If you choose to read about music as your general category for this year's academic reading challenge, books for the ethnography section might initially be a little more difficult to find than music history. I admit that I have myself not read many books in this area, but I have read a few because I teach a research methods course in which ethnography is one of the featured methods. I also teach a cultural studies theory course that includes a section on theories of subculture, many of which are music subcultures.
If you're not sure what it is, ethnographic research is defined by participant-observation. This method requires that the person doing the study immerse himself or herself in a culture or subculture, observing and taking notes on uses of languages, ways of interacting, and generally making fine-grained observations and commentary on the details of daily life. It is the present-day study of how a culture defines itself, produces meaning and approaches the world, most commonly practiced in anthropology and sociology. Reading an ethnography of a musical culture is likely not just to tell you about musicians and their history, but to immerse you in the life-ways surrounding a music that you love. If you are a fan and read about your own fan culture, you may also learn something new through the encountering scholarly observations of your scene, though you might not always like what you read or find that it fits your own experiences.
Most of the ethnographic studies of music that I am familiar with through teaching are about Anglo and American music fans, music-related youth subcultures, and /or music scenes. The classic subculture studies described England's punks, skinheads, mods, and rockers and were later criticized for their single-minded emphasis on the formation of masculine working-class identities. One more recent US-based study of the punk subculture that draws on these classic studies, but emphasizes girls' experience is Lauraine LeBlanc's Pretty in Punk, an auto-ethnographic analysis of the 1990s US punk scene that is strongly flavored by the author's ambivalance about her role as an academic.
While this is a fine study and a quick read, you might also think about exploring the field of ethno-musicology, which takes an anthropological approach to musical cultures and which has led to studies of musicians and scenes around the world. There are a tremendous number of studies that go beyond personal memoir or journalism. Particularly because of the growth of international music media and production, many of these explore international and transnational music cultures and bring fresh insights into how people experience culture locally while interacting in a global mediascape.
While I have not read the majority of books suggested in this post, I practice a pretty strong Google-Fu and found them by searching through book reviews and "search inside" features that allowed me to check out a little bit of what they have in their tables of contents.
I started with h-net reviews, and despite the somewhat mixed review, Magdalena Waligoska's Klezmer's Afterlife: An Ethnography of the Jewish Music Revival in Germany and Poland looks pretty fascinating. Published by Oxford University Press in 2013, this is a book about the rise of non-Jewish Klezmer bands in Poland and Germany in the present day and gets at larger questions about the meaning of Jewishness in Post-Holocaust Europe.
If, like me, you're a fan of the Brooklyn-based Ukrainian surrealist self-proclaimed "gypsy" punk band Gogol Bordello you might be interested in reading Mirjana Lausevic's Balkan Fascination which is about American engagement with the music of the Balkans. If you are not sure what that looks like, take a look at GB's critique of the U.S. culture in "American Wedding" below. I think this video also captures the connection of music to larger cultural experiences, so that we understand at the outset we don't only experience music as "audiences" in formal sit-down concerts or in solitary listening environments.
Another book exploring transnational music subcultures that has received a lot of positive critical attention is Emma Baulch's Making Scenes: Reggae, Punk and Death Metal in 1990s Bali published by Duke University Press in 2007. As the title suggests, this book is based on years of fieldwork by the author in Indonesia. Looking across multiple scenes instead of concentrating on one, Metal Rules the Globe as you are probably not surprised to learn, describes and analyzes contemporary heavy metal through multiple essays on fans and music around the world.
An influential ethnographic study of music that I often recommend to students interested in studying subcultures, or just US immigrant culture more generally, is Sunaina Marr Maira's Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in NYC. Maira's insights are really sharp and her writing is quite accessible. This is a book that explores the NY Bhangra scene and connects it to gender, race, religion, and other dynamics in second-generation immigrant youth identity formation in the U.S.
Perhaps you are more interested in staying within the borders of the US and exploring local music scenes. If so, you would do well to check out ethno-musicologist, Christopher Scales' book, Recording Cultures an ethnographic analysis of Native American Powwow singers, both in the context of large inter-tribal powwows and the recording industry which supports indigenous music and connects these artists to each other.
For fans of jazz, Matt Sakakeeny's Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans gets high marks from NOLA-based American Studies scholar, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs. This will take you into the Treme neighborhood beyond what you've seen in the popular television show, both celebrating the music and describing problems related to gentrification and the mixed blessing of the tourism economy for New Orleans jazz musicians.
If country music is your thing, Aaron Fox's Real Country, is an ethnographic study of how music pervades daily life in working-class communities in the town of Lockhart, Texas. This book, as the title suggests, provides a contrast to the commercial country scene and sound of Nashville. In addition to being a Columbia University professor, the author is also a musician and a radio DJ.
For another side of Texas, one of the most fascinating current music cultures in the Americas surrounds the Narcocorrido. I first learned about these in a lecture about the famous singer Chalino by journalist Sam Quinones. Mark Edberg's ethnographic study El Narcotraficante brings deeper analysis and is certainly bound to be more nuanced than a certain television show you may have heard something about.
And finally for hip-hop fans, last but not least. It looks like I'll have to make time to read Marcyliena Morgan's The Real Hip Hop, an ethnographic study of the LA hip-hop scene and Saja Fernandes's Close to the Edge, a sociological account of global hip. Morgan is the director of the Hip-Hop archive at Harvard University. Here is a video of the Morgan talking to Mark Anthony Neal on his show Left of Black, about her work and the origins of the archive.
If you're not sure what it is, ethnographic research is defined by participant-observation. This method requires that the person doing the study immerse himself or herself in a culture or subculture, observing and taking notes on uses of languages, ways of interacting, and generally making fine-grained observations and commentary on the details of daily life. It is the present-day study of how a culture defines itself, produces meaning and approaches the world, most commonly practiced in anthropology and sociology. Reading an ethnography of a musical culture is likely not just to tell you about musicians and their history, but to immerse you in the life-ways surrounding a music that you love. If you are a fan and read about your own fan culture, you may also learn something new through the encountering scholarly observations of your scene, though you might not always like what you read or find that it fits your own experiences.
Most of the ethnographic studies of music that I am familiar with through teaching are about Anglo and American music fans, music-related youth subcultures, and /or music scenes. The classic subculture studies described England's punks, skinheads, mods, and rockers and were later criticized for their single-minded emphasis on the formation of masculine working-class identities. One more recent US-based study of the punk subculture that draws on these classic studies, but emphasizes girls' experience is Lauraine LeBlanc's Pretty in Punk, an auto-ethnographic analysis of the 1990s US punk scene that is strongly flavored by the author's ambivalance about her role as an academic.
While this is a fine study and a quick read, you might also think about exploring the field of ethno-musicology, which takes an anthropological approach to musical cultures and which has led to studies of musicians and scenes around the world. There are a tremendous number of studies that go beyond personal memoir or journalism. Particularly because of the growth of international music media and production, many of these explore international and transnational music cultures and bring fresh insights into how people experience culture locally while interacting in a global mediascape.
While I have not read the majority of books suggested in this post, I practice a pretty strong Google-Fu and found them by searching through book reviews and "search inside" features that allowed me to check out a little bit of what they have in their tables of contents.
I started with h-net reviews, and despite the somewhat mixed review, Magdalena Waligoska's Klezmer's Afterlife: An Ethnography of the Jewish Music Revival in Germany and Poland looks pretty fascinating. Published by Oxford University Press in 2013, this is a book about the rise of non-Jewish Klezmer bands in Poland and Germany in the present day and gets at larger questions about the meaning of Jewishness in Post-Holocaust Europe.
If, like me, you're a fan of the Brooklyn-based Ukrainian surrealist self-proclaimed "gypsy" punk band Gogol Bordello you might be interested in reading Mirjana Lausevic's Balkan Fascination which is about American engagement with the music of the Balkans. If you are not sure what that looks like, take a look at GB's critique of the U.S. culture in "American Wedding" below. I think this video also captures the connection of music to larger cultural experiences, so that we understand at the outset we don't only experience music as "audiences" in formal sit-down concerts or in solitary listening environments.
Another book exploring transnational music subcultures that has received a lot of positive critical attention is Emma Baulch's Making Scenes: Reggae, Punk and Death Metal in 1990s Bali published by Duke University Press in 2007. As the title suggests, this book is based on years of fieldwork by the author in Indonesia. Looking across multiple scenes instead of concentrating on one, Metal Rules the Globe as you are probably not surprised to learn, describes and analyzes contemporary heavy metal through multiple essays on fans and music around the world.
An influential ethnographic study of music that I often recommend to students interested in studying subcultures, or just US immigrant culture more generally, is Sunaina Marr Maira's Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in NYC. Maira's insights are really sharp and her writing is quite accessible. This is a book that explores the NY Bhangra scene and connects it to gender, race, religion, and other dynamics in second-generation immigrant youth identity formation in the U.S.
For fans of jazz, Matt Sakakeeny's Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans gets high marks from NOLA-based American Studies scholar, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs. This will take you into the Treme neighborhood beyond what you've seen in the popular television show, both celebrating the music and describing problems related to gentrification and the mixed blessing of the tourism economy for New Orleans jazz musicians.
If country music is your thing, Aaron Fox's Real Country, is an ethnographic study of how music pervades daily life in working-class communities in the town of Lockhart, Texas. This book, as the title suggests, provides a contrast to the commercial country scene and sound of Nashville. In addition to being a Columbia University professor, the author is also a musician and a radio DJ.
For another side of Texas, one of the most fascinating current music cultures in the Americas surrounds the Narcocorrido. I first learned about these in a lecture about the famous singer Chalino by journalist Sam Quinones. Mark Edberg's ethnographic study El Narcotraficante brings deeper analysis and is certainly bound to be more nuanced than a certain television show you may have heard something about.
And finally for hip-hop fans, last but not least. It looks like I'll have to make time to read Marcyliena Morgan's The Real Hip Hop, an ethnographic study of the LA hip-hop scene and Saja Fernandes's Close to the Edge, a sociological account of global hip. Morgan is the director of the Hip-Hop archive at Harvard University. Here is a video of the Morgan talking to Mark Anthony Neal on his show Left of Black, about her work and the origins of the archive.
