Anthropology Matters Journal, 2006, Vol 8 (2)

From Play to Knowledge

Editor: Ingie Hovland
Guest editors on this issue: Suzanne Langer and Emily Walmsley

Editorial: From play to knowledge: a workshop on ethnographic methodology

Susanne Langer (Cardiff University), Emily Walmsley (Keele University), Hannah Knox (University of Manchester) and Mattia Fumanti (University of Manchester)

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Articles

How dancing, singing and playing shape the ethnographer: research with children in a Balinese dance studio

Jonathan McIntosh (Queen's University Belfast)

In this article I contribute to the debate on research methods in ethnomusicology. To do this I illustrate how active engagement in the activities and learning processes of children better enables the ethnographer to gain insights into children's musical worlds. This is borne out of my research concerning children's practice and performance of dance, music and song in South-central Bali. The principle aim of my research was to examine the role of music and dance in the everyday lives of Balinese children. This was achieved through an investigation of children's learning and performance of ceremonial and secular traditional dance forms, children's songs and games, and children's disco dance performances. Taking Corsaro's (1985) 'reactive approach', which is responding to or following the children's wishes as my key fieldwork strategy, I show how I developed a basic practical knowledge of Balinese dance and children's songs. This knowledge then made it easier for me to communicate with children and for them to invite me to participate in their music, dance and play activities. I demonstrate that such occasions were beneficial to my research work, because in allowing me to gain insights into their learning of traditional dance and to learn about their songs and games, my potential child-informants also had an opportunity to discover who I was and why I wanted to learn from them.

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From play to knowledge: from visual to verbal?

Lucy Atkinson (University of Edinburgh)

This article relates my experiences using playful child-centred research techniques whilst undertaking research with Congolese refugee children in Zambia. Such techniques generate rich and varied information, and often in unexpected ways. They also create a format whereby the researcher and the children can interact and form relationships outside the usual social relationships of adult and child, researcher and informant. Given play's classification as enjoyable, social and educational, play as an aspect of fieldwork can be involved in a range of different ways of gathering and presenting anthropological knowledge. Through play we build different kinds of relationships, experience different kinds of interaction and therefore gather different kinds of information. Play in fieldwork therefore leads to different kinds of knowledge, but it also leads to knowledge presented in different forms-visual, embodied performative and experiential. Given the prioritisation of written forms in academia, the way in which these forms of representation can be used in the presentation of knowledge is not straightforward. The challenge to anthropology is how these different forms of knowledge are valued and translated.

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The arts of the remix: ethnography and rap

Brett Lashua (Cardiff University)

In this paper I take note of 'the arts of the remix', in which techniques of producing hip-hop music with First Nations young people in Canada involved remixing both music and research practices. Through a school-based leisure programme called The Beat of Boyle Street, I taught Aboriginal young people to use computers and audio software to make, produce, and record their own hip-hop music. The programme's research component involved a bricolage of arts-based and performance ethnographic techniques and analyses. The shared music-making process opened space for storytelling, and the songs that were produced articulated many of the struggles and hopes of First Nations youth.

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Playing in the field: participant observation and the investigation of intersubjective knowledge in jazz improvisation

Will Gibson (Institute of Education, London)

This paper investigates the use of intersubjective knowledge in the production of improvised jazz performance. I describe an approach to participant observation in which recordings of the researcher and research participants improvising musical performances together were used as 'texts' for framing discussions. A key methodological challenge in this investigation involved encouraging informants to provide sufficiently detailed verbal accounts of their common-sense knowledge. Through using these musical texts, the informants were able to provide a contextually rich commentary; in this way, our 'play' became a topic of conversation which shed light on the very practices I was interested in researching.

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Making mountains, producing narratives, or: 'One day some poor sod will write their Ph.D. on this'

By Katrín Lund (University of Iceland)

This paper looks at ways of narrating mountaineering experiences in Scotland. I shall examine how mountaineers organise and abstract their experiences in the form of lists, logbooks, photographs and drawings, and compare to the official listing of Scotland's topography. My argument is that when storing experiences in various material forms, mountaineers are creating their own personal topographies. These entail narratives invested through the bodily act of moving over the ground on foot. Not only are these narratives a form of play, through which mountaineers reanimate their experiences, but they are also often transformed into documents, such as logbooks, diaries, or collections of photographs and drawings. Although the topographies as created in these documents may appear to be frozen in time, I suggest that they continue to generate the movements in which they are grounded. As such they are part of an unfinished and ultimately unfinishable jigsaw puzzle. This will lead me to consider what anthropologists can learn about their own ways of organising and abstracting their experiences from examining the material culture of mountaineers.

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