Through a correspondence between two scholars, this paper explores and critiques various ways in which scholars working in ethnography and cultural analysis frame and construct their methodology and object of study. Through the close reading of theoretical accounts of methodology in ethnography and cultural analysis, we examine how these accounts construct the relationship between the scholar and her object of study.We read these scholarly practices as protocols, referring to the ways in which accounts of methodology may be understood as rules/guidelines by which scholars in these fields conduct research. Protocol etymologically refers to protos (first) and kolla (glue). Through the figure of the protocol, we delineate how scholars in ethnography and cultural analysis themselves become implicated in giving accounts of their research methodologies. Somatechnics presents a thoroughly multi-disciplinary scholarship on the body, providing a space for research that critically engages with the ethico-political implications of a wide range of practices and techniques. The term ‘somatechnics’ indicates an approach to corporeality which considers it as always already bound up with a variety of technologies, techniques and technics, thus enabling an examination of the lived experiences engendered within a given context, and the effects that technologies, technés and techniques have on embodiment, subjectivity and sociality.
MULTIFILE
Paper presented at the 31st European Seminar in Ethnomusicology ESEM, Limerick (Ireland), 18/9/2015. This paper presents a case study of ‘Belinda’, a Dutch woman in her early sixties who considers herself at the same time as ‘un-musical’ and musically hyper-sensitive. She is neither an ‘outstanding performer’ nor a ‘maverick’, but rather an idiosyncratic example of late-modern (i.c. Dutch) everyday life musicality.Interesting as her particular case may be, the focus in this paper is theoretical and methodological. Through concisely discussing Belinda’s biography, I will be able to focus, theoretically, on using practice theory as formulated recently by German cultural sociologist Andreas Reckwitz as a possible foundation for studying music in late-modern western societies. Reckwitz considers culture as an inherently hybrid and dynamic arena of shared and contested individual understandings of the world, and sees practices – ‘ways of doing and saying’ – as the locus of culture. Methodologically, I posit – referring to Reckwitz but also to the seminal work of George Herbert Mead and others - that there is no need to think about the individual and the social as two mutually exclusive domains, but rather that the individual is inherently social and therefore the study of music in society (‘music as culture’; or maybe ‘ethnomusicology’) should base itself on a thorough micro-ethnographic study of individuals, rather than on more abstract groups, combining ethnographic methods with insights from qualitative sociology and Grounded Theory.The paper hopes to contribute to theoretical and methodological discussions in ethnomusicology. Because the study of ‘Belinda’ is a strong example of a study by a researcher who has been born and bred in the same context of ‘shared and contested ways of doing and saying’ as the researched, the paper also hopes to contribute to ideas about the methodological particularities of ‘ethnomusicology-at-home’ and about the potential value of ethnomusicological studies of late-modern musicality and musical late-modernity.
