Intro Post - What this Blog is For

Well, hi. This post marks the decidedly un-grand entrance of the Yiddish Singing Fieldblog. It's quite likely that this is not the first blog to serve as a technological supplement to the humble field note (a mainstay of ethnographic fieldwork since Malinowski), but it is the first that i know of.

The purpose of this blog is twofold: 1) to serve as a convenient home for observations, thoughts, theories, and descriptions that come out of my research; and 2) to make a space where other people, particularly my friends/informants/comrades in the Yiddish music scene, can debate, criticize, corroborate, challenge or otherwise discuss them.

I'm an ethnomusicology student at the front end of a year or so of dissertation research, in this case ethnographic fieldwork. So, I left the warm familiarity of Providence, RI to move to the exotic concrete jungle of Brooklyn, NY. It's not that all the Yiddish singers I'm interested in live in New York - no such luck with a diaspora community - but a higher concentration are to be found here than just about anywhere else. "The field" is not Brooklyn or New York city, but a less cohesive, non-geographic, imagined entity, best called "Yiddishland".

Traditional ethnographic research methods were designed for long, intensive, immersion experiences in small, cohesive, bounded communities. This is not to say that urban ethnography or diaspora ethnography is completely new or cutting edge - it's been going on for several decades, usually as the second or third projects of scholars whose careers were established on the more traditional model. But, innovations in methodology and how we think about fieldwork haven't come along as quickly as "the field" itself has changed. So, in some sense, keeping this blog is my attempt to force the tool to fit the job: unconventional field notes for an unconventional field setting.

Working in a large, dispersed, urban scene with an even larger, more dispersed community means that opportunities for interaction are much less frequent than in traditional field settings, and they almost always occur in the midst of discreet, framed, heightened events (performances, festivals, interviews, etc.). I know that electronic communication in writing cannot fully capture the relaxed and spontaneous informality of the interactions that occur while running into someone on the street, guesting in their house, or sharing meals together - the kind of "deep hanging out" that fieldwork was made for. But, i hope it can at least create the possibility of a low pressure exchange not often found in the dark corner of a loud rock club or among the frantic engergy of a music festival or even the most friendly of prearranged interviews.

I hope the format and content of this blog will change and grow with time and as my fieldwork agenda changes - from observation to interviews to surveys and back. Soon to come are thoughts on "the field" as a concept, some notes and thoughts on events I attended last month, and possibly exciting news about the creation of an organization for Yiddish cultural workers.