Sobrecargas y sobrecalentamiento en el estátor y rotor (49).

>>>>>>> Dear Willemien

I had to conduct an interview for the EOAN group on Monday and chatted with Aryan Kaganof (the filmmaker) about Saturday and your project. Today he sent me a very interesting e-mail, suggesting that these events are wonderful opportunities to get some image documentation and suggesting a friend of his who might be interested in working with you. We have to talk about the possibilities of this. There is something about these events (of which I have attended but one) that can possibly best be shown in photographs, perhaps accompanied by a form of deconstructive descriptive discourse. Aryan’s comment that you might be uncomfortable with such an arrangement arises from me mentioning that these events pose challenges to you that are quite different from intellectual ones. Best, Stephanus

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The source of my discomfort was the hunch that what I found meaningful, moving, and upsetting at these events could not be harnassed or systematized within disciplinary understandings of methodological propriety and rigour. It seemed to me that the disciplinary language of ethnomusicology could not accommodate the intimate moments of personal expression that, for me, stood at the centre of boeremusiek events.

For these reasons I was immediately drawn to the possibilities of extending Kaganof’s idea of visual documentation into a visual anthropology of a boeremusiek event. Outsourcing the photography was another matter altogether. I was deeply troubled by the thought that, while I would attend the particular event, and had built up a sense of what was going on by attending many others, the photographs would not be the result of my personal experience. I experienced it as a loss of control. Employing a professional photographer would entail a substantial, and risky, financial investment.2 I would have to trust someone else to realise my vision. Simultaneously, and perhaps ironically, I also worried about the impact this sort of outsourcing would have on the methodological credibility of my research within an ethnomusicological disciplinary context.

My work, like that of many other South African music researchers, is situated in an intellectual climate where the boundaries between musicology and ethnomusicology have largely fallen away due to a host of institutional and political reasons. The disciplinary indeterminacy of South African music studies makes international dialogue very difficult. Yet, this challenge to disciplinary boundaries is perhaps South African music studies’ greatest potential contribution to international discourses. After 1994, the existence of separate societies for ethnomusicologists, studying black music, and musicologists, studying white music, resonated badly with the apartheid policy of separate development. As a result, the Symposium on Ethnomusicology and the South African Society of Musicology merged in 2006 to form The South African Society for Research in Music with a journal accommodating all research on music: The South African Journal of Music Studies. South Africans, quite simply, could not afford to hold on to the premises separating musicology and ethnomusicology. One of these premises is that fieldwork experience should stand at the centre of ethnomusicological knowledge.

2

I am grateful for the financial assistance of the Documentation Centre for Music (Domus) at Stellenbosch University that enabled this project.

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First-hand face-to-face experience in the field is still considered the bedrock of contemporary ethnomusicology.3 My apprehension about outsourcing the photography is explainable in light of Barz and Cooley’s claim that “fieldwork is experience, and the experience of people making music is at the core of ethnomusicological method and theory”,4

The relationship between technological mediation and face-to-face field experience has best been articulated in the context of ethnomusicological film, where the latter is considered an outcome of experience in the field. Hence John Baily’s evident pride at being the “lone operator” in producing his fieldwork movies, responsible for the shooting, sound and editing.5 Despite Simone Krüger’s suggestion that ethnomusicological film is concerned with “depictions of reality” where the aim is “documentation, rather than fiction, and thus reporting, not inventing, whatever is in the world”, the proponents of ethnomusicological film rely implicitly on the fact that film is not an “invisible” medium.6 Baily and others’ films are, as a rule, accompanied by a study guide offering detailed explanations of editing decisions. In fact, the recognition of film as a medium is one of ethnomusicological film’s saving graces. It is not film’s “depictions of reality” that assure its authenticity; rather, it is the fact that film is determined by personal experience, assumed as the basis for ethnographic understanding. Viewed this way, fieldwork experience itself, and its translation into film, are seen as separate activities. In John Baily’s words, the “fieldwork movie ... is an adjunct to anthropological or ethnomusicological fieldwork. The camera is used as a research tool (replacing to a large extent the audio recorder), and some of the footage is in due course edited into a film, which becomes a kind of research report”.7 It is still experience gained in the field that is ultimately seen as governing the decisions that inevitably need to be made when shooting and editing film. It is the ethnographic authority of the fieldworker behind the film that lends the film its authenticity, its realism, and its ability to mediate experience for its audiences by letting them imagine that they were there themselves. While the suspension of

3

Gregory F. Barz and Timothy J. Cooley, Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 14; Bruno Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-one Issues and Concepts (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 13.

4

Barz and Cooley, Shadows in the Field, 14.

5

John Baily, “The Art of the ‘Fieldwork Movie’: 35 Years of Making Ethnomusicological Films,” Ethnomusicology Forum 18, no. 1 (June 2009): 60.

6

Simone Krüger, Experiencing Ethnomusicology (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2009), 196.

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disbelief experienced by the audience in audio-visual formats is perhaps greater, the function of the fieldwork movie is not much different from that of the written fieldwork report.

What I was proposing to do was to change the dynamics of fieldwork experience altogether. By employing a photographer I removed myself as the ethnographic authority “behind” the photographs – an authority based on experience. By employing photography instead of film I was deliberately inviting an abstract and less determined relationship to develop between the photographs and “reality” itself – moving beyond disciplinary sanctioned forms of mediation. These photographs would not serve as documents of my fieldwork experience.