2.2. The Field of Encounters
2.2.1. Dialogic Editing
As they became aware of such problems, ethnomusicologists also developed other ways of building acoustic representations.
So we would sit down around the cassette recorder with one, two, three, four, five [Kaluli] people wearing headphones, and they would spontaneously start talking about the recordings as they listened. I soon realized that this was the beginning of a whole methodological program for recording and feedback and more recording. I came to call this method ‘dialogic editing’; I was inspired by Rouch’s similar experimental methods in film feedback. Recording wasn’t just about gathering things. It was the invitation to a conversation about what was going on in the world as recorded, about what we were listening to, how we knew and questioned the world by listening to it, how we edited and arranged its meanings like a composition. (Feld and Carlyle 2013: 206)
Methods of dialogic editing serve to mitigate the asymmetric power embedded in the act of recording and in anthropological fieldwork in general. They do not eliminate it completely, however. As Kevin Dwyer noted, the view that fieldwork could be a conversational journey with the Other simply does not reflect the fact that “the anthropologist’s goal, established prior to the encounter with the informant, remains paramount” (Dwyer 1979: 209). The metaphors of conversation and collaboration also bypass the significant epistemic challenges posed by fieldwork. They oppose presumably less empathetic or more directive ways of doing ethnography, but without articulating how relevant data should be gathered or correct interpretation achieved, the risk is to merely relinquish the quest for valid knowledge to the earlier ethnographic genres (Dwyer 1979). Steven Feld’s allusion to “composition” in the quote above is typical of this way of evading the issue. It does reflect its author’s wider engagement with artistic sound practices. Yet, as Marcel Cobussen (2013) remarked, amongst all sound artists interviewed by Lane and Carlyle for the volume In the Field, Feld stands out as the only one who also firmly claims anthropological relevance for his field recordings. He is clear about the fact that he edits the recordings , to achieve a result which he compares to musique concrète, but according to him, the recordings also convey facts about the “acoustic epistemologies” of other people.
Feld describes “doing anthropology in sound” as a method rooted in listening, recording, and dialogic editing. Curiously, the part of it that one might expect to stand out most conspicuously – the dialogue – is both the least explained and the least audible. Listening closer, “dialogic editing” is indeed a metaphor. Feld coined the phrase in an article published after the first edition of Sound and Sentiment to describe discussions that he had with his Kaluli friends following the publication of the book. These discussions were explicitly about the written text. The title of the article also made it clear that they were not about writing the text but about how the Kaluli read it. For the second edition of the book, Feld simply added this account of the dialogue as a postscript. The dialogue itself was not made available to the reader, and although Feld emphasized how the Kaluli disagreed on occasion with him, their motives for discussing his text in the first place remain unclear. Were they concerned about how it presented their cultural identity for outsiders? How did they relate to the project of “doing anthropology in sound”? Did they care at all?
A brief counter-narrative might help to locate the singularity of “dialoguing” about the anthropologist’s book. When I presented my own freshly printed volume to my friends in Zece Prăjini (Stoichiţă 2008), they congratulated me and agreed to play some music for its launch. We had a barbecue that night and drank a toast. I distributed a dozen copies to my closest collaborators, who were also the book’s main protagonists. They politely stored them on display, close to the souvenirs that they had brought back from their trips. They showed the book with pride to foreign musicians, researchers, or journalists who came to visit them. But before and after publication, all my attempts to actually discuss with them what I wrote were politely declined: it was solely my business, not theirs, they said. A book written in French for French academics had no relevance for them, no connection to the concerns which could keep their discussions alive for hours. I did not have many convincing counterarguments, although I did hope that irrelevance would not remain my work’s main characteristic for them in the long run. This is to say that, although dialogue is part of anthropological fieldwork, dialogic editing requires more than the anthropologist’s own interest in editing anthropology.
Feld later expanded the metaphor of dialogic editing to refer to the fieldwork that shaped his audio compositions as well. That “dialogue,” however, never became part of his recordings. For one thing, the recordist himself was hardly ever heard on those pieces, except perhaps by himself: “I am always part of the recording,” Feld says to Carlyle, “always present in some way, even if that presence is not audible to the listener” (Feld and Carlyle 2013: 209). More generally, dialogic editing does not translate into audible dialogue for the listener. This returns us to the problem raised by Dwyer: anthropology makes itself essentially invulnerable to the Other as long as it conceals the Self, mediates the Other’s voice, and interprets their confrontation as “negotiation” of a goal set by the Self. To accept the risk of the encounter would mean to leave open the possibility that the dialogue could fail, that its outcome could result in something unsatisfactory for both parties.
The recordings which my Roma friends made at the nearby studio in Roman fascinated me for their conspicuous artificiality. When I told them that, they smiled: of course, playing music was a technique and music an artefact; the more conspicuous the better, if one were to make some money out of it! Beyond sheer calculation, aesthetic tricks (şmecherii) were also part of a broader context where irony and (self-)mockery constituted an acceptable expression of power for the unprivileged (Stoichiţă 2016). On the other end, my recordings in the “realist” genre often disappointed the musicians due to their dullness. When they told me, I grinned: those were the expectations of my discipline, of my supervisor, etc. The recordings that we actually edited together ended up sounding both artificial and dull. As I mentioned earlier, none of us liked them very much even though we had invested much time and good will in their making.
I could say that this kind of failed dialogue helped me to understand a few things about how my Roma friends listened to music and what they expected it to be. I could perhaps say that I learned to listen more “like them” in the process and maybe that I tried to convey something of it in my publications as well. But in the context of this issue on ethnographic rubbish, it should be read simply as an example of failure itself: how an attempt to produce dialogic field recordings can go wrong and why it should have the opportunity to go wrong.