has unusual properties. In other words, musical structure mimics the ongoing battle between those in positions of authority and those who wish to evade that authority. Beginnings and endings, then, tend to be sites of power and convention, while middles attempt to subvert it. While culturally and geographically we may contrast centres and peripheries, in music the centre is often the edge.