Multi-Sited Ethnography Project:
Music,
Memory and Place
and
the Journey into the Happy Hunting Ground in-between them
Jamie Isabel Rosado
Introduction
Place
is something that offers many options as to definitions. You can tackle
it from
a purely geographical standpoint, for instance a certain location is at
latitude 18, longitude 67(that is where Puerto
Rico
is). We can also analyze place from a purely geo-political stance such
as Egypt
is a
country situated in a desert zono-biome and uses a multi-party semi-
presidential political system. Unfortunately for me and my desire for
clarity
in my paper, music is also a topic that can include much transience. Although purists would not agree with me,
music is anything that people as a whole call music, which includes
everything
from Blue Man Group, Beethoven, Britney Spears, and everything
conceivable that
lies in between.
A
search on Wikipedia for place elicits 12 possible definitions or
explanations,
while a search for music brings us to one big page but with over 15
subdivisions and a million hyperlinks to various people’s best music
lists.
My
intention with this project is to find the ground where place and music
meet. I
have found that interesting things can happen there even back home, in Puerto Rico. Every one of us has had a song
play, for the
first time or in general, at the best possible moment in time and had a
memory
of a moment be better off for the welcome or unwelcome addition. There are songs that every time you hear them
you are teleported back to the memory that that song evokes, whether
you wanted
to go there or not. Be it your most devastating break-up or your first
kiss the
connection is immediate and intense and often difficult if not possible
to
prevent. People often have the same kind of reaction to place as they
do to
music. I doubt that any of us can speak about Vietnam
as a place separate from
all of our recollections of the place be they good or bad.
Memory
is the area where all of these things collide.
I remember from my introduction to Psychology class that memory is the
ability
of a person to form and retain information but memory is so much more
than
that. The book Fear, Death and
Resistance: An Ethnography of War: Croatia 1991-1992 starts
with a quote that I will repeat here. “All
that we had, all that we
were, reduced to memories.” I
believe that it was well chosen to start the article about fieldwork
after the
war in the Balkans because it shows us the power of memories.
Analysis
During
my time in Croatia,
I tried to understand the difference between one Croatian man’s
reaction to a
particular band and another Croatian man’s reaction to the same band.
Analyzing
the variables we come up with several possible explanations for the
difference
in opinion. The first is the most obvious, that they grew up in two
different
cities with different family situations, temperaments and lifestyles.
That fact
although important and worth mentioning is not one I want to consider
for this
paper.
I could also say that since they spent their time during
the war in two different cities, their hypothetical anger issues could
be
greatly affected by their different experiences in it. Darko stayed in Dubrovnik and Sime lived in Sarajevo during the war. Each city,
though
greatly affected by the war, had marked differences, such as
duration of
conflict and the amount of exposure to the surrounding violence and
threat. As "Darker Than Midnight," Monique
Skidmore’s article on
modern day Burma
shows us, fear is not something that you can easily isolate yourself
from. Even
though the threat was not directed at the author she still felt it as
profusely
as the people of the nation of Burma.
The experience of walking into a store in Vietnam and hearing a song that came
from Puerto Rico was a surreal
experience. As my article shows
I was pulled down an avenue I was not looking forward to strolling
down. All of
my memories hidden so far from common view where pulled out because of
a song
and just maybe a place. Did the place that I was in at that particular
moment
affect my reaction to that song? I have been in many places; Puerto Rico, New York,
San Diego,
on board ship and in a variety of
other places but have not had the same reaction as I had then. Was the
tinny
sound of the speakers to blame? They seemed to accentuate his voice and
lose
all of the music behind him. Why was the
combination of one song and one place cause enough emotion in me to
bring me to
tears? Unfortunately I can not answer this question at this time
because I
don’t quite know the answer myself.
I
entered Egypt
unsure of what I was going to
write about, which is not too uncommon. However by the second day I
still had
no concrete ideas. Usually by the second and third day in port I have
an idea
of where I am headed with my field report and just lack information. This time I had the chatter in my head;
religion and public life, the difference between men and women in
society, all
of them were good topics but none of them really spoke to me. Like
Theodore
Bestor in his article on field work in Japan, "Inquisitive
Observation," I was fortunate to
have my
topic find me like his found him.
Most of my time as I walked through Cairo I was conscious
of myself and my surroundings though my tour guide told me not to
bother I
decided it was in my best interest to wear it. Eventually I gave up and
stopped
wearing it because as long as I stayed with the group everyone knew
that I was
an “American Lady”. Which is what they all yelled after me as they
whistled and
called. My old standby of I don’t speak English (said in Spanish) did
not work
here; it didn’t matter if I understood them they were going to have
their fun.
Conclusion
All of my articles deal with memories
and two of its most potent triggers, place and music. As I have already
stated
the terms music and place lack singular definitions.
No matter where I went music was present in
one way or another, especially in India
where even the ambient noises seemed musical and in Egypt
where the call to prayer was
also much more musical then I expected.
The importance of all three subtopics
of my paper is that all of them shape our best souvenirs of this trip
our
memories.
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