Ethnomusicology Now: Relating in/to the Field

Authors: Melvin Butler (University of Miami), Lee Veeraraghavan (Tulane University), Sunaina Kale (University of California, Davis), Abigail Lindo (University of Florida), Allan Zheng (University of California, Riverside), Hannah Snavely, chair (University of California, Riverside)

**The following is the transcription of Rising Voice’s Roundtable, presented at the SEM Annual Conference, Ottawa, Canada, in October 2023.

Hannah:

Welcome, everybody, good morning. Thanks for coming so early to this roundtable. I’m super excited to bring together these scholars to talk about relationships in field work and within the discipline. I recognize that it is early, so if you need to go get coffee, that’s fine. If you just need to stand up during the presentation, feel free to go to the back. That’s totally fine. Or if you want to go to another panel as well, that’s also welcome. Just to give a little introduction, my name is Hannah Snavely and I am the editor of SEM Student News, which is, this is the soft launch. We are changing our name to Rising Voices in Ethnomusicology (applauses). Thank you. To just sort of bring some new life and direction into the journal and sort of align more with our goals and endeavors. For those of you who are graduate students here, we will have a Student Open Meeting at 12:30 today and we will discuss that a little bit more in depth. Our upcoming publication is called “Ethnomusicology Now,” which was an open call for students to be able to just talk about what’s on their minds or present research that they’re working on without a specific theme. Normally, our issues are thematic, but we wanted to open that up a little bit more broadly for an issue. And with that, we are doing this roundtable as part of that publication to speak to current issues and what scholars are dealing with today. The lovely people you see here, have all written for SEM Student News or Rising Voices. Well, Allan works for Rising Voices and is doing a great job as a copy editor. And, I kind of picked everyone just because we had delightful conversations via email and I wanted to meet them and have all these lovely humans together, or what they have written in the publication really resonated with me. So it was maybe a little bit selfish on my part to get all these people on a roundtable together, but I am super excited to share with you all what they have to say. So we’re going to go in order...I think, yeah, let’s go through an order of how the names are on the screen, if that’s okay. So it’ll be Melvin Butler, then Sunaina Kale, then Lee Veeraraghavan, Abigail Lindo, and Allan Zheng. Just to give a little overview, I told them to introduce themselves briefly as well, but I wanted to pick people at different stages in their career. So we have a tenured scholar and (turns to Lee) can I call you a vulnerable scholar? I don’t know, a laborally vulnerable scholar?

Lee:

Yea, I appreciate that.

Hannah:

Is that a good way to say it? Okay. A postdoc and two graduate students who have finished their fieldwork. So I’m really looking forward to this, and we will start off with the presentations and then open it up for a little bit of conversation amongst the scholars, and then we’ll open it up to you all for questions. So we can get started. Thank you. (Murmuring to get microphones in place)

Melvin:

Good morning, everyone. Welcome. Thanks for being here. My name is Melvin Butler. I teach at the University of Miami, and am really honored to be part of this exciting panel to share my perspective. It’s a little odd to be the most senior person up here. I mean, it just seems like yesterday I was a newbie at ethnomusicological conferences. My first SEM was in 2000 in Toronto, and it’s hard to believe it’s been 23 years. But here I am again and I’m excited to share my perspective on ethnomusicology now. So, I’d like to start with this little cartoon, because for me, I think it represents some of the anxieties that I’ve often felt, and I’ll read it for those of you that can’t see. I’m a big Farside fan, and this is a man there looking at another man on the street. (In an angry tone) “So Clarence Diggs, I thought it was you. Never learned your scales or modes, did you, young man? Just screwed around in class, as I recall. Now look at you, you tone deaf, little weasel. Ha ha ha ha! What’s that chord you’re butchering?” (Normal voice) And the person on the street is with a guitar is thinking, “Oh, my God, it’s Mr. Blanchard, my old music teacher!” You know, this idea of being shamed by a former mentor, teacher because you haven’t done something with your life, I think is something that many of us can relate to. I think when you decide to go down this path and be a music scholar or be a musician, you’re sort of faced with this world of uncertainty. I never really wanted to be a starving artist, and maybe that’s part of the reason I got into ethnomusicology. I tell myself it was in part to satisfy this intellectual curiosity and to do research. But I also knew that as a saxophone performance major and a saxophonist, that even if I were amazing, it wasn’t exactly the life that I wanted to be leading when I was fifty.

But, even as a twenty-something-year-old living in New York and, in fact, I have a picture of myself. Hold on. I’ll jump to here. (In reference to photo) There’s me, my freshman year of Berklee College of Music. When I had no idea what ethnomusicology was, even then, I knew deep down inside that I wanted job security and health insurance and a salary and something that would give me a way to flourish and feel fulfilled while also doing something that I could get paid for, to make a living. So when I found myself not only an ethnomusicology student at NYU, but also a newly minted PhD at the University of Virginia, I was still grappling with all the questions about “what have I signed up for? What is this thing called ethnomusicology?” And in some ways, I think that the anxieties I feel now, the issues that I was encountering then have not really gone away. And so this is the reason why I have this slide here about old wine in new bottles. I think a lot about whether or not the issues that we claim to be new are simply old wine, that we are repackaging or trying to understand in new disciplinary or new institutional or new temporal contexts, or do we have new issues that are sort of just reframed in different kinds of contexts that may or may not be flexible enough to adapt to them. So I’m sort of playing with this idea in a common metaphor that’s often confused and used in different ways. I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that one of the things that made me nervous about participating in this panel is like, wow, I don’t know, do I have anything new to say? Am I in touch with the realities?

But here, this slide shows some of the things that I think have concerned me over the years. I think of this in terms of keywords. Power, engagement, and identity I think are three big ones for me, as well as maybe something like epistemologies or just logics of knowing. How is it that we know what we know? And I feel like maybe it’s true that more than ever we are grappling with this question of musical knowledge and what it means to embrace embodied ways of knowing. How is it that we can claim to know anything about some other group of people? And these questions of asymmetries of power between ourselves and the people we study, even if they are within our own communities, I think they are all the more pressing and they remind me of certain dichotomous ways of thinking, certain binaries that have been nagging. One, of course, is between the notion of fieldwork and homework or the field and home, and the idea that the line between what we do as scholars and what we do in ordinary life is not always perceived by ourselves as mutually exclusive. And sometimes there’s a great deal of overlap. In contradistinction, I think, to the narrative that I often encountered when I entered the field as a student in the mid-nineties, that you go into the field and then you come back from the field. And when I found myself doing research in my own church in Brooklyn, it was like, “Oh man, this is, what a wonderful and complicated way to problematize that binary between there and here, between other and self.” And I thought a lot then about how to engage in the kind of productive distanciation between what I felt I knew and what I knew that I didn’t know, or different layers of analysis. And working in spiritually charged places challenged me to think about the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary experiences and the ways in which spiritually informed logics of knowing are contested, problematized, embraced or not, in academic spaces as well.

Engagement is another huge word for me. And I think narratives of applied ethnomusicology were quite prevalent in the 90s when I took an Applied Ethnomusicology seminar with Gage Averill at NYU, when I encountered people like Kyra Gaunt, who was on the faculty and who’s right there (points to Kyra), and thinking about the political implications of the work that we do and why it matters. So this is something that I think is all the more pressing to younger generations. I’m a proud generation Xer and I teach millennials and Gen Zers and I have a son who’s a generation Alpha member, and I’m thinking a lot about these generational differences and how maybe some of the same issues keep coming back, but in a new format. And maybe they’re now more and more pressing. I’m trying to keep this sort of brief, but I feel like I’m winging it a little bit here because I have so much to say. But the idea of trying to craft a career that is meaningful to us, that is rewarding to us, but that also makes the world a better place, that serves in some way. And I see that with various initiatives in the Society for Ethnomusicology. I see that in the speeches, the talks the young scholars on this panel give, and it inspires me. There’s an idealism and a hope and a refusal to settle for the status quo that I think is refreshing. And that’s something we always need.

I teach at the University of Miami, as I mentioned. We have a master’s degree in ethnomusicology and in musicology, and we’re often thinking also about the ethics of even having these kinds of graduate programs in a climate where jobs are scarce. What kinds of other options do we have? And as the Society for Ethnomusicology, are there ways that we can decenter academia as the sort of the be all, end all of what we do as scholars? And for those of us who are doing applied ethnomusicology, how can we bring that more to the foreground and maybe make the notion of being engaged and applied in what we do, something that is a through line no matter how we’re situated within academic spaces. And then finally, I was reminded of an article Travis Jackson wrote back in 2006, reflecting on his then 12 years in the Society for Ethnomusicology, and he was writing about the first conference he attended in 1994. And he was then talking about things in encouraging and optimistic ways, thinking about the formation of the Section of the Status of Women, the Gender and Sexualities Task Force, the Popular Music Section, Crossroads Project, etc., and he says that the existence of each of them is a sign that the society is slowly but assuredly filling the chasm between what its members do on paper and what they do in their interactions with colleagues, students, and various others. And so from my perspective, what Travis Jackson was saying some 17 years ago, reflecting on his past, now it’s been almost 30 years since he joined the Society for Ethnomusicology. Those issues are still with us. And so in that way, maybe it’s old wine in new bottles or new wine in old bottles, depending on how you want to position yourself in relationship to that metaphor. So I think I’ll stop there and give room for other panelists, but that’s my perspective. Thank you. (Applause)

Hannah:

Thank you so much. Sunaina is next.

Sunaina:

I just wanted to start out by thanking Hannah for inviting me to be on this panel. I’m really honored to be here, and to also thank my fellow panelists. Really excited to be in conversation with you all. Okay.

Aloha mai kākou. ‘O Sunaina Keonaona Kale ko‘u inao. No Orinda, Kaleponi mai au. He Hawai‘i au. Hello, everybody. My name is Sunaina Keonaona Kale. I’m from Orinda, California. I am Native Hawaiian and I am currently a UC President’s postdoc based in Native American Studies at UC Davis. I’m going to start off by acknowledging and thanking the Algonquin people, the traditional caretakers of the land now known as Ottawa. My remarks today are going to focus on one of the questions that Hannah posed for us to think about, which is what is the importance of relationships built through fieldwork? And my talk will relate to ideas that I’m working on in an article on fieldwork with my colleague and friend, Alison Martin. Today, my main point is that relationships forged through fieldwork are incredibly important and specifically that I strive to be in good relation with my interlocutors. However, it’s kind of difficult for me because of some systemic barriers that affect me as an Indigenous woman who is both connected to and disconnected from my culture. Further, I think that good relation rests in really honest self-reflexivity and also self-compassion. My research is on reggae music in Hawai‘i and my field site is the island of O‘ahu. I am Kānaka Maoli, also known as Native Hawaiian, but I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and I’m also multiracial. I grew up going to Hawai‘i every couple of years to visit family, and I was comfortable in my Kānaka Maoli identity, until graduate school, that is. Fieldwork has been really hard for me. For example, I visited Hawai‘i the summer after my first year of graduate school, and I was wracked with anxiety about engaging with any kind of research and with other Kānaka Maoli. This is something that I’ve been working through ever since. Right now I’ve been mostly living in Honolulu and I’ve been there for about a year at this point. When I first got there, I felt like I had to be doing fieldwork all the time, talking to everyone, even at the grocery store or any kind of public place. And eventually it became so debilitating that I realized I had to take a break and just sort of practice living there. I’ve talked through these ideas with my colleague Alison Martin, and through talking about this together, we realized that we were both kind of frustrated with some older, particularly white, male ethnomusicologists who have developed really strong relationships with communities of color in a far off country. We were frustrated because we were thinking, how could they have these really strong relationships with their interlocutors, but we could barely leave our houses to talk to our own people? I think my issues with fieldwork must stem from a combination of settler colonialism, capitalism, ableism, and this colonial and patriarchal imposter syndrome that we learn in grad school.

For Indigenous people in the U.S., we’re constantly battling against erasure. Blood quantum and displacement work to get rid of us through legislating us out of existence. You’re less Indigenous the less Indigenous blood you have, or the less traditional you are. Many of us don’t live on our ancestral lands, usually for a colonial reason, like forced removal, land being poisoned, being priced out, or simply that there were better economic opportunities elsewhere. The position of working with your own community while being disconnected from it seems to amplify all of the feelings of not being Indigenous enough. You’re supposed to be connected, but you’re not. And you actually kind of are, or the reverse. And it feels like it’s your fault, even though your feelings are colonial discourses. In a panel entitled “Homework not Fieldwork: Feminist Methodologies” at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association’s annual meeting earlier this year in Toronto (Arvin et. al 2023), the panelists discussed what it meant to do fieldwork at home as Polynesian women and femmes. Sāmoan scholar Lana Lopesi argued that the notion of diaspora as a third space that is, “neither here nor there,” didn’t make sense to her as an Indigenous person in diaspora. She is Samoan and grew up in Aotearoa, also known as New Zealand. She is “shaped by the mountain that I live next to, by the water that I drink.” How can we be in good relation with lands that raised you, in my case the Ohlone and Bay Miwok lands of the San Francisco Bay area, as Indigenous people of elsewhere? And then how do you come back home?

Kānaka Maoli scholar Lani Teves described the paradoxes of feeling freer when she lived in Oregon, yet longed and didn’t long to go back to Hawai‘i. She felt that if she moved home, she’d be “resolved.” But then again, she never felt fully at ease at home anyway. She says now that she’s moved home, she feels, “fucked up.” On top of that, in grad school, you’re being bombarded with messages that you’re not enough and you’re learning how to be very critical. Such messages include you’re not smart or well-read enough to be here. There’s no roadmap. You’re behind everyone else. You don’t deserve to be here.

Ebony O. McGee et. al (2022) point out that imposter syndrome, as it is typically understood, reduces it to psychological processes that individuals can “fix.” However, McGee et. al argue that this individualist framing ignores the structural problems that create imposterism in the first place. The universities are set up for white, middle or upper-class men. So after being steeped in grad school imposter syndrome, it makes complete sense that I would start applying the same thinking to Hawai‘i once I got there. On top of that, being connected to the community where you research adds additional layers of responsibility. I will continue to go back to Hawai‘i regardless of my research. Further, if I mess up a relationship with somebody from my research, not only could it potentially affect my experience of home for the rest of my life, but it could even affect my family. I am carrying additional baggage that white people who study others do not have to deal with. Or honestly, simply, if you are a scholar who does not study your own culture. If you’re not connected to the culture that you research and you mess up royally, you can just leave. I can’t just leave. And I also don’t want to leave.

When I’ve gotten past my barriers and actually do field work, I try to be in good relation with my interlocutors. In Indigenous studies and in many Indigenous cultures of Oceania and Turtle Island, good relation means reciprocal relationality. It’s built into the traditional structures of our cultures. Indigenous reciprocal relationality is the idea that humans, that all human and non-human beings that surround you, work to take care of you, and so you must take care of them in return. Being in good relation is not limited to Indigenous people. Anybody can and should be enacting or striving towards reciprocal relationality. Being in good relation with your interlocutors is also a deliberate attempt to make the research process less extractive and more generative for your interlocutors. What this means exactly depends on context. They can be co-researchers with you or even help author papers. They can guide the research questions you ask toward ones that would benefit them. You could share your research with them somehow and more. However, what does good relation mean when you’re connected to and disconnected from your research site? When colonialism, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, and more put up barriers between you and your interlocutors. When you’re afraid to talk to your own people because you don't feel Indigenous enough, so you avoid. When your brain keeps trying to trick you from leaving the house, going to events, and meeting people with executive dysfunction and anxiety, and you’re just tired and hopeless all the time from other health issues, and you really don’t want to work anyway. When traumatic things happen to you while you were doing fieldwork last time and you really didn’t understand this until the past 1 to 2 years. When your interlocutors were working class or at least have way too many jobs because they live in one of the most expensive places in the U.S. So they barely have time for you anyway, even though they’re really enthusiastic and despite it all, still want to help you. When figuring out how to give back to the community is complicated. People probably don’t have time to collaborate with you in a sustained manner and you worry about inviting and paying specific people over others, and you worry that that would cause rifts in the community. When you dismiss your own problems as “not real” because you have so much more economic, educational, and light skinned privilege than most Indigenous people ever will, so you feel guilty and do no help to anyone.

Being in good relation in the field is difficult, and there are specific systemic barriers that face scholars like me. That is, simply being a woman of color, being of the culture I research, and more specifically, the simultaneous experience of disconnection and connection. And in this context, or any context, really, I think the key to reciprocal relationality is being really self-reflexive, but very honest with yourself. You can’t pretend that you don’t have power as a scholar connected to an institution, and you have to be aware that you and your context is always changing and you have to be open to critique. But in order to do all of that, you really have to practice being kind to yourself, accepting your feelings—good and bad—and accepting yourself for who you are. Which is very difficult, and is something I’ve been trying to learn to do over the past couple of years. I’m going to mess up and I’m not a broken Indigenous person because I didn’t grow up in Hawai‘i or in a traditional way. I’m just me. I’m already whole. I don’t think I’ll ever stop having these imposter feelings, and that’s okay. I think the goal is to greet them and to make room for them, so that they don’t take up so much space to prevent you from doing your work or just living. Thank you. (Applauses, murmuring to switch presenters)

Lee:

Hi, everyone. Thank you very much for being here. And thank you, Hannah, for inviting me. This is going to be a little bit meandering, but I swear I’ll bring it back.

As I read over Hannah’s questions in light of what’s happening in the world this week, elsewhere and here, I’m struck by how they suggest a gnawing awareness of fragility. These questions are in the abstract, but I’ll just read them again for everyone to hear.

The questions are: What are the relevant and critical theoretical ideas that ethnomusicologists are engaging with today? How does our work press against ongoing systemic oppressions such as racism and colonialism? What is the importance of the relationships built through fieldwork and the relationships forged with each other? How do ethnomusicologists today connect their work to other disciplines? And what is the role of ethnomusicology in increasingly interdisciplinary scholarly spaces? So maybe I’ll get to some of those (laughs).

I’m struck by how these questions suggest a knowing awareness of fragility. I use that word instead of, say, vulnerability, which implies a deliberate orientation toward the world and others, because I think the more disinterested fragility gets at this brittle feeling that what holds us to the world could just snap and crumble. Perhaps some of us, certainly not all, are relatively secured in place in the bosom of an institution. Nevertheless, I think we all feel this now. I don’t think it’s my place to address ethnomusicology-the-discipline-as-a-whole because there are concrete and structured ways that we do not actually speak to one another. And certainly I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but I do think we all feel this sometimes now.

For many of us, our material security is fragile. Our working conditions might make it very difficult to do research, whatever that looks like. Our relationships with interlocutors in the field are theorized as fragile, demanding much labor to ensure ethical buttressing. Our relationships with one another, in practical fact, as our trajectories diverge, are fragile. Perhaps we are only tenuously attached to the SEM for mundane reasons, like not being housed in a music department.

So I’ll address this just to graduate students in ethnomusicology, because Hannah asked, and because I’m very grateful that you did. But I want to say a little bit more about fragile relationships and the modes of address that that might beget.

I’m pretty happy to be back home here in Canada for a hot second. But having been gone for a bit, the mental and physical habits that concretize social reality here are starkly visible. I was talking yesterday with the brilliant Maria Fantinato Géo Di Siqueira who noted that they had seen an Indigenous guy busking at the market here wearing a t-shirt that read “Canada is occupied land built on genocide.” It was so nakedly put. And Maria observed that baldly stating the facts out in the open like that doesn’t happen in quite the same way in the U.S. I think this is true, and in some ways it’s a good thing—in the sense that to state the truth is good. But I think it’s a response to something insidious, something that is very English Canadian, but also applies perhaps to the ethnomusicological character and something that is encouraged by all academic disciplining.

This is Anishinaabe Algonquin Land. Just walking down the street in downtown Ottawa, it’s apparent to me that there are a disproportionate number of Indigenous people subjected to the violence and violation to dignity of homelessness. Homelessness in the Anglosphere, like genocide and stolen land in Canada, is out in the open. But the mind shields itself from traumatic violence. And while we cannot help but see, we may not always see clearly because looking is fraught and to do so carefully might knock us off our course. This very palpable perceptual filter seems to demand a blunt response, from those shut out by it, that insists on being seen. That blunt response, in turn, seems to demand its own response. And in many instances, I think that the second response functions as an ego defense against change.

This might look like reactionary defensiveness, but it might also look like self-flagellation. Immediate adoption of surface level practices to fend off critique. Or some other highly visible defense focused on ‘what it means for us,’ however broadly that ‘us’ is defined. And certainly when it comes to colonialism in Canada, which is so deeply entrenched, it is not clear that reactions will produce lasting, meaningful results for everyone.

When I was in the field between 2012 and 2015, I organized with a radical environmentalist collective called Rising Tide Vancouver - Coast Salish Territories. We were based largely out of Vancouver, but also worked in northern British Columbia and Vancouver Island. Rising Tide is an umbrella organization that has autonomous local collectives all around the world, and what they all share is a commitment to supporting frontline communities in their on-the-ground struggles, openness to direct action tactics, and an anticapitalist orientation. Our chapter formed a few months before I arrived in the field to support the Unist’ot’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation. The Unist’ot’en are re-occupying their unceded traditional land to promote land-based healing from the harms of colonization. They are also fighting oil and gas pipelines, several of which had been slotted to cross their land. And some of you will be familiar with the Wet’suwet’en struggle because from 2019 on they have been invaded multiple times by militarized RCMP enforcing the construction of TC Energy’s Coastal Gaslink pipeline.

On top of this, though, there was a general atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion in the field that made it very, very difficult to organize. We were subject to heavy surveillance and police intimidation. Moreover, many of the people in the broad activist community had experienced a lot of abuse and not always managed to break the cycle of violence. As a result, there was a lot of lateral violence, largely psychological, and a real pressure cooker atmosphere.

At the time, I fought against the prevailing norms that threatened to destroy our trust in one another and our ability to work as a collective; identity policing, enforcing hierarchies of oppression, judging one another’s characters instead of interpreting evidence and collectively coming up with solutions. At the time, I characterized these problems as contributing to a lack of integrity, meaning structural integrity: the group couldn’t hold together because, ironically, we were trying so hard to live up to ideal values. And here we might excavate some repressed vectors contained within the related categories of allyship and solidarity, both of which are two way streets. It’s not service. It’s acting on the principle that an injury to one is an injury to all. I didn’t realize how serious the problem was until I was snitch-jacketed and effectively excommunicated from that entire community. Snitch-jacketing, or bad-jacketing, has a long history of being deployed against liberation movements to sow distrust and break up groups, most notably the FBI’s COINTELPRO initiative that was used against the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement. The gist is to falsely accuse trusted group members in key positions of being informants. In theory, and often in practice, the group would then take care of their own.

My fieldwork suddenly became cause for suspicion, and the Unist’ot’en completely cut off communications with me. Most of the activists I knew well didn’t believe the accusations, but no one publicly stood up for me, although they continued to use me as their Brown Spokeswoman until I ran out of money and had to leave town. At this point, I crawled back to Philadelphia to write my dissertation. Over the next two years, I kept returning to Vancouver to try to fix things, but the more I went, the worse it got. And eventually, I ran out of the meager savings on which I had been living. Our chapter of the Rising Tide Collective fractured and fell apart in 2016. And then I had to face the academic job market synthesizing these experiences to make me look like a desirable hire. I am still precariously employed. Most of my colleagues in my peer group who have not had deeply traumatic fieldwork experiences do not understand and in effect look away, pursue their own thing. And sometimes it feels like they’re stepping over my corpse. Our relationships are fragile.

Obviously, I wasn’t murdered, which separates me from other victims of snitch-jacketing like Anna Mae Aquash, who was murdered on suspicion of informing the FBI about the American Indian Movement. But I experienced a social death as a steady campaign of threats, harassment, and stalking by my accuser—who specifically mobilized anti-academic sentiment to further seed suspicion—combined gradually and inexorably to break almost all of the relationships that I had spent years building one by one. And I’ll say that when you repeatedly risk arrest with people, it’s a special bond that is not necessarily love or friendship, but the breaking of it is a terrible thing. I’ll also say that confronting colonialism and many forms of racism, as ethnomusicologists desire to do, at the end of the day, sometimes means confrontations with the police, confrontations with the state, confrontations with people who are well-organized, funded, and trained specifically to harm you, and they’re very good at it.

Because of our focus on our object of study, which acts as a filter, attempts within music studies to combat racism and colonialism can quite easily swerve the problem of repressive state apparatuses. Indeed, to frame academic struggles as anti-colonial—or, in some cases, anti-racist—risks courting what philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (2022) calls “elite capture,” which “describe[s] the ways socially advantaged people tend to gain control over financial benefits, especially foreign aid, meant for everyone. But the concept has also been applied more generally to describe how political projects can be hijacked in principle or in effect by the well positioned and resourced. And yet, the idea also helps to explain how public resources such as knowledge, attention, and values get distorted and distributed by power structures” (2022, 9-10), and is precisely what stands between us and Barbara Smith’s urgent vision of coalitional politics. And Táíwò here is referring to the founding member of the Combahee River Collective, Barbara Smith, who recently critiqued the contemporary mobilization of identity politics and intersectionality. And, as Táíwò puts it, you know, characterizing Smith’s argument, they weren’t establishing themselves as a moral aristocracy; they were building a political viewpoint out of common experience to work toward common problems and particularly material ones.

I don’t really have answers to any of the questions asked. But in the spirit of political conversations, my own position is all I have, which I’m very honored to put in conversation with all of yours. But when it comes to the relevant theoretical ideas ethnomusicologists engage today, I won’t identify any because graduate students are perfectly capable of finding their own paths as the prescribed one narrows. I do think it’s marvelous that people are increasingly treating voices of our interlocutors and even the more-than-human as theory instead of data. I hope that institutional structures will support this kind of work, which needs to be done very slowly and carefully with much thought. And as with any project of redistribution on a global scale, many material resources, likely more than the average Ph.D. program affords.

With that slowness in mind and with the disciplinary and constitutionality of ethnomusicology rapidly changing, in some cases due to decisions from above and political exigencies from without, I wonder what graduate students can do collectively to make this kind of work possible. I am suspicious of triumphalist-can-do narratives and equally suspicious of jeremiads that, in effect, can be disempowering. How can we create the conditions in which we may see clearly before acting?

Slowness, I think, is key. I applaud the graduate student unionization efforts in America and indeed all university unionization efforts. But I’ll note that many graduate students here in Canada are unionized, and that doesn’t mean their conditions are better, the demands on them any less. I’ve often thought about the possibilities for a graduate student publication strike, which could take that career accelerant off the table when it comes to the job market and prioritize thought and care. But that kind of thing would really have to come from the students at the best resourced institutions in solidarity with those who are more poorly funded and whose advisers are less supported institutionally in their own work.

To conclude, I want to say that I was recently reading a statement by Arielle Angel, who is the editor of Jewish Currents, on the current situation in Israel and Palestine in response to the atrocities in Israel and the genocide that we see unfolding in Gaza. And Arielle Angel is the editor of Jewish Currents, but she quotes Puerto Rican Jewish poet Aurora Levins Morales (2022), who says:

We cannot cross until we carry each other,

all of us refugees, all of us prophets.

No more taking turns on history’s wheel,

trying to collect old debts that no-one can pay.

The sea will not open that way.

(Chokes up)

This time that country

is what we promised each other,

our rage pressed cheek to cheek

until tears flood the space between,

until there are no enemies left,

because this time no one will be left to drown

and all of us must be chosen.

This time it’s all of us or none.

(Applause)

Abigail:

I don’t want to go after.

Lee:

I’m sorry (laughs). A little bit histrionic up here.

Abigail:

Thank you so much. That was lovely. And I’m serious: I don’t want to go next.

I like that you stated those questions because I think we’re up here and we’re speaking, and you’re like, what are they speaking to? What are they speaking on? I really appreciated the questions. I think the former teacher in me is just very structured. So I liked the questions, but they were also very challenging. Like you say, not easy to answer. And I’m coming somewhat fresh off of fieldwork, so I’m using them in a reflective way. Then I also have a couple of meandering points as well, so bear with me. Thank you for this opportunity, Hannah, to speak among these scholars. And thank you all for being here early in the morning, because I saw some of you late last night, and you look good.

So one of the questions was, what is the importance of relationships? And they’ve already talked about relationships in some way. So I’m going to try not to wax poetic or anything too long, but…

There is no access, no revelation, and no ethnography without the relationships we form within and outside of the “field,” as we know it. And our knowledge of a place is a relationship in and of itself. The latter remark was a truth I learned during my recent fieldwork trip to Portugal. I was in the Azores, which included expected experiences, others that transcended words, and some that were just unpleasant. And there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging all of these realities. This is the truth of time spent in any place. But when you are away working as an ethnographer, there is a work, there is a labor to be done. You feel a pressing need to negotiate between your work, your discomfort, and the limited resources you have, and the urgency of now. I hate using that. You know who said that? The urgency of now? Anybody? The fierce urgency of now... That was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.! But I love the way it sounds and I use it for so many things. But the urgency of now, everything we’re doing in the urgency of now with the most important thing being the limitation of time. There’s a selfishness to what we do. And that’s something I couldn’t avoid, and I had to assess, and I think about.

You may also maintain unrealistic expectations of a place or the possibilities within it as there is so much taking, so much that you’re trying to take in during your tenure. Because of this reality, reciprocity is essential and this is something that researchers should actively pursue. I only have my own experiences in my program at the University of Florida. Lovely people, love that place, trying to get out of the state, you understand (laughter). But how are students taught to develop, nurture, and celebrate relationships in the field and to have realistic expectations of these spaces? Because when we go to these places, we are carrying these ideas with us. And even though I feel like I’m oppressed in so many ways, in my own experience and my own intersectional identity, I acknowledge that I have lots of privilege by being in this institution, and whenever I go anywhere, they know that. So how do I negotiate with these things, right?

Relationships help you to make sense of these thoughts in conversation. Relationships provide a cartography of support and aid in an embodied acclimation to a new place, to a new way of being and experiencing, even for a familiar place, right? It doesn’t matter if the field is home or the field is abroad. This is always true. People moving through and around your work provide you with care, access, and information, writing the story of your work essentially, and these relationships forged in the field also color your knowledge of that space and the resulting work you produce. For this reason, I’m exceptionally thankful for the individuals who made my work possible. I was not aware that we could produce slides, but this morning I sent [Hannah] some pictures because I wanted to celebrate some people. Is it just those two or did you have one more?

Hannah:

That’s all.

Lindo:

Hahahaha, that’s fine. Okay. So the woman on the left, her name is Nena. Nena is seventy years old. Nena is from Croatia. She goes to this festival that I love called Tremor. It’s very alternative. I’m going to talk about it in my paper tomorrow at 10:45, if you want to be there. But Nena is the coolest woman I’ve ever met. I feel like age is not an issue for her involvement in certain things. She’s a creative, she’s an artist. She makes wood sculptures, and she has cared for me in a very powerful way, a maternal way, but it’s almost instinctual. When I was there, she read me so clearly, (turns to Lee) you ruined it because you got emotional and now you gave it to me. (Continues) She really cared for me in a way I needed within the first month of fieldwork. The streets are slippery. I fell and busted my knee. I felt like I was in the way. I felt immobile. I felt powerless. And she was just there caring for me. Knocking at my door. “I brought you soup. I did this. I did that.” These small acts of care were part of my survival, to be clear. So when I talk about knowing a place colored by these relationships, it’s in that way as one part. (Chokes up) I’m so sorry. You don’t deserve this. But that’s one part of it.

Abigail:

Then the other picture. That’s my viola da terra instructor. Viola da terra is the native instrument to the Azores, something I played. Very old school ethnomusicology, right. Look at me with my bi-musicality. But he’s amazing. And this person gave me access. (Handed tissues) Oh, you are lovely. Thank you. Thank you so much. (Continues) He gave me access to all of these other individuals in the community by basically verifying me. He gave me a certain level of authenticity because when I made a relationship with him in 2021, I didn’t know I would need him so much. But every group I needed to to be in, every space I needed to to know someone. He opened that door. It would be a text. He’d be like, “All right, go see Jeff. Go see this person. Go see Marco. He knows you.” And now I was verified and therefore I could move around the space because I looked different. I sounded different. My Portuguese is horrible. Right in front of me is someone I deeply admire. This is Dr. Salwa Castelo Branco. She is the person who brought ethnomusicology to Portugal, and I get to know her and call her a colleague. She is a part of my salvation during my work. Right. These are real things. If we’re going to talk about relationships, let’s talk about relationships. Without these people, my work would not be there. So thank you for letting me talk about them ever so briefly. I did have one other response. Less tears with this one, most likely, if I’m lucky. 

But the other one I was thinking about was oppression. In my own work, sometimes I think, am I doing enough? And it’s not always the labor of everyone to do it. I know that’s a very difficult thing to say, but in our own ways, our works can be political without as much emotional labor and without as much overt precision. I don’t know how to explain it. A senior scholar in our department maintains a trope of responding to students’ qualms and research questions with “I’m decolonizing my mind.” He’s always saying this: “I am, I’m constantly decolonizing my mind. I’m decolonizing my mind.” There’s a certain level of ennui. “You know, aren’t we all decolonizing our minds,” right? Despite his playful intention, this should be an intentional pursuit, again, undertaken to ensure that we as scholars are assessing our own positionality, preconceived notions, prejudices, privilege. Our work starts with us and our own subjectivity. Addressing that is key. Again, this goes back to: how are we trained to do this? I’m not sure everyone is, and I can look at my own program and think, we need more of this. Because when I went in the field, I felt it. It was so uncomfortable. Music has always been a resource for the minoritized, the suppressed, the downtrodden, otherwise disenfranchised the other, all of us, really. And one thing that brings me hope and reminds me of the power that we wield as researchers, right? Both as a wonderful and dangerous truth is the breadth of current ethnomusicological research, the topics, the things that we’re talking about and potential for us all to narrate the story that sounds tell in the world around us. What we do with it and how we give voice to these suppressed voices is this is the history we write and the potency of our field as a whole. Sometimes I question even in the Azores, which is just fun for people because they’re like, “that’s so exotic.” People call it the “Hawai‘i of Europe.” It’s kind of isolated. And there are these islands. When you’re there, you know, there’s tons to do outside and people are going whale watching and it’s so novel. What are you doing there? How do I tell the story of this place? How do I tell the story of the place without it being reductive, without it checking some box, right? Without it serving me solely? These are things I’m constantly thinking of—what we do with it, how we give voices to these people. Do we, as a field of scholars, provide spaces for each of these narratives, and do they go beyond our eyes? I feel like public ethnomusicology, or applied ethnomusicology, all these things are really important to me, maybe as the former educator. But I feel like we need more of that.

Then I just had a few points because I was saying with the work we do, I want it to be legible to my mother. Does that makes sense? I want my mother, my old Jamaican mother, her ornery self. I want her to know what I’m doing. She always wants to know. (Turns to Melvin) And I think she loved your book, you know. (Continues) Because his book is about Jamaican church. And I grew up in Jamaican church. I’m from Jamaica. You heard it right. I switched it on. But what I really love is that your book was something that I just experienced and didn’t think anyone was paying attention to. But for her, it was like maybe a marker of identity in her being an immigrant and then being in the U.S., she felt seen. And it was powerful for me. So how do other people relate to our work who are not in the academe? I think this is a pressing issue and something that we’re still pushing back against in some ways, because a lot of what we’re told to do as grad students, make a publication, do this, do that, attend conferences. I do all of that. I’m doing a great job. Fantastic. Do the people that I love and the people that I know know what I do and understand what I do and value it? And does it affect their lives? Because once that’s happening, I feel good. Just saying.

Okay. So the last points. I had just points here where I’m like: the continuous concern of narration. I’m thinking about that in my own work, not shying away from discomfort. I don’t want to even touch that because (Turns to Sunaina) you did such a beautiful job of doing that, and I appreciate you for that. I had a conversation with a colleague—this is my last point about the field—and he just finished his degree and he’s not working in the academe, right? And he’s like, “I don’t want to be a great of anything.” I said, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “all of these scholars at our institution.” (We have a professor emerita. Her name is Jennifer Thomas. She’s the motet lady. People know her for motets, right? She cataloged motets. If you think motet, you think her name, right? There’s certain people, if you think a certain field of study, you think their name.) And so he’s like, “I don’t really know if that’s what this looks like anymore, the field. Like, I’m going to be an expert of Azorian music or this is the boundary of what I know. I’m going to be an expert of Brazilian music, right? I know everything on this. That’s not what it looks like, maybe. Maybe I’m a critical thinker and a cultural theorist in these ways, and I apply it to these contexts.” Right? I think it’s difficult to say that because I’m in a room with some greats here. I got Cheryl Keyes over there, Dr. Cheryl Keyes. I got Anthony Seeger right here, right? And then so, I’m just thinking these people, you leave great shoes to fill, but we’re just going to walk in them differently, maybe? And that’s where I’ll leave that. Thank you. (Applauses)

Allan:

I don’t know how I’m supposed to follow that. Oh, my god.

Lee:

Oh, you have to cry (laughter).

Allan:

Let me just close my eyes, right? I think I did this wrong. I had, like this whole, like, theoretical nonsense that I decided to think up while thinking about writing my dissertation because I just recently came back from fieldwork in August. Came back from Cambodia and spent about, yeah, the past year learning Cambodian classical dance, and some music on the side, because that’s what we do as ethnomusicologists, I suppose. And so I guess I’ll maybe share some thoughts. Oh my gosh. I’m filled with so many inspiring ideas that I want to respond to right now. (Chokes up) Compose myself. Here we go.

So I’ll just start with an internal monologue from fieldwork. I’m in the back of the line at dance practice. This dance is completely new to me. I’ve never seen this before. (Makes movements to visually reflect his words) My eyes are floating up, down, left, right, quite rapidly, my gaze quickly tracking as many of the movements in front of me. I attempt to mimic every gesture. My right arm rising maybe about a half second behind the person in front of me. My brain is working overtime while I focus on just about everything in front of me. From the person’s movements in front of me, my movements, the rhythmic chanting that I’m supposed to be doing, but not doing. Everyone else’s chanting.

I can’t keep up with this. I’m overwhelmed. My hands, my fingers, my legs are flailing around. I don’t step forward. My legs are in the wrong position. I leap to make a quick switcharoo. In that time, I no longer can see what hand gestures they’re making in front of me. My hands are supposed to be doing something right now. Figure it out in a moment. I’ll just keep following, I think, to myself, and eventually it’ll become clear.

I begin with this internal monologue to put forward an idea that I’m trying to make sense of through my dissertation right now: thinking about following as one way we might work across disciplines, relationally, as ethnomusicologists. It’s common in the study of Cambodian music and dance as well as several music dance practices globally. Balinese gamelan comes to mind readily—to follow the lead of someone else while learning music and/or dance. And so, despite how often music and dance are performed together, I find that our engagement in ethnomusicology with dance is, to me, quite limited.  I’m currently thinking through how we engage critically with music and dance. And I’m thinking through this through following as a particular technique. This is a way for me to make sense of my own ethnographic work, my methods, how I want to describe my relationships in the field, and possibly move this toward thinking about public-facing work in the future.

It has been my sense that ethnomusicology remains distanced from dance studies. This isn’t to say we don’t do work in dance studies. For instance, the writings of Barbara Browning (1995), Katherine Hagedorn (2001), Tomie Hahn (2007), Henry Spiller (2010), and Christina Sunardi (2015) come to mind for their contributions towards connecting music and dance transmission, exploring ideas surrounding notation, as well as discussing the corporeality and sensorial experience of music and dance. However, it appears that, to borrow Burno Nettl’s words, “ethnomusicologists have been ambivalent” towards the study of music and dance (2015). This is quite unfortunate given the interdisciplinarity of our research. So I’m tackling, going full on into that question of interdisciplinarity—very deep dive here. I want to acknowledge the growing conversation surrounding choreomusicology and the consideration of sound and movement as inseparable bodily phenomenon. In centering the body, we may also find ways to engage the ontological turn in the humanities, an area in which ethnomusicology can make strong contributions. For instance, we may hear and move in different ways. These differences show the different ways people interface with the world. I think of William Cheng’s work where he provocatively asked, “What’s the purpose of sounding good?” He argues that the values inherent with sounding good are inextricable from our subjectivity and embodied reality. We can also ask: how is sounding and looking good culturally and socially determined? And I suggest that the answer is relative to the particular beliefs, aesthetic preferences, and ideologies associated with a particular sonic movement practice. As Made Hood explains (2020), Balinese music and dance is intertwined with local philosophy, spirituality, cosmology, creativity, and the natural environment. Thus music and dance, as it seems to me, are inseparable from local ontologies and its aesthetic constitution further embodies that knowledge.

At the same time, no single performance practice or designer is entirely uniform in quality. In the case of my classical music and dance and no doubt other genres, each teacher has their own style, aesthetic preference of playing music and dancing. In Khmer classical music, this is often referred to as phlauv or path—that these are often dependent on how their teachers played music or danced. Within this sort of metaphor of phlauv, representative of the style of music and dance, I think of it as something that’s reflective of knowing a particular musical history or dance history in the body. It’s one way for me to come to know at least one perspective of that practice or tradition, and I acquire one way of learning to play a particular piece or one way to do a particular gesture.

I find myself often thinking, “so this is how they conceptualize that phrase or sequence of movements.” This process of following, as I’m attempting to make sense of it, offers the follower the perspective of the entity being followed. These perspectives, in turn, represent different ways of interacting with the world and our own bodily reality.

I’ve also been thinking of following as a methodology. I recall once being told to follow the field and allow the field to guide me as I go forward. In this sense, following the field is about openness to experience and understanding that not only our proposed projects will change, but also our worldviews as well. Ethnographers also experience a process of becoming, said Kay Kaufman Shelemay in her 2018 Seeger lecture, actually, the first SEM I attended. In fieldwork, I started to think about this process of becoming when I once was asked, “So is your plan to become a dancer?” Someone asked during practice break. Was that my goal as a researcher? Ah…to be determined. I still don’t know, but I think I’m involved in that process of becoming a dancer. My research, as I’m attempting to make sense of it, is about coming to know through actively following the sounds and movements and people around me. The way I follow what is around me and the way those movements sound are part of that process of becoming. I try to move like a dancer. I try to understand things like a dancer. Yet this following does not mean that I become the people around me. It allows me to gain a better sense of the people around us and allow them to shape my own knowledge and worldview. Following for me is this process of becoming as well as gaining a sense, an awareness of difference.

And, I have a bunch of nonsense in here that I’m just going to glaze over now, just to really sum up and say that from my fieldwork experience, I’m thinking of following as a sort of way of working across music and dance and engaging with epistemic and ontological difference. In learning to follow someone else’s voice or body, I think that our responsibilities and relationships change. I think we resituate power between ourselves as ethnographers and our interlocutors. We move into different kinds of relationships, into closer proximity with each other and greater intimacy with each other. We become aware of our own limitations and what we can offer, as well as the range of what other folks can offer. It forces us to confront differences firsthand through how we think, process, move, and experience the world around us. Following, then is, to me, a way of perceiving situated knowledges and a way of re-situating that power and relationship. (Applauses)

Hannah:

Thank you, everyone, so much. This was lovely. I do want to give a little brief response. I’m currently in fieldwork right now in Chile and came back for this, so everything’s really fresh in my mind. So, Abigail, I did want to say, having people care for you and fieldwork is crucial and life-changing. I’ve had moments as well where I had a really terrible season and there were other women who came and surrounded me and got me through it to transform to better than who I was before fieldwork. I’m glad that other people are having those experiences, too.

I pulled out some words that I wanted to read that these scholars were talking about: the values that they’re bringing to their work and in their relationships with other people. Some of the ideas that came across these presentations were: becoming, generating reciprocal relations, honesty, intimacy, humility, wholeness, welcoming, vulnerability, flourishing, engaging, and honest self-reflection and compassion.

I would like to, if any of you have responses that you would like to give, we can open the floor to you all first. (To Melvin) Yeah, go for it.

Melvin:

Yeah. Thanks again. This was amazing. I have so many thoughts, and I’m encouraged that some of the keywords that I mentioned when when I opened up actually did come back. If there’s one thing that saddens me a little bit it’s that, speaking as the elder on the panel here, is some of the self-deprecation. I mean, in some ways we use self-deprecation as humor. But what I sense is that many of us have internalized some of the stigmas that have been attached to the things that make us human, tears, dancing, relationality. Oh my gosh, let us not do that. Let us not apologize for being fully human. Yeah, that’s my thing (snaps from Kyra and other audience members) right?

But I feel that, too. I think anthropologists and ethnomusicologists have been talking for decades about the fact that we don’t stop being human when we do fieldwork. We don’t—even though it seems that way, maybe from previous generations of scholars that have written this way—we still bring our full selves, or at least we should, into the fields that we construct. We are emotional. We move, we engage in rituals. We have needs. We depend on people. But there is a stigma to emotionalism, to tears, to grooving. Academics don’t groove. It’s always funny to me if I play some James Brown or Aretha Franklin for my students and they just sit there like, “Oh, okay, how interesting.” It’s okay to allow ourselves to be moved by music. I’m always giving my shout-outs to my mentors. Kyra Gaunt is one of the people that helped me to realize that I could be fully myself and I could be reflexive, and it’s okay. I’m not nearly as courageous of a pedagogue, having students dance in class. I try. But I hope that we can embrace this aspect, And the vulnerability and fragility, also, is such an important aspect.

I don’t know if I’ve ever said this publicly. During my fieldwork. (Turns to Abigail) Abigail, because you read the book. Thank you for that. (Returns to audience) I lived with a Jamaican pastor, a woman who fed me every day. My father passed away while I was doing my fieldwork while I was in Jamaica. My wife had the unenviable task of calling me to say, “they gave him about a week left and so maybe you should come back.” In this moment where the only person I had there was Pastor Brian, she was like, “maybe you need to go,” but wow, what would I have done without that support? Field and home can collide. There were so many people that offered that support to me as well. But this is an issue. Maybe we have work to do in sort of de-stigmatizing—these kinds of human actions and phenomena. So anyway, that’s my overall, that’s my initial response. But I’ll cede the microphone to someone else.

Lee:

Thank you, Melvin. I really appreciate that. It was very human and kind of you.

Yeah, I think that I have been a little bit suspicious of emotional reactions to things, because they can quite often derail other conversations. And I think that you’re absolutely right that it’s part of being human. I wonder if we can create space for this. I’m actually very moved hearing about some of your fieldwork experiences, whether they were incredibly difficult or very nurturing, and these are all facets of the human experience. But I think that, one thing that happens is ethnographers, we do kind of go out, we sort of go beyond our normal, what we understand to be our normal zones of experience. And I think that, yes, there may be these beautiful relationships in the field that can be sustained and all of these things. And maybe there won’t be, as in my case. But the question is, when we return, what are we met with? I think that that is where we have an institutional responsibility. Or we have a collective responsibility to really think about how we are treating one another. And that might be an institutional response, because sometimes these kinds of situations require institutional responses, but it also might just be a very human response. My sense is that as people progress along their career path, they get busier and busier and it just becomes harder and harder to really create that space of responding in a human way. It’s not everyone and not all the time. But it doesn’t take a lot to extend a hand or to brush someone away.

Hannah:

What you just said brings us back to the concepts of slowness and seeing that are so critical to our work as ethnomusicologists as well. But slowness is really difficult. I’ve learned slowness in fieldwork, because fieldwork requires slowness, and I had to unlearn everything that I learned in graduate school to be able to slow down and be at a pace in a different country and at the relational-building paces that are required for fieldwork. We’ll see how fighting to remain slow works in the future. Anyone else have any responses?

Lindo:

I just want to respond to your comment about slowness and the temporal experience of places, and how places move at different speeds. Is that something you take back with you? Because when you said that, it made me think, am I more intentional about being slower? On the island, one thing I argue in my work…I like islands, right? Someone confronted me early on in my work. She asked, “why the Azores?” She is another researcher, and she was maybe trying to figure out like, “But you’re not Portuguese, but you’re not this.” First I was apprehensive. Like, “how dare she assume that I must be of this, this is the colonizer mindset! I have to be of this place to speak of this?” And she was more so saying, “what in you attracts you to it? Because in your body there are things that you have that call out to a place.” That was so powerful and deep and made me shameful because I was like, I apologize. I am of an island. I’m from Jamaica, right? She loved that she…that was her tethering thing: you’re from an island, you’re going to another island, you’re looking at the sea in a certain way. You’re looking at the land in a certain way. I talk about insularity as a strength and a weakness. But in this insularity, I immediately noticed that Lisbon and the way mainland Portugal feels is very different than how the Azores feel. They feel slow.

They feel very not static in some ways, but it’s intentional. There’s a negotiating between that rural and the metropole. But when I come back, there is no opportunity to fully decompress and gradually speed back up. It’s just from going fully slow to going fully fast. Maybe I’m just saying we need to give grace in the same sense that you’re saying for individuals who are coming back because you’re relearning time, you’re relearning the way your body feels somewhere else. I never thought about it that way, so I’m just waxing poetic again, just speaking of it. But a colleague said we should have a support group at the institution for people who just came back from fieldwork, and we just talk about it and we just talk about the things that were uncomfortable, the things that were good, the things that we learned, the things that we want somebody else to tell us before we went. Maybe that’s a part of it. But okay.

Allan:

I think I’ll echo that also. I just came back in August and I’m still relearning time and now I’m in another time zone again. So this is wonderful. My sleep schedule’s wonderful right now. But I also wanted to respond to things that came up in Sunaina’s paper about being disconnected and connected to the home... (Kyra asks him to move closer to the mic) Oh, I’m so sorry. (Continues) Being connected and disconnected to home and how, for me as a person from the Cambodian diaspora and going and doing fieldwork in this “supposed home” and my own struggles of finding a connection to place and people and other sort of expectations that “yes you are up this place, and you are not also of this place” at the same time and running into those moments of difference, whether that be through language, through understanding of all the intricate little details of temporal expectations to anything else. Those were things that resonated with me in your work.

Hannah:

Yeah. Let’s open it up to everyone else. So if anyone has any comments or questions. We welcome them.

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