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Entrance to the Larco Museum of Pre-Columbian History in Lima, Peru. Why should all these pictures be party pictures, anyway?

This is Part III of a multi-part submission from Luis-Manuel Garcia on nightlife ethnographic praxis. You can see Part I here and Part II here. LMGM/Luis-Manuel is a Canadian of Peruvian-Colombian origins, migrating between Toronto, Berlin, Chicago, and Paris. He has managed to turn his love of electronic dance music into a PhD in Ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago, and into a post-doctoral fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin. On the side, he writes about food and dances every chance he gets. You can find him at LMGM, The Blog, as well as his website.

This is the last installment of the series on fieldwork methodology for ethnographic research in nightlife scenes—in other words, how to study a dance music scene without getting in the way. In the first installment, I posted a brief list of problems that nightlife scenes pose to conventional modes of ethnographic research. Unsurprisingly, most of those issues had to do with the circumstances of EDM (electronic dance music) events themselves; and so, I subsequently wrote another article on “going out” for fieldwork, mostly detailing my own methods and giving a few bits of general advice. Today’s post (and the final one in this series) covers a more conventional but no less important aspect of music ethnography: interviews! While the process of actually interviewing someone off-site (i.e., away from an EDM event) is pretty similar to other interviewing situations, there are some important things to keep in mind when trying to secure these interviews and ensuring confidentiality.

Interviewing Party People

When preparing to do fieldwork for the first time, it may be tempting to see interviews as the easiest part of the fieldwork process. Anyone can ask questions, right? You just need to write up a list of questions and then put them to a bunch of people and record their answers. But no, there are lots of things to think about and to make decisions about: how will you phrase your questions in order to get the richest and most accurate/honest information? Considering that the interviewee’s time is limited, how many questions will you ask and which will take priority? How do you get interviewees in the first place? How will you protect the interviewee’s identity? Will you record the interview, take handwritten notes, or both? Where will you conduct the interview? Will you ask uncomfortable questions? How will you analyze the interview afterwards? And then, after dealing with all of those decisions, there’s still the tricky social performance of maintaining the flow of conversation.
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Mutek, Montréal, 2008

This is Part II of a multi-part submission from Luis-Manuel Garcia on nightlife ethnographic praxis. You can see Part I here. LMGM/Luis-Manuel is a Canadian of Peruvian-Colombian origins, migrating between Toronto, Berlin, Chicago, and Paris. He has managed to turn his love of electronic dance music into a PhD in Ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago, and into a post-doctoral fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin. On the side, he writes about food and dances every chance he gets. You can find him at LMGM, The Blog, as well as his website.

To review: last time, I wrote “Doing Nightlife Fieldwork,” which claimed that there wasn’t enough helpful writing out there on how to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in nightlife scenes. It’s a problem, I think, that we don’t at least have a shared idea of what “best practices” would look like; this is an important ethical and institutional issue for EDM studies, for sure. I listed a few ways that nightlife settings throw a wrench in conventional ethnographic methods and invited readers to write in the comments and/or write response-posts on their own blogs. The comments have already been great, and there’s talk of a few of my EDM-scholars-with-blogs buddies preparing their own posts. Today, I’m going to focus on one of the main elements of music ethnography: attending music events and engaging in participant-observation. I’ll describe how I do this in my own research, and then I’ll follow it with a short list of tips and notes that are more general and hopefully useful to other ethnographers reading this. I’m admittedly far from the most experienced ethnographer out there, but I’m hoping this will be of some use to younger scholars—and also encourage more experienced ones to share their knowledge, too.

Going Out (a.k.a., Doing Participant-Observation)

Participant-observation is exactly what it sounds like: you take part in a cultural activity, and—over time—you learn things about that activity that you wouldn’t have discovered just by watching from a distance. There’s a lot more to it, of course: you also build social connections into the community, prompt pedagogical interactions where experts explain a lot of the “unwritten rules,” and develop an expertise in that activity that makes you more credible when you talk about it to other people outside the community (e.g., other scholars). Even more importantly, ongoing participant-observation creates a sort of “archive of experience,” from which you will draw to gain a more intuitive understanding of how things work, what’s appropriate, what things mean, etc. For decades now, participant-observation has been preferred over pure observation as a means of studying musical practices—or any practice, really; this is especially true in anthropology, but also in certain branches of sociology (one of the earliest being the Chicago School of Sociology).
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Kiki and Silversurfer @ Le Rex, Paris, 2007

Over the next three days, we’ll be posting a multi-part submission from Luis-Manuel Garcia. LMGM/Luis-Manuel is a Canadian of Peruvian-Colombian origins, migrating between Toronto, Berlin, Chicago, and Paris. He has managed to turn his love of electronic dance music into a PhD in Ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago, and into a post-doctoral fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin. On the side, he writes about food and dances every chance he gets. You can find him at LMGM, The Blog, as well as his website.

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a book entitled, “How To Do Fieldwork in Nightclubs and Bars?” Certainly, when I was working on my own dissertation, I wished that other nightlife-researchers would be more open about their methods and more generous about giving advice to new ethnographers of nocturnal scenes. To be honest, a fair number of nightlife-researchers have published some details about their methods; it’s usually tucked away discreetly in an appendix or in a section of the introductory chapter. But these brief methodological reflections often too lacking in detail to be instructive and—frankly—I’m not always satisfied with their solutions to the problems of nightlife fieldwork. Despite all my griping, I have been guided by the methods of some nightlife researchers, such as Fiona Buckland in her book Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making (2002).

In any case, very few nightlife ethnographers actually describe their research methods in detail, even though the circumstances of nocturnal scenes often pose difficult challenges to conventional fieldwork methods. Just a few of these are:

1. Exposing/endangering night-lives: the nocturnal world is different from everyday, public life. People often allow themselves to do things at night (in clubs, bars, bathhouses, etc.) that they would/could not during the daytime. Some people couldn’t care less if their boss/parents/co-workers know that they dance, do drugs, go to fetish bars, dress in drag, etc. Others would be mortified. And there’s more than just embarrassment involved: a breach of confidentiality might end up getting someone fired, divorced, ostracized, or even physically hurt. So, how do you respect the boundaries between a person’s nighttime persona and her/his “real” life?

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