Ursula Hemetek

Who took the photos?
On the role of partners in ethnomusicological fieldwork

In the beginning of my career but also - more seldom - recently I have witnessed presentations of – primarily male – colleagues about their field works and the results. There were wonderful photographs of the musicicians and of the social setting but usually also some of the researcher himself. As the presentation suggested that the person was alone in the field, I sometimes put the question: „but who took the photo“?. Very often the answer was: “my wife, as she was joining me during all my field trips“. It seemed to be quite normal that these „wives“ were doing highly professional work during the field trips but were usually never mentioned in the publications, nor in the presentations.

This was the point of departure for a pilot study at the Institute of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology at the University of Music and Performing Arts, concerning the role of „partners“ in ethnomusicological fieldwork, conducted in 2013/14 (by Nicola Benz and Marko Kölbl). 10 „pairs“ belonging to different generations,  were interviewed, all of them working in Austria. I will present some of the results of the pilot study and use these to discuss the issue of academic representation of research partners in relation to gender issues. 

 

Cornelia Gruber and Marko Kölbl

EnGendering the Field
Surveying Gender and Queer Approaches in Ethnomusicology

Gender and queer approaches are present and often structurally embedded in many scholarly disciplines, particularly in the humanities. For ethnomusicology however, this picture is a little different. Ethnomusicological work on gender is manageable, queer approaches are rare. From our point of view, in these works the understanding and definition of gender does not always appear topical, and theoretical links to gender/queer studies only happen to a variable extent. Also, ethnomusicological work seldom enters the gender theoretical discourse. Given this scenario, we want to examine the inclusion of gender/queer approaches in ethnomusicology, surveying articles on gender issues that were published within the past 10 years in the ethnomusicological journals Yearbook for Traditional Music, Ethnomusicology, World of Music, and Ethnomusicology Forum. The articles will be examined according to multilevel qualitative and quantitative review criteria designed by the presenters based on major issues and topics of gender/queer theory. This includes examining (1) on which level gender issues are tackled, (2) which gender theories are applied, (3) the author’s research methodology and (4) in which way it is applied in the article. In our paper we present and discuss the statistic results and critically examine which methodological tool kits ethnomusicologists have been using when tackling gender/queer issues. We will contextualize our results within gender studies and queer theory, and examine the status of gender research and the criticism it is exposed to within ethnomusicology and academia in general.