Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword: Let It Get into You
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: On Intimate Entanglements
- Chapter One Yusef 's Breath: Jazz Love, Cross-Racial Identification, and Paying Dues
- Chapter Two Three Reflections, with Epilogue
- Chapter Three Modulating Flawed Bodies: Intimate Acoustemologies, Chronic Pain, and Ethnographic Pianism
- Chapter Four Performing Desire: Race, Sex, and the Ethnographic Encounter
- Chapter Five Thick Descriptions
- Chapter Six Entering the Lives of Others: Entangled Intimacies, Trauma, and Performance
- Chapter Seven Ethnomusicological Empathy: Excavating a Black Graduate Student’s Heartland
- Chapter Eight Ethnomusicological Becoming: Deep Listening as Erotics in the Field
- Chapter Nine Mirror Dancing in Congo: Reflections on Fieldwork as Blanche Neige
- Chapter Ten Ethnography and its Double(s): Theorizing the Personal with Jews in Ghana
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Chapter Eight - Ethnomusicological Becoming: Deep Listening as Erotics in the Field
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 January 2024
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword: Let It Get into You
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: On Intimate Entanglements
- Chapter One Yusef 's Breath: Jazz Love, Cross-Racial Identification, and Paying Dues
- Chapter Two Three Reflections, with Epilogue
- Chapter Three Modulating Flawed Bodies: Intimate Acoustemologies, Chronic Pain, and Ethnographic Pianism
- Chapter Four Performing Desire: Race, Sex, and the Ethnographic Encounter
- Chapter Five Thick Descriptions
- Chapter Six Entering the Lives of Others: Entangled Intimacies, Trauma, and Performance
- Chapter Seven Ethnomusicological Empathy: Excavating a Black Graduate Student’s Heartland
- Chapter Eight Ethnomusicological Becoming: Deep Listening as Erotics in the Field
- Chapter Nine Mirror Dancing in Congo: Reflections on Fieldwork as Blanche Neige
- Chapter Ten Ethnography and its Double(s): Theorizing the Personal with Jews in Ghana
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as the assertion of a lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.
—Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”We sit next to each other, [hearing] the unfamiliar rendering of the familiar, which we call performance, and we begin to bond without an initial need for words. Words will come later, as they always do. But for now, we sit on common ground, experiencing something together, supporting each other throughout the experience by the very fact of proximity ⦠Listening may not seem like much ⦠but it is the firm ground for building and rebuilding society the real way: the solid way based on our shared human condition. (Pujol, Artist's Journal: The Listeners, 2018)
—Dave Isay, Listening Is an Act of LoveVillage women when they write their songs write songs to free themselves from the chains that bind them.
—Thandiswa Mazwai, “Feminist Party” on ZoomIt was Thanksgiving 2016, the weekend of the opening of the Philadelphia Sudanese Community Center in West Philly, the place where graduate students in my Field Methods seminar had been conducting research. Most of the students were not in town that weekend, so I went alone for the day’s events, bearing a digital still camera and MP3 recorder. While I waited for events to begin, I ventured down into the basement of the building to encounter a long brightly lit room, with an array of Sudanese cultural objects, displays of food, clothing, jewelry, and walls lined with a wide array of Sudanese art—paintings, pencil drawings, linocuts, an image of Martin Luther King Jr. with a cross and Arabic script, another of an early Sudanese woman missionary in Germany, and pencil portraits of Sudanese poets and writers. A local community ensemble of teen girl string players, one of whom was Sudanese, was warming up in the corner; a small group of teens we had worked with in a freshman seminar in 2015 was rehearsing their song and dance routine; young children played on African-made drums and then wandered around the area; hijab-covered women in a rich array of colorful toobs were preparing food.
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- Intimate Entanglements in the Ethnography of PerformanceRace, Gender, Vulnerability, pp. 159 - 174Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2023