The sound of home: Implications of living in the field Samantha Breslin, MA

Department of Anthropology, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. Johns, NL

Abstract This paper explores how conducting ethnographic research at home brings into question the notion of the field as a distinct place where fieldworkers go to undertake fieldwork. It is based on my fieldwork with musicians who play traditional Irish and Newfoundland music at sessions in St. Johns, Newfoundland. I show how my participation as a player of this music in a private session known as Fiddle Group, before, during, and after my official fieldwork project, complicated this conception. I consider some ethical and practical dilemmas for fieldworkers and participants in understanding one another that are foregrounded by these complexities. I argue, however, that these problems are common to much ethnographic fieldwork. As such, they need to be discussed, rather than hidden behind ideas of the field as an other place.

pening Vignette

It was a warm and clear night, really quite gorgeous. I felt happy and somewhat excited on the way over to the session at the Georgetown pub to play some tunes and also do fieldwork. I entered the pub, found a seat around the table and set up my flute, joining in with what was being played. As I was in the middle of playing a tune I noticed David, one of my anthropology professors, come in. I didnt quite do a double take, but I certainly had to think about it to make sure it was him. I waved and smiled and went back to playing. After looking at him a few times, when a tune came up that I didnt know I got up to say hi. I was trying to figure out why he was at the session, knowing that I was there doing fieldwork. He asked me how my research was going and what kind of tunes we play. I said he should bring his fiddle, even though I knew this would make him a potential research participant. He said it was in the car but he was just going sit and listen for a little while. Greg, a masters student in our department who often comes out to the sessions, came in not long after. I went back to my seat when I heard a familiar tune, Greg taking a seat to the right of me. Someone else started a tune called Me Ol Ragadoo and I saw David quickly leave, but come back in with his fiddle. He pulled up a chair behind Greg and I and we opened the circle a little so that he could join in. In what followed, it seemed in many ways that David contributed to setting the direction for the session by starting a lot of tunes. It was a great session, going until 11:30 or later. But, in my head I was trying to figure out how I was going to deal with now having an anthropology professor in my field notes in addition to a fellow student, and how to describe and understand the interactions of that night when someone who could potentially be evaluating my thesis was central to the sessions dynamics. Introduction My fieldwork in St. Johns, Newfoundland from May to August 2009, pursuing a masters degree in anthropology at Memorial University of Newfoundland, complicated the distinction between the field and home in many ways. My research focuses on musicians who play traditional instrumental Newfoundland and Irish music. In my research I sought to understand how these musicians define this music and what

Keywords 68 | Samantha Breslin The field, ethnographic fieldwork, boundaries, subjectivities, research ethics, traditional music sessions, St. Johns, Newfoundland.

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 it means to them to play it. The research was done in part through participant observation at local sessions of music. Sessions, very briefly, are informal but often scheduled gatherings of musicians. The musicians sit around a table instead of on stage and play tunes. I also attended weekly scheduled gatherings at peoples homes to play this music, known by the members as Fiddle Group. Initially these sessions and Fiddle Group represented to me my field (or fields), though only at certain times, when a session was taking place. However, as illustrated by the opening story, modified from my field notes, I experienced a significant overlap betweenhome and the field. As a result of these experiences, I came to understand how these two spaces are intertwined and mutually constituted, and that I as a fieldworker/researcher play a significant role in demarcating them. Many anthropologists have critiqued the construction of the field within anthropology (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Gupta and Ferguson 1992, 1997; Rosaldo 1993). Nevertheless, it remains common to speak of the field as a distinct place separate from home, a neatly confined object to be studied, and the Anthropologist doing fieldwork as having an objective identity separate from their personal selves. These notions are further reinforced by stories of entering and leaving the field and of persevering through struggles and dangers during fieldwork forming a rite of passage to become an Anthropologist (Gupta and Ferguson 1997:12-18). I argue that such conceptions hide the many practical and ethical dilemmas that fieldworkers and participants must negotiate. These problems should be explored, rather than hidden behind conceptions of the field as this other place. For the rest of the paper, I will use an extended example from my fieldwork with this group of musicians known as Fiddle Group, drawing on a few other aspects of my fieldwork such as the opening vignette, to illustrate how my concept of the field and my life in it became complicated. I will also discuss how these complications foreground common dilemmas for fieldworkers and participants alike. Fiddle Group, the field and my life Fiddle Group began with a group of five people who decided to take a course in Newfoundland fiddling offered at Memorial University through the music department. One of the founding members, Dana, is also a PhD student in anthropology at Memorial. Once the course ended, these people continued to meet once a week at someones home to practice and socialize and have done so for the past eight years. New people joined the group throughout the years, myself included, and now the number of people who attend in any given week generally varies from five to fifteen. The group includes musicians of all levels, most of whom are not originally from Newfoundland; we play mostly Irish and Newfoundland tunes; and the group includes all sorts of instruments that are considered appropriate to this type of music, such as fiddle, guitar, accordion, flute, whistle and bodhrn. Along with Dana, Greg who was mentioned in the opening story is also a member of the group, and many other members have some association with the university. I first attended the group in early October 2008, only a month after I moved to St. Johns. I was invited to join by Greg, who learned of my research interests (originally oral traditions and music in Ireland) and that I play the flute. I continued to attend almost every week. I also participated in other social and musical events with Fiddle Group including the groups performance at the local Folk Night held by the Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Arts Society, a Christmas party held by one of the members, and a pub session for our accordion players birthday. My participation in Fiddle Group became an important part of my life during my studies; I often looked forward to Wednesday nights as my one opportunity for a guilt-free break from school-work. In inviting me, Greg may have had insight into what my project was to become before I did. I changed my research location to Newfoundland and as I read previous research on music and oral tradition within the province, my participation in Fiddle Group and my plans for fieldwork began to converge. There had been limited research done 69 | Samantha Breslin

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 on instrumental music in Newfoundland, almost none in St. Johns, and the popularity of the Irish session was a fairly recent phenomenon. Fiddle Group then came to fall squarely within my research scope. Once fieldwork officially started, in May 2009, I of course informed all the members of Fiddle Group of my research and what role I hoped they might play, but this changed little in our relationships. I would get a few questions about how my research was going and what I was finding as the summer went on. I also became a better player, taking more time to practice, and as a result became a more active participant musically in the group. But as far as I could tell, little else about my interaction with other members changed beyond what I experienced in my first seven months or so playing with them. We bantered, joked, gossiped, talked about current affairs, drank, ate and of course played music the same as before. I see the anthropologists who are part of this group at both Fiddle Group and around our department. We will talk about Fiddle Group at school and school at Fiddle Group. My active involvement in the group certainly continues beyond my formal fieldwork period, and I intend for it to continue in the future. As I have said, Fiddle Group is an important part of my life. In addition, the opening vignette shows how the distinctions between other field sites and home are also blurred, leaving me with anthropology masters and PhD students, as well as professors, as potential participants. I certainly have fieldnotes involving all of them. Some of my friends from the department would also come to the pub where I was doing fieldwork on a Friday evening for a drink and to watch and listen to the session. Conversely, I would sometimes walk into Bitters, the restaurant operated by Memorials graduate student union, and see a member of Fiddle Group there. I even saw a Fiddle Group member at the campus gym one day. Also, while my fieldwork has technically ended, not only do I continue to participate in Fiddle Group as I did before, I also continue to attend the public pub sessions downtown St. Johns. I enjoy playing the music and it is not something that I wanted to stop, especially after I started noticing a significant improvement in my playing throughout my fieldwork. I even considered myself to be doing fieldwork while practicing playing music by myself in my home. While considering practicing to be fieldwork was at first a justification to allow myself the time to do so, it was also appropriate behaviour in my role as a beginner musician and necessary to be able to participate in Fiddle Group and other sessions. My fieldwork then also provided me with a social network of people with shared interests and activities, helping me create a greater sense of home in St. Johns, where I had just moved in September 2008. However, these experiences left me wondering where the distinctions are between the field and home, and between myself as a researcher and as a person just living my life. The people, space, and times overlapped between the field and home, so the primary way the field was defined was by my arbitrary delimitation of when, where and with whom I would take field notes. The field then was not this other place that I went in the sole capacity of an Anthropologist, it was my home and intimately entwined with myself as a person. Shared Experiences Perhaps my fieldwork is exceptional in the degree of overlap between the field and home. Yet, the demarcation of the field throughout anthropological history, which is explored extensively by Gupta and Ferguson (1997), is not nearly as neat as it has been portrayed. For example, continued involvement with ones field post-fieldwork is a common practice. Many anthropologists describe how they still keep in touch with friends and participants through letters, e-mail and visits following their period of fieldwork. Similarly, other anthropologists have argued that the periods both before fieldwork and after shape our research (Shore 1999:45; Gardner 1999:49). The complex interactions between the field and home that I experienced simply foreground common problems for both fieldworkers and participants in understanding one another and understanding fieldwork that I will now briefly mention. These issues continue

70 | Samantha Breslin

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 to be hidden and tucked away behind common parlance that the field is an other place, neatly cordoned off from home and the rest of our lives. This is done despite the fact that these problems are shared by many anthropologists and not just those of us with glaringly ill-defined fields. Old Problems The interactions between home and the field are first problematic for participants (and anthropologists) in understanding a researchers identity as a researcher. To the non-anthropologists I worked with, particularly in Fiddle Group, I was first this flute-player studying anthropology and playing Irish and Newfoundland music. This dilemma does seem less problematic when one thinks of fieldwork in foreign places when the anthropologist stands out as someone new, allowing them to demarcate their identity and purpose as conducting anthropological research. However, Katy Gardner writes how she disguised the extent of her research saying I told them I was writing a book, I did not tell my informants what I was planning to put in it (Gardner 1999: 66). Gardner did her research in Bangladesh and was adopted into a local family, self-identifying as a family member as much as possible as opposed to a researcher, a common role that anthropologists take on. What Gardners example illustrates is that there is nothing new about anthropologists having ill-defined or multiple identities (Narayan 1993). Fieldwork at home only highlights these issues of conflicting identities that participants and fieldworkers alike must try to understand. Inscribing my identity as a fieldworker on top of that of a beginner musician created strange dynamics for me as well, in terms of what constitutes fieldwork data. While my fieldwork officially began on May 7, 2009, which is the day I began taking field notes, I cannot forget all that I knew of people before I started field work. This information from before fieldwork certainly helped me in developing my research proposal, interview questions for members of Fiddle Group, and ideas of topics and issues to consider. In addition, while I am no longer taking fieldnotes, this does not mean that I am ignoring what happens at Fiddle Group or other sessions to this day. I cannot wipe these periods clean from my memory nor do I want to. Again, as I mentioned, pre and post-fieldwork have been previously discussed as influencing fieldwork and written products of fieldwork. Yet, how are participants to understand what I, as a researcher, am doing, and when, if the the field and my home overlap and I am the one demarcating these spaces and times, even if I did inform participants of their conceptual delimitation? The final complexity I will mention relates to the written products of fieldwork. Gupta and Ferguson describe how different types of writing are understood as appropriate when one is in the field and one is at home, again constructing a distinction between home and the field (Gupta and Ferguson 1997:12). This constructed distinction also extends to the intended audiences for our written works, where participants are separated from readers and readers from participants. I, however, was sitting on the same couch in my apartment writing this paper and writing my thesis as I was typing field-notes every morning. In addition, while Gardners participants in Bangladesh were unlikely to read her research, it being written in a different language and a different country, such distinctions are quickly shrinking in fieldwork abroad and particularly at home (Gardner 1999; Brettell 1993). All of my participants speak English, most live in St. Johns, and many if not all have expressed interest in reading the final product. One musician (who also happens to be a student at Memorial) told me I should bring the thesis down to the session when it is done, and if I did not then they would go find it at the library anyway. This overlap also adds to issues of anonymity and confidentiality, in a place where most musicians know other musicians. Yet, these complications and problems, among others, are also not new to anthropology. They are only highlighted by the complexities I experienced in defining the field and home as separate spaces, which they were not. Conclusion Many anthropologists have already called into

71 | Samantha Breslin

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 question traditional views of the field and argued for alternative conceptualizations and methods of researching and writing (Gupta and Ferguson 1992, 1997; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Rosaldo 1993). Yet, what should also be explored and discussed are these complications that researchers face living in the field. Fieldwork at home may seem particularly laden with ethical and practical problems, but insisting instead on creating neatly defined fields, as has historically been done in anthropology, only hides these issues it does not eliminate them.
University of Chicago Press: Chicago. Narayan, Kirin 1993 How Native is a Native Anthropologist? American Anthropologist. 95(3): 672 686. Rosaldo, Renato 1993 Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Beacon Press: Boston, MA. Shore, Cris 1999 Fictions of Fieldwork: Depicting the Self in Ethnographic writing (Italy). In Being there: Fieldwork in Anthropology. C.W. Watson ed. Pluto Press: Sterling, Virginia. Pp. 25 48.

References Brettell, Caroline (ed.) 1993 When They Read What We Write: The Politics of Ethnography. Bergin and Garvey: Westport, Connecticut. Clifford, James and George E. Marcus (eds.) 1986 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. University of California Press: Berkley. Gardner, Katy 1999 Location and Relocation: Home, the Field and Anthropological Ethics (Sylhet, Bangladesh). In: Being There: Fieldwork in Anthropology. CW Watson ed. Pluto Press: Sterling, Virginia. Pp 49 73. Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson 1992 Beyond Culture: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference. Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 6 23. 1997 Discipline and Practice: The Field as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology. In Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a field science. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson eds. University of California Press: Berkley. Pp 1 46. Marcus, George E. and Michael M. J. Fischer 1986 Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences.

Samantha Breslin completed a masters

degree in anthropology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. For her undergraduate studies she earned a Bachelor of Mathematics (Honours) in computer science and anthropology from the University of Waterloo. Her masters research is an ethnographic study of the lives of musicians who play traditional Irish and Newfoundland music in St. Johns, Newfoundland. Acknowledgements: Thanks to Robin Whitaker for her advice on this paper. Also to Laura Nelson-Hamilton for the many discussions that contributed to the idea for the paper. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Institute of Social and Economic Research and the A.G. Hatcher Memorial Scholarship.

72 | Samantha Breslin