Atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen has been widely credited with popularising the concept of the Anthropocene (Reference Crutzen2002). The term had been around for decades before the Nobel Laureate popularised the concept, but it quickly gained traction around the turn of the millennium (Steffen et al. Reference Steffen, Grinevald, Crutzen and McNeill2011). Alarmed to discover that a hole in the Earth's ozone layer had been caused by humans, Crutzen and colleagues began arguing that Homo sapiens have been having such a widespread impact on the world that the current epoch should be given an appellation, such as the ‘Anthropocene’, that would indicate an unprecedented level of anthropogenic impact. Human population growth (Fischer-Kowalski et al. Reference Fischer-Kowalski, Krausmann and Pallua2014), extractive industries, and excessive consumption (Williams et al. Reference Williams, Zalasiewicz, Waters, Edgeworth, Bennett, Barnosky, Ellis, Ellis, Cearreta, Haff and Ivar do Sul2016) are among the causes of climate change, degraded ecosystems, and declining biodiversity. Each of these has been cited as definitive aspects and indicators of the Anthropocene (Lewis and Maslin Reference Lewis and Maslin2015).
Of course, concern for environmental crisis extends well beyond the physical sciences. Studying environmental matters has become recognised as an exigency in all professions, disciplines and fields. That is why this special issue of Popular Music is so timely. Per the editors’ call, ‘The Anthropocene Era implies that we must engage societies in a socio-ecological transition towards less destructive forms of living, forcing us to reconsider the concept and the consequences of modernity itself’ (Editors’ CFP Reference Ribac and Harkins2018). That includes music studies and is the reason we undertook the intensive project described in this article. Our goal here is mostly methodological, however, rather than largely theoretical. We agree with most of the points put forth in the editors’ Introduction. However, when trying to reach beyond those premises, we, like scholars worldwide, enter Plato's Cave. Each of us understands the Anthropocene from a slightly different vantage point. It would be next to impossible for five authors from different disciplines to craft a coherent theoretical treatise on the meaning of the Anthropocene, or even come to a consensual definition. However, our disciplinary diversity has greatly enriched and made possible the methodological experimentation that is the main focus of this article.
Yet, before doing so it is incumbent upon us to provide at least a working definition of what we mean when using the term Anthropocene: the advent of the Anthropocene, as discourse, represents a growing recognition that human beings have been radically transforming the planet. We are in the midst of the ‘sixth great extinction’, the first one caused primarily by human actions, institutions, and technologies. Climate change, environmental inequity, and greatly degraded environments, all definitive trends of the epoch, demand our attention.
Given such a recognition of environmental exigency, methods designed for another era may no longer be sufficient. We may no longer, for example, simply be able to hop into jet aircraft to study distant locations and cultures without accepting that we too are part of the problem (Wilde and Nevins Reference Wilde and Nevins2019; Grant et al. Reference Grant, Pettigrew and Collins2017). However, the contradictions and conundrums of travel are among many sticky problems that will remain stuck here. Instead, we offer it as an obvious and somewhat dramatic example of methodological issues that will need to be addressed if we are to take the Anthropocene more seriously. Toward that end, here we consider changes in methodology that may help us to collaborate more actively with the communities we study as they confront specific environmental challenges. To advance our methodological experimentation, we formed a collaboration entitled Field to Media: Exploring Environmental Crisis Via Musical Performance & Media Production and hope that the method may ultimately be of use to fellow music scholars concerned about the environmental exigencies of the Anthropocene.Footnote 1
What is Field to Media?
Field to Media involves using video production to study and amplify ecomusical responses to climate change, pollution, deforestation and other environmental challenges. With the term ‘ecomusical’, we are referring to forms of musical practice that engage environmental questions at the local level. In each of five field sites, we are making musical media together with our collaborators,Footnote 2 which we see as a process of co-production that blends action research and ethnography. Each of our five subprojects and communities are confronting distinct environmental challenges, ranging from noise pollution and commercial extractionist practices to assaults on biodiversity, to water pollution and deforestation.
It is not so much the use of digital video that distinguishes the Field to Media collaboration, but rather the degree to which we are integrating media production and musical performance into the research process. As opposed to most documentary film productions, these are musical video co-productions from the very start, and are envisioned as media that will directly serve a community need. It is our contention that a highly engaged, community-based, production-oriented methodology can provide insights into local musical cultures and contexts.
To test that notion directly, each of us is conducting a Field to Media experiment with our field collaborators. Pedelty made a music video about noise pollution (Pedelty Reference Pedelty2018) along with a large community of musicians, scientists, organisers, and residents, all of whom share concerns over the impact of machine noise on marine animals and human beings in the Salish Sea region of Canada and the United States. Hatfield and her colleagues recorded traditional songs that speak about traditional ways to collect and use natural resources in Yaeda Chini, Tanzania, which is contrasted with commercial activities that are threatening traditional lands. Roy co-created a musical videoFootnote 3 with artists-activists in Dhaka, Bangladesh, who are creating music to save the Sundarbans, the worlds’ largest mangrove forest, from industrial encroachment. Pang composed, choreographed, and co-performed a piece about water pollution of the Funan River in Chengdu, China, drawing on her childhood experiences, current contacts, and field travel. Dirksen is working with Haitian colleagues on completing a music video about deforestation and desertification and the importance of planting trees, with the aim of releasing these videos online and through Haitian media networks.Footnote 4
In short, through this work we hope to catalyse discussion and help our colleagues to engage and mobilise their communities – and in the process gain insight into local ecomusical cultures. In this article we seek to begin critically assessing the results of these experiments, focusing mainly on the methodological aspects of Field to Media. We assess that these field-based experiments indicate strong potential for media production to serve a more central role within fieldwork: co-production may help us to engage the material, social, and ethical challenges of the Anthropocene more directly and creatively. We are exploring the liminal space between ethnographic fieldwork, art, activism, and popular music.
The mediating role of communication technologies in ethnographic fieldwork
Field to Media is not new when it comes to the basic idea of employing digital technologies in the field. Ethnographic film and photography are commonplace, as are audio recordings, especially in ethnomusicology (see, for example, Baily Reference Baily1989; Feld Reference Feld2003; Gubner Reference Gubner2018; Harbert Reference Harbert2018; Zemp Reference Zemp1988). However, in the case of ethnographic video, at least, media production has tended to be completed in serial fashion: the ethnographer conducts fieldwork and then documents it on film. Video is viewed as a means of documentation and distribution rather than being central to the ethnographer's participant observation. Yet media have been an integral part of ethnography since its inception. Early ethnographers, including Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski, used pen and paper to take notes in the field. Academic publishing houses used typeset technologies to publish their ethnographic work. Well over a century after Boas began his fieldwork, note taking remains a common ethnographic practice. Although the terms ‘medium’ and ‘media’ are more often employed in association with electronic technologies, all material conveyances of communication are ‘media’. Therefore, the integration of electronic media, such as audio- and video-recording devices, is in some ways supplementary rather than revolutionary. The ethnographer–collaborator relationship, like all human relationships, is partly mediated by technology, whether that technology is hand-and-paint cave art or touch-and-shoot videography.
Audio recordings, film, and video became commonplace in ethnographic field research as portable recording technologies became more readily accessible. For example, anthropologists have long used photographs as a heuristic tool. John Collier (Reference Collier1967) coined the term ‘photo elicitation’, which involves using photographs to stimulate responses (Harper Reference Harper2002). Photo elicitation is central to the subfield of visual ethnography, a field that has effectively incorporated video as well (Pink Reference Pink2013). Nor is fieldwork mediation limited to visual technologies: ethnomusicologists have used portable recording devices to capture and share music made by collaborators almost as long as they have existed (Brady Reference Brady1999).
Still, many ethnographers remain wary of the mediating influence of audio-recorders, video cameras, and microphones in the field. If the goal is to create rapport with colleagues in the field, some ethnographers argue, the conspicuous presence of technology may interfere with face-to-face interactions. However, whether we bring such media-making tools to bear or not, our collaborators’ lives, identities, and social interactions are mediated by complex technologies of transportation, entertainment, and communication long before we arrive. In such a world, there is no such thing as an unmediated face-to-face interaction.
Most of our collaborators are just as accustomed to media as the average ethnographer, whether they live in a rural village in the Global South or an urban centre in Europe. In a world of cell phones, televisual culture and globalised media, electronically mediated encounters are no less authentic than a conversation around the proverbial hearth. That is not to say that our first encounters in the field should involve cameras. Yet all of us found our collaborators to be very open to collaborative media making. In fact, we found making media with collaborating communities to be no more or less awkward and out of synch with quotidian experience than traditional ethnographic interviews.
Bi-musicality, co-production and collaborative ethnography
Performing with musician-informants – often referred to as ‘bi-musicality’ (Hood Reference Hood1960) – is a well-established method in ethnomusicology. In fact, bi-musicality is so fundamental to ethnomusicological methodology that Michelle Bigenho (Reference Bigenho and Stobart2008) views it as a dividing line between anthropological and ethnomusicological fieldwork. Bigenho asserts that ‘the ethnomusicologist label also carries with it expectations about a researcher's position as a participating musician’ (p. 29). For that and other reasons, Bigenho does not consider herself to be an ethnomusicologist, despite the fact that her fieldwork involves music. Bigenho's claim is not completely accurate. Bi-musicality is not a defining trait in and of itself, as not all ethnomusicologists perform with collaborators in the field. Furthermore, there are a number of musicologists, anthropologists, popular music scholars, and scholars from other fields that do perform with their collaborators. Nevertheless, Bigenho's perception of ethnomusicology indicates that bi-musicality is fairly commonplace. Field to Media simply stretches the epistemological principles of bi-musicality to broader contexts of performance and production. In sum, the antecedents for Field to Media methodology are well established.
Co-production is already an established practice in filmmaking. Although the progressive intent of co-production is often undone by the pressures of time, financing, institutional frameworks, personalities, and neo-colonial power differentials (Rangan Reference Rangan2010), many filmmakers strive toward collective methods of production. In that regard, Field to Media does not represent an entirely new approach. The project is more combinatory and integrative than revolutionary. We are updating, expanding, integrating and adding to antecedent field and media production methodologies. In league with action researchers, we see such fieldwork as a praxis through which academics and field collaborators alike can contribute to positive social change, and not just as a source for academic discovery. Co-production requires us to form communities with the people that we encounter in the field, taking on more defined and purposeful roles alongside and with them. In other words, this is about creating ‘intentional communities’ gathered around shared concerns about the environment. In addition, it involves presenting media as tools for forming these intentional communities. Rather than view this as a divergence from traditional ethnographic practice, we understand it to be a more explicit recognition of the intersubjective, productive, and creative dimensions that have always been part of the ethnographic encounter.
Pen, paper, typeset, video cameras, audio recorders, and musical instruments are not just translational media, but also social organising devices. They mediate relationships in life and in the metaphorical ‘field’. After all, rarely is ethnographic fieldwork conducted in an actual field, but rather in a diverse range of settings that, like all places, are semiotically constructed realities in a specific time and space. How we co-occupy and construct such places and moments is partly mediated by technology, technique, and tradition. For example, in order to complete a quality video production people must take on fairly well-defined roles in relation to each other, much as is the case in a family, village, political institution, workplace, band, and so on. In most of our Field to Media projects, collaborators were involved in the entire range of roles: producers, directors, composers, production designers, script writers, artists, musicians, on-screen talent, editors, audio designers, audio engineers, and so forth. It is not completely unlike the role creation that takes place during traditional ethnographic fieldwork, albeit perhaps more complex and explicit.
It would be disingenuous to claim, however, that such roles are evenly distributed or completely non-hierarchical. Such claims of equitable relationships could obfuscate and thus legitimate actual hierarchies involved in fieldwork and media production or, in this case, media production-as-fieldwork. Equitable and mutually satisfying Field and Media relationships are an ideal that is certainly not always actualised in practice. Once roles, statuses and identities are differentiated – as is the case for both fieldwork and media production – it is difficult if not impossible to completely flatten out the hierarchies brought to the field as well as those that develop in production, although to do so remains a central ethic. Given the difficulties of achieving true equity, principles of free association are perhaps equally important. For example, during any given moment of production, a musician may not have the same level of agency as the director, and the reverse may be true during a moment of musical creation. Yet a shared ethic of coming together willingly for a shared purpose can prevail throughout. Differentials in power can be consciously recognised, discussed, and reduced. Again, the parallel between fieldwork and media production is clear. Ethnographers enter into communities with externally defined roles, statuses and identities in tow, and no community is without its inequitable power relations. As scholars involved in such work, reflexivity remains key to avoiding pretence and achieving insight in relation to shared goals and orientations.
Field to Media methodology presupposes that our field collaborators will have some sense of how media is made. Fortunately, most people do have at least a rudimentary sense of how to engage in at least one media-making role, including serving as talent (e.g. musician), organiser, caterer, accountant, videographer, and so on. Everyone has something to contribute. We were jumping into the creative space together, working around a shared problem and towards a consensual end, although we need to reflexively admit that we enter the field with some sense of what we want to achieve as scholar-producers. Yet, in the spirit of co-production, our intentions are just a starting point. The end and on-going results bear little resemblance to what any of us imagined at the start. Again, it is not unlike traditional ethnography in that regard, and Field to Media is perhaps even less predictable.
Yet it is often assumed that colleagues in the field hold a priori cultural reality and therefore have a set of needs, problems, and interests to which we can and should respond as ethnographers. The traditional ethnographic goal is to capture collaborators’ perspectives while being reflexively aware of how one's own orientations diverge from those worldviews and thus influence our ethnographic representations of studied communities. At its best that represents a progressive ethic to learn from previously (and still) marginalised others. At worst it is neo-colonial noblesse oblige. Field to Media takes the deconstruction of positivistic ethnographer/collaborator binaries a step further. Since the 1960s various ethnographers have noted that we do not study pre-existing, static realities or ‘cultures’ in the bounded or synchronic sense. Culture is not a thing to be identified, but rather an active semiotic process. Therefore, ethnography is a creative process as well, taking place in a liminal, fluid and polysemic space. Referring to that space as ‘the field’ may retain too much of the positivistic, natural history origins of ethnography. ‘A moment of time and place’ may be more accurate than the more static implications of ‘the field’. We know that in telling stories from ‘the field’ we relate Rashomon-like realities. In studying culture, we are examining constellations of imagined collectivities (Anderson Reference Anderson1983), mostly in the form of stories. Moving image media are ideal for doing so. Therefore, rather than trying to minimise the creative quality of fieldwork we are attempting to embrace it. In Freirean parlance, the truths we seek are dialogic (Freire Reference Freire1968; Pedelty Reference Pedelty2017, pp. 75–8), rather than authoritative, static and singular.
We recognise that there are dangers and ethical conundrums involved in thinking about ethnography as a productive space – and as a space of production. Instead of valuing divergent perspectives, we may use that as pretence to accidently erase and overrun others’ complex realities. Deconstructive semiotic theory can become another way for privileged ethnographers to misrepresent subaltern others. In an attempt to work against that danger, we have drawn on Freirean principles to try to make this a more ethical and equitable experiment in community-based co-production (Pedelty Reference Pedelty2017).
In initially choosing which communities to work with we align ourselves to the problem in specific ways. As Latour (Reference Latour2014) and environmental anthropologists noted long before him (i.e. Steward Reference Steward1941), the material world is not fully subject to human interpretation and will constantly remind us of that fact if we forget. In other words, human beings cannot simply wish away climate change, deforestation, noise pollution, or toxins. As an extension of that point, material change requires some material action. Therefore, we self-consciously chose activist communities as the starting point, people who are consciously engaging environmental threats in ways that could potentially affect policy, structure, institutions, and behaviours so that the material problems in question may hopefully themselves be addressed. There is intentionality from the outset, a joining-in of effort.
With all of the above possibilities in mind, we took on the task of testing the Field to Media methodology. In the following sections we will provide a brief synopsis of each subproject. From the outset we had planned to roll out the subprojects in stages, with some delaying their co-production fieldwork until summer of the second year, 2019. Therefore, the projects range from mostly completed to in production. We recommend that the reader view each of the published videos to fully understand and effectively evaluate the following overview.
LOUD: Mark Pedelty
The Anthropocene is exceedingly loud and becoming more so. Nowhere is that clearer than in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring , where the silences caused by extinction are more than offset by the incessant ‘noise of motors’, as she notes in the Introduction (Reference Carson2002, p. 12). In fact, anthropogenic noise is affecting the health, foraging, reproduction, and communication of a number of social species (Shannon et al. Reference Shannon, McKenna, Angeloni, Crooks, Fristrup, Brown, Warner, Nelson, White, Briggs, McFarland and Wittemyer2016), including our own. In response to this problem and in recognition of local concerns over the impacts of anthropogenic noise on orca whales, I directed LOUD (2018), a music video about noise pollution in the Salish Sea of British Columbia and Washington State. LOUD was released on 19 October 2018, and may be viewed at https://www.ecosong.band/loud-1. It has since been circulated among the local environmental non-profit and activist community. LOUD was also submitted to film festivals and selected by three.
LOUD attempts to capture the aspirational ethic Jeff Todd Titon put forth in calling for ‘a sound commons for all living creatures’ (2012). The goal was to take part in, and study, the on-going mobilisation of local communities that are seeking to limit anthropogenic noise on and in the Salish Sea. LOUD was also inspired by Denise Von Glahn's writings in regard to ‘skillful listening’ (Von Glahn Reference Von Glahn2013), the idea that we can achieve healthier and more sustainable soundscapes through learning to listen more effectively to the sounds surrounding us, and to each other. In LOUD, each instrumentalist's, singer's, artist's, scientist's, engineer's, activist's, and organiser's contribution took the project in a slightly new direction. The video was originally storyboarded and scripted as a single-setting piece evoking an underwater kelp-forest. Various more-than-human characters, similar to the one performed by Felicia Harding – a fantastical mermaid-like creature – were going to deliver the musical message via choreographed movement. Instead, the video is mostly a montage skipping from site to site, presenting singers in various contemporary outfits that represent no consistent motif or aesthetic.
Challenges associated with cross-border collaboration, time, financing, and logistics, as well as collectively made decisions, led to a video that may not be as aesthetically consistent as designed or as successful as past Ecosong.net music videos when it comes to environmental messaging. Film festival juries are reinforcing that suspicion. The fault is entirely my own, because the on screen talent is incredible. Yet a number of very positive responses from around the Salish Sea region indicate that the video hit home for some viewers nonetheless. For example, a Washington legislator involved in a key noise bill, as well as local activists, scientists, and community organisers weighed in with praise. Whether or not LOUD was an aesthetic success, it was an insightful field experience, revealing new knowledge in regard to ecomusical genre expectations among active audiences, gender representation, the continued resonance of international boundaries, and interspecies communication.
At the risk of sounding clichéd, the artistic achievements of the piece can be ascribed to the talent, crew, and community, whereas the limitations can be attributed to me as the director. Starting with the question of genre, the song seems to resonate with audiences better when performed as a contemplative singer-songwriter piece than in the pop-rock form of the video. The video neither sonically illustrates the contradictions of human sound-making or ‘anthropophony’ (Krause Reference Krause2008) – in this case the idea that relatively loud anthropogenic sounds (music) are being employed to bring awareness to very loud noises (motors) – nor does it make a more plaintive and fitting plea for quietude. These singers would have been better able to perform the piece using a more ironic noise music angle or, conversely, if they had taken on a quieter tack. Yet at the same time the border tensions mentioned above, including lost time and finances owing to unanticipated problems working across an international border, exerted their own force in the end. Lessons learned.
As for representing more-than-human communication, the not-quite-human, not-quite-animal lead character was intended to model skilful listening. She makes an appeal for quietude and a healthier ‘sound commons’ (Titon Reference Titon2012). The desire to decentre humanity presents a difficult conundrum, one that is ritually represented in LOUD. It represents recognition of the fact that we cannot fully understand cetacean, avian, or other animal languages, and that in interpreting their needs we inevitably must use human languages, anthropomorphised representations and human musics, languages inteligible to us.
Working across an international border helped us to understand the structural challenges of stewarding a transnational biome. Sea life moves freely across the invisible boundary between nations, but musicians and organisers do not. From organising the talent and distributing the video to gathering for live follow-up events, the border proved to be every bit the barrier to collaboration described by performers and organisers in A Song to Save the Salish Sea (2016).
Furthermore, the Salish Sea soundscape is influenced by, among other things, a disconnected and sometimes even competitive non-profit marketplace, exacerbated by a border that radically limits transnational collaboration. Working with group leaders and staff around the Salish Sea made it apparent that there is far more disconnection between assumedly allied organisations than would be required for more concerted action. Conservation groups compete for limited funding, press attention, volunteers, and access to policy-makers in much the same way that Clifford Bob (Reference Bob2005) described for global non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
That powerful, yet hidden cultural phenomenon and marketplace became part of our visceral experience during the production of LOUD and has especially revealed itself in subsequent outreach. A few organisations, such as The Whale Trail (https://thewhaletrail.org/), embraced the critique of anthropogenic noise while others experienced it as a threat to their central messaging. Advocacy groups and scientists with deep ties to the whale-watching industry have been silent or actively worked against legislation aimed at further limiting the sonic impact of the whale-watching flotillas. Those groups demonstrated no interest in sharing LOUD with members, while those backing noise legislation shared the video with their members.
That system and culture became clearer to me through conducting this Field to Media experiment. What may have remained occluded in surveys, interviews, and perhaps even in traditional ethnographic engagement with these organisations, was revealed through co-production. Such is the point of participant observation. Tacit cultural realities are often best revealed through action and performance. Just as in science, the way forward is not through getting everything right but rather through trial-and-error. Work on LOUD continues with live performances, exchanges with local organisations, and online outreach. As Freire explained in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), communities codify consensual values, aspirations, and ideas in order to make institutional and social change (Pedelty Reference Pedelty2017, pp. 81–4). That is the goal of LOUD as it has been for past Ecosong.net co-productions, to express, advocate for, and instantiate the environmental aims of a community in the form of a music video.
‘Zaniko Atoko’ (‘Bring Me an Axe’): Tara Hatfield
My collaboration with the Hadzabe (Hadza), an ethnic group residing in Northern Tanzania and believed to be one of the few remaining hunting and gathering tribes in Africa, started with the production of an album. The relationship between this particular community and the Anthropocene is a complex one. As an ethnic group which has been able to maintain their relatively sustainable use of natural resources for thousands of years, the group offers a unique perspective on how to confront environmental issues and create more ecologically focused and continuously viable ways of interacting with the world. Their music serves as one important mode of transmitting information about their environment and the ways in which people have traditionally used local resources to sustain human life.
While the Hadzabe still practise traditional methods of hunting and foraging, commodities from outside of the community, created by production methods that have helped to define the Anthropocene through their environmental effects, have a growing presence. Donated clothing shipped across oceans (perhaps more than once) are abundant and cell phones have recently become useful with the availability of solar panels. In addition to the material products made available through the overexploitation of the earth's resources, the impact of human (including corporate) consumption is now felt even in this remote valley. Through the lyrical content of their songs and the collaborative choices made in the visual representation of ‘Zaniko Atoko’ (‘Bring Me an Axe’), both the music itself and the collaborative process of producing the music video become active modes of addressing Hadzabe concerns regarding the impact of the Anthropocene on the environment and the living beings which depend on its resources in order to survive.
Before beginning to conceptualise the production of an environmentally focused musical video, I initially set out to record some of the traditional, and more contemporary, songs of the Hadzabe with a hip hop musician known as Chaca na Nduguzee. Land titles granted in 2011 by the Tanzanian government have provided a significant amount of land security for the Hadzabe, but have also effectively codified borders around the area and allowed for pastoralist groups, especially the Barabaig – a pastoralist ethnic group living in close proximity to the Hadzabe – to inhabit the slopes surrounding the valley floor. Some of the problems created by this encroachment became the central environmental concerns for the music video collaboratively produced through the project discussed in this article. I travelled with Chaca to the valley called Yaeda Chini in January of 2017 to record an album of Hadzabe songs, songs that have subsequently been titled Tegeregaki: Listen with Hadza. While the music we recorded, and the song eventually incorporated in the music video, are not what one would typically consider ‘popular music’, the involvement of a number of hip hop musicians in the production of both the audio and visual elements, as well as the format itself, uniquely align this particular collaboration with the other music videos discussed in this article. Many of the songs we recorded contain lyrics that directly address the relationships between the Hadzabe themselves and the non-human beings with which they share their environment. The first song on the album, ‘Nubeeya Obee Yamuaya’ (‘Our Land is Beautiful’), demonstrates the inherent value the Hadzabe perceive in their environment and their desire to protect the land and the resources it provides them.
I explained the grant project to Chaca, thinking we could create a hip hop music video together, but he instead proposed creating a video with the Hadzabe, using an audio track we had already recorded. While the grant necessitated a certain degree of my involvement, I wanted to allow my Tanzanian collaborators the freedom to create a video of their own design. Chaca, the Hadzabe musicians and I decided to work with two small film crews based in the city of Arusha, Tanzania to create the video. The other people involved in this production – listed by first names only – included Biggie, Freeman and Elia from Okoa Mtaa, a hip hop-centred community collective, and a small group from a video production company Kili Inc., consisting of Msechu, Unambwe, and Timo. Both of these organisations are based in Arusha. Msechu was selected to direct the video along with me. Our collaborators would film, record extra-musical audio, photograph the process, and edit the footage.
Storyboards were drawn up at the beginning of 2018 for three of the songs we had previously recorded: ‘Nubeeya Obee Yamuaya’ (‘Our Land is Beautiful’), ‘Akwene Onokochiya Paanakwete’ (‘I Won't Get Married to an Old Man’) and ‘Zaniko Atoko’ (‘Bring Me an Axe’). We initially thought we may have enough time to create more than one video, but after I arrived in June of 2018, we decided to focus our efforts on creating a video for ‘Zaniko Atoko’. The story we had drafted for this video would show members of the Hadzabe community in Yaeda Chini carrying out a number of activities central to daily life in order to demonstrate their reliance on the natural resources available in the valley and their intimate relationship with their landscape, soundscape, and world. There would be an underlying story being told by a community elder to a group of young children about the environmental changes she had observed throughout her life. In particular, the video would be centred around the cutting of trees surrounding the valley by the Barabaig, and the resulting decline in the populations of species that have been important game animals for the Hadzabe.
In June 2018, the two film crews, Chaca, a chef and a driver from Nyayo (Chaca's tourism company), and I travelled to Yaeda Chini for a week of filming. We arrived in the valley after a day of travelling paved highways, dirt roads, and dry lakebeds and almost immediately met with a number of the Hadzabe community members who would be appearing in the video to discuss how the production and filming would proceed. Each day, we woke up before dawn in order to make the most of the limited daylight hours. After emerging from canvas tents, drinking chai ya maziwa (‘milk tea’) and eating a few pieces of toast or chapati maji (‘a flatbread with an egg-like consistency’), we would drive from our campsite to the large baobab tree which serves as a central meeting point for the Hadzabe. From there, equipment was prepared and the filming would begin. Each day was spent filming a few different scenes which featured various daily practices of the Hadzabe: the collection of baobab fruit and the grinding of its dry flesh and seeds into a powder, usually consumed after mixing it with water, hunting, young boys practising their archery skills, the preparation of meat, honey-harvesting and of course, singing and dancing. The underlying story described in the previous paragraph required a little more rehearsal and preparation for the individuals featured in these scenes, especially the children, but after only a few days, we had more than enough footage to create a short music video.Footnote 5
‘Dwellers of the Forest Arise’: Elja Roy
‘A Song for Sundarbans: Dwellers of the Forest Arise’ was released on 21 January 2019.Footnote 6 The video shows a live performance of a Bangladesh-based musical group, Samageet. ‘Sama’ means ‘equal’ and ‘geet’ means ‘songs’ in Bangla. Samageet is a group of activist singers and musicians. Their main goal is to create awareness about the on-going impacts of political decisions. The video shows the song they most often perform about the Sundarbans: ‘Dwellers of the Forest Arise’, also titled ‘Go Back, Get Out India’. Although the group protests unsustainable development, the artists do not advocate for a protectionist discourse. They advocate for renewable energy and trading policies that can be harmonised with environmental concerns.
The song describes how a proposed coal burning power plant will destroy the Sundarbans’ ecosystem. Bangladesh Power Development Board and India's state-owned National Thermal Power Corporation are jointly establishing a coal plant, the Rampal Power Project. The team performed the song at their rooftop office. They regularly perform on streets during protests, rallies, and awareness campaigns. To ensure the supreme independence of the performers and to retain the essence of street protests, no storyboards were made. My videographer and I recorded the performance in a natural setting and light. Video-recording became tricky as the performers preferred to freely move while singing. So we decided to go with the flow and follow our instincts on what to focus on at each moment. However, the process had its own pitfalls. While editing, my editor Karl Demer struggled to find relevant footage because I could not communicate verbally with my videographer during the shoot. It was a live performance and we didn't want to interrupt the performers by speaking to each other; besides we were avoiding appearing in each other's camera.
Sound recording was another hurdle. Since all the members of the group were singing, no single location worked well for placement of the audio-recorder, so the instruments are louder than the vocals. Plus, the open air setup caused ambient noise to intrude throughout the video. Bangladesh is one of the most populated countries on earth; as my collaborators pointed put, the noise gave our work a distinct Bangladeshi character.
As Pedelty notes, ‘Movements have always been propelled by song’ (Reference Pedelty2016, pp. 2). The Sundarbans movement in Bangladesh is producing a rich body of songs. The music affirms a similar argument Josh Wodak put forth in an article on music and climate change, which presented the idea that popular music represents a generation-specific zeitgeist (Reference Pedelty2018). Syed Farhad, an activist musician said, ‘There has been a surge of protest literature in recent years on Sundarbans in Bangladesh. These new songs, poems, and dramas will define the contemporary movement for future historians’.Footnote 7 As noted by journalist activist Mahtab Uddin, the country is seeing the longest and largest environmental movement in its history.Footnote 8 The musical video that we made for this project allowed us to capture a small portion of it.
During my fieldwork in Bangladesh and in the forests of Sundarbans, I learned about disconnects between the artists of both nations. Their unfamiliarity with each other was not only a result of national borders but also a by-product of a rural vs. urban dichotomy. In Bangladesh, there are several individuals and groups writing songs about the forest, including solo artists Kafil Ahmed and Syed Farhad and groups Bhatial Sohure and Mabhoi, to name a few. To go against the ‘pecuniary philosophy’ of the market that discards anything that does not make money, Samageet writes songs that talk about political, environmental, and social issues. Since their songs predominantly criticise the money-driven market, the artists primarily earn their means from different sources. For example, the organisers of Samageet are academics, and Mabhoi is a duo consisting of a professor and his 10-year-old son. Probably because the individuals rarely perform for money, there is little competition between them. Their camaraderie is remarkable. Nevertheless, as a national border makes it difficult, there are no collaborations between the artists of both nations. Therefore, I next plan to make a longer video that shows artists from the Indian Sundarbans and Bangladesh.
The field research experience did not end after releasing the video. The video's reception has revealed more about international dynamics involved in the uneasy co-management of the Sundurbans ecosystem. As mentioned, the song is also called ‘Go Back, Get Out India’, which echoes the most used phrase in the song. Upon its release, I faced some push back from my Indian audience. As I am Indian, my near and dear ones did not expect me to go to a neighbouring country and record others’ grievances against Indian policies, and were among the first to voice their concerns. When I received the English translation of the song from Samageet, it was named ‘Dwellers of the Forest Arise’. Although the song is commonly referred as ‘Go Back, Get Out India’, since I was using English to upload and name the song, I had a choice to title it either way. As I anticipated a negative reaction from Indian audiences, I consciously named the song ‘Dwellers of the Forest Arise’. The video and release were only the start of our co-production. I will soon return for further work. Having established a strong rapport and relationship with Samageet and the other artists via this intensive Field to Media experiment, I am planning to learn more about their movement. I not only wish to incorporate that knowledge into my dissertation and beyond, but also want to use that knowledge to facilitate transnational co-production.
Dancing upstream – current issues of environmental awareness as performance: Yan Pang
In 2008, I had my first professional composition lesson with Professor Minzhu Song at the Sichuan Conservatory of Music. I was asked to write about the beauty of the clear Funan river (锦江) in Sichuan, China. I stared at the body of water and struggled. ‘Why is Funan River dark and green?’, I asked. He sighed, ‘Because many people put garbage next to the river and into it sometimes, too’. Little did I know this interaction would ignite my passion for art for social consciousness. In 2018, I joined the Humanities Without Walls Grant Collective to focus on how I can use art to raise awareness about the environment. Given my participation in the collective and in reflecting back on my interaction with Song, I knew that my contribution must be about water pollution in Sichuan. I reached out to my contacts in the arts, local educational institutions, and communities from the region to ask about their perspectives on the issue.Footnote 9
Song has written several musical compositions in the style of Sichuan Opera and about his love of rivers in the area. The Sichuan Opera's long history teaches the listener not only about music, but also about Chinese art, society, history, and people. Many modern music fans have forgotten about the Sichuan Opera, much like the beauty of the rivers in Sichuan. The performative elements of this genre are emotional and dramatic content is conveyed by singing, dancing, and the playing of instruments. In ‘Dancing Upstream’, I compared these elements with how a river moves over rapids or in shallow/deep places. I also incorporated an understanding of the styles of Chinese opera alongside issues of water pollution as a double-pronged educational strategy.
Song employs the musical elements of Sichuan Opera to create work that embraces the style of the geographical area combined with contemporary aspects of modern music.Footnote 10 In this project, I used Song's approach of pure traditional single-line melodies placed in comparatively complicated harmonies and contexts based on pitch collections and figure sequences. This resulted in a musical piece that blended traditional Chinese music and Western classical-influenced music performed alongside street dance forms (see Pang Reference Pang2018, p. 23).
‘Dancing Upstream: Current Issues of Environmental Awareness as Performance’ is a theatrical dance and music production. The intercultural (Chinese/European/American), interdisciplinary (music/theatre/dance), and collaborative project (Yan Pang as composer/J-Sun as choreographer/Stefon ‘Bionik’ Taylor as music producer) was created to raise public awareness of pollution around the Funan River in Sichuan.
My mode of thinking draws from an earlier collaborative work with Song: ‘Twinkle Twinkle Sichuan Opera’. ‘Dancing Upstream’ fused my lived experiences to theorise possibilities and techniques in the creation of the work. This project also takes a comparable approach that describes important moments of moving bodies informed by lived experience which impacts music and movement (see Pang Reference Pang2018, p. 23). Using a specific style of Chinese music with American street dance (breaking) highlights the multidisciplinary nature of the project.
J-Sun used breaking techniques to investigate and theorise issues of environmental justice resulting in the choreography of the dance piece. J-Sun's approach follows three steps: ‘(1) using specific dance techniques to engage with issues like circulations of power, (2) making movement choices which are not part of the accepted canon of techniques in order to theorise, and (3) documenting the new knowledge produced from the approach in written, spoken, or bodily form’ (Mazzola Reference Mazzola, Pang, Noer, Yao, Neace and Rochester2019, pp. 171–2).
To convey this investigative process, J-Sun employed specific gestures like reaching into the river and throwing away pollutants, symbolising the cleaning of water (see Zhao Reference Zhao2013). This action resulted in thinking about how to ethically dispose of chemicals like phosphorus. Such questioning has led to research about how phosphorus is processed to make fertiliser and, thus, reinvigorates the natural environment (see Tweed Reference Tweed2009). Next, he used breaking techniques to gather, change, and re-distribute the chemicals on the stage away from the river and into farms.
Bionik constructed soundscapes and rhythms with software and live instruments. The music/dance piece begins with J-Sun and me sitting centre stage at a grand piano. Bionik is positioned to the left of us with his rig and creates a soundscape of running water and frog croaks. This sonic environment changed into an industrial one with sounds of metal-working; the pounding of iron fills the air.
In addition to piano, I used steel garbage cans as instruments in the piece and symbolically as containers and tools of pollution. During the performance, I dance towards J-Sun as he plays a simple rhythm on an upside-down garbage can and hides behind it. I take on the role of Mother Nature and the movements are sharp and aggressive. I am battling the polluters (J-Sun) while they bang loudly to reassert dominance over the natural environment. The multidisciplinarity of the project gave a depth and weight to the work, which was made possible by combining our different art forms and theorising processes together.
I used music and dance as modes of inquiry to engage with environmental practices in China. ‘Dancing Upstream’ exemplifies this approach as J-Sun attempts to control Mother Nature (represented by me) by grabbing the grand piano in the first moments of the performance. He cannot stop the music and is swept away with the torrent of sound produced from the instrument. We show the futility of polluting the very resource that provides life. This piece embodies China's continual struggle to be globally connected and an industrious nation with local consequences, which have resulted in an unacceptable environmental threat. For example, I take on the masculine dance aesthetics of rocking and J-Sun uses the feminine characteristics of waacking. Here, we perform the confusion felt as the impact of pollution is made visible: humans are no longer certain that climate change can be reversed. The work does not have a resolution, but I hope that it educates and inspires audiences to look at the effects of irresponsible caretaking of rivers. The final moments of ‘Dancing Upstream’ show the artists forced to work together with movement and music. We have no choice but to collaborate or risk extinction as a species.
A filmic response to Haiti's deforestation problem: Rebecca Dirksen
At the time of this writing, the Haiti component of the Field to Media project is underway, with filming and production taking place during summer and early autumn 2019. This collaboration has brought together filmmaker Kendy Vérilus; musicians Caleb François, Erol Josué and Darline Desca; vocalists and Vodouizan associated with the lakou Souvenance (a sacred yard);Footnote 11 journalist and environmental advocate Anthony Pascale (known as Konpè Filo); and me, a professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. Our project team is working on a music video to address one of the most pressing environmental crises facing contemporary Haitian citizens: deforestation. Our objective is to encourage the public not only to plant trees, but also to come to appreciate the importance of trees for human health and life. This initiative has been designed to complement the culturally and spiritually informed environmental advocacy work that Konpè Filo has been doing on related topics for more than three decades, which largely revolves around the planting of mapou (‘kapok’, or ‘silk-cotton’) trees (see Dirksen and Wilcken, forthcoming).
In Haiti, deforestation is the result of centuries of land overuse. Popular belief – both inside and outside of Haiti – apportions nearly all the blame for the nation's loss of trees to impoverished generations of the past 100 years who have cut down trees to sell charcoal. More accurately, the deforestation process began with the colonial plantations that required vast expanses of cleared land to produce 40% of the sugar and 60% of the coffee being imported to Europe by the mid-1700s. It continued with an aggressive 19th- and early 20th-century logging industry that sent the old-growth forests piece by piece to North American and Europe. Together, these motions transformed much of the western part of Hispaniola's pre-Columbian rain forests into desert – only to be compounded by poor or non-existent environmental regulation by the Haitian government during the 20th and 21st centuries.
As the concept of the Anthropocene has taken hold over environmental humanities discourses, it is also now beginning to permeate ethnomusicological research (often via ecomusicology), as music studies scholars of all sorts are finding it their responsibility to address matters generally well beyond the purview of music. This call to act holds particular urgency for the Haiti team: the 2018 Global Climate Risk Index identified Haiti as the single most vulnerable country to the effects of extreme weather events related to climate change during 2016, and the second most vulnerable country over the two-decade period from 1997 to 2016 (Eckstein et al. Reference Eckstein, Künzel and Schäfer2017, pp. 4–9). Beyond the numerous global forces driving shifts in the climate and environment that cannot be overstated, climate change and environmental degradation in Haiti has been directly tied to the profound loss of tree cover. Despite popular narratives promulgated in the media about contemporary causes, these are not new issues, and are rather defined by centuries of human activity and shaped by both structural violence and slow violence (Nixon Reference Nixon2011).
Yet in addressing deforestation and its real impacts on the Haitian population in this music video, we find ourselves facing a daunting challenge: how can we positively confront such negative topics at a moment when the call for ‘new narratives’ for Haiti is of utmost importance (Ulysse Reference Ulysse2015)? Especially in light of US President Trump's egregious, racist, and historically ignorant declaration of Haiti as a ‘shithole’ country in January 2018, which ricocheted around the world thanks to an international media blitz, our project is thus tied up in questions about representation. In ‘airing out’ some of Haiti's most pronounced vulnerabilities, we are treading on delicate territory. How can we be sure that this risk is ‘worth it’, in terms of being helpful instead of further exacerbating the precarious situation?
As we struggle with answers to this question, we look back at previous experiences in depicting delicate matters in a public forum. In fact, drawing film work into my ethnomusicological research is not a new academic venture. Filming was part of profiling an impressive group of young rappers called Wucamp, who spent many months cleaning up their neighbourhood streets each day using wheelbarrows and shovels while rapping about the deleterious effects of letting trash pile up (Dirksen Reference Dirksen2013).Footnote 12 This led to a more ambitious project in creating the music documentary co-directed with Kendy Vérilus – part of this Field to Media project – titled Zafè Fatra (The Affair of Trash), which has screened at film festivals in Port-au-Prince, Brooklyn and Santiago de Chile (Dirksen, Reference Dirksen, Castelo Branco and Diamondforthcoming). Collaborating on the film Zafè Fatra raised for me the rhetorical question of whether engaged music and engaged music scholarship can really clean up Port-au-Prince's streets. It is a question that is eminently adaptable to this Field to Media project, which I aim to keep in mind as we continue forward with this music video. Moreover, film documentation, again with Vérilus behind the camera, has been central to following the work of late master craftsman Charles Charlesine as he made tanbou (drums) that have been used in the Vodou lakou (sacred yards) of the Artibonite for the past 50 years (Dirksen Reference Dirksen2019). When asked, Charlesine reminisced about the increasing difficulty in finding the appropriate wood to make these drums. Curated selections from this film work are now part of an exhibit at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures titled Sacred Drums, Sacred Trees: Haiti's Changing Climate on display throughout 2019.Footnote 13
As we transition from these earlier experiments with film collaboration as part of the research process into this new project, we are now focusing more explicitly on developing a filmic language and Field to Media methodology. The goal is to establish a basis for co-labouring (de la Cadena Reference De la Cadena2015). Yet we are finding this difficult to execute perfectly: some imbalance is intrinsic to the process, at least in that I was part of the Humanities without Walls grant-writing team that conceived of the project and received a grant to carry out work according to the plan set forth in the proposal. This means that the general topics, rough agenda, and a conception for how the work partnership is supposed to operate (i.e. using a Freirian approach) have already been set prior to engaging any colleagues in Haiti.
It is now a task to draw everyone working on this Field to Media video – from those responsible for the music to those figuring out the production – into a dialogic engagement to convince the broader public of the importance of planting trees. Many musical groups are in fact heavily invested in pushing social messages through their music, through the related traditions of politically and socially engaged music, called mizik angaje or mizik sosyal, and many have, if often cursorily, addressed environmental issues in their lyrics. Yet how will we ensure that this collaboration develops into a fundamentally ‘equal’ pursuit? Will anyone who has agreed to join this project prioritise it for the job (there is a small financial remuneration) or for the prospects of advancing their musical (or other) careers on an international stage (perhaps based on assumptions that the academic world yields powerful results and can somehow influence the commercial music industry), rather than for the ‘primary’ goal of tackling environmental concerns? Would it matter to the integrity of this project that this may well be the case?
Complicating the situation further, as we aim for effective and meaningful engagement with pressing issues of the environment, are we really being fully attentive and sensitive to our surroundings? Haiti is currently bending under the PetroCaribe embezzlement scandal, which has plunged the country into more than a year of heated demonstrations in response to the plummeting local currency and skyrocketing inflation (Charles Reference Charles2017). In light of this, are we really focusing on the precise type of climate change that is most urgent at this time?
Conclusion
We have discussed only a few aspects of each video and are only beginning the processes of examining developing intersections between our five projects. In addition to continued regional outreach following the release of each video, we will produce a documentary weaving together all five subprojects and scenes from each video. However, this article has provided us with a valuable opportunity to lay out the project as a whole and overview our individual conundrums and collective possibilities midstream.
We hope that reading about these experimental field productions and the Field to Media project as a whole has sparked ideas for the reader. It has not been easy for music scholars to engage the worst ravages of the Anthropocene, but increasingly it has become productive and promising to do so. In contributing to this movement to address anthropogenic change, Field to Media is going beyond a few ethnographic norms:
• methodology – collaborative video production as an ethnographic method;
• genre – music video as opposed to documentary film;
• medium – video as opposed to print circulation;
• engagement – collapsing fieldwork, outreach, and application into a holistic effort to affect change.
In so doing, we have been discovering the benefits of co-production, but have also encountered limitations. There are limits as to how far traditional ethnographic methods and expositional forms can be stretched. For example, there are limits to what an anthropologist can study, or how, and still be considered an anthropologist. The same is true for all disciplines. Therefore, depending on individual circumstances or institutional expectations for study or employment, it may be difficult or perhaps even unwise for a graduate or early-career scholar to veer too far in the direction of participatory action research, popular music genres, or experimental video. Any one of those elements could be viewed as straying outside more validated practices and foci. Putting all three of those tacks together may ground the researcher on a somewhat solitary island. Nevertheless, we think of the Field to Media methodology as more evolutionary than revolutionary, and per the point of this entire volume, see video co-production as a way that music scholars can more directly engage the Anthropocene.
Number four on the above list of ethnographic norms is ‘engagement’, which indicates that the Field to Media method may be more akin to participatory action research than ethnography per se. However, our argument is that action research can be ethnographic. If participant observation is really a spectrum from the ‘observation of participation’ (Tedlock Reference Tedlock1991) on the one end, to activism on the other, Field to Media falls closer to the latter. Rather than do ethnographic work and then hope that our published results will percolate into meaningful action, we seek to make ethnographic and ecomusicological research more directly pragmatic, from first design work to distribution.
As with all experiments, this one has revealed multiple limitations and barriers. For example, while the goal was to collapse fieldwork, media production, and application towards solving a pressing problem, the realities of time and resources required serious compromises. As the reader might guess, it is difficult to wear all of the above hats and achieve the hoped-for goals in such a short period of time in the field. After all, one of the hallmark distinctions of ethnography is time spent in the field with collaborators. Ethnographers seek to learn deep and often sublimated cultural realities, truths that may not be amenable to more rapid or superficial methods. In truth, we could probably not have completed these intensive video projects without serious prior geographic, academic, and cultural experience with our collaborators, including musicians with shared interests and talents.
And so, it turns out that the title, Field to Media, was well chosen. For most of us the experience was more of a serial process: fieldwork first, followed by media production. It was not as integral a process as originally intended. For several of us, co-production was made possible by virtue of having previously conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork with our co-producers. For example, Pedelty's LOUD project is most accurately described as the application of lessons from previous fieldwork among Salish Sea musicians and communities (Pedelty Reference Pedelty2016). For LOUD, two years of production work rested on an ethnographic foundation that went back much further. Despite that time commitment, the work still feels incomplete.
For the Haiti team's project on music to raise awareness about deforestation, effective collaboration would not have been possible without Dirksen's previous 16 years of work in the country and close long-term relationships with all of the participating members, from musicians, to film crew, to journalist-activists. It became a matter of selecting partners from a long list of possible participants, based on previously demonstrated concern about the general topic and eagerness to take on an environmental activist platform. Discussions about how the team can best navigate and collectively define a shared musical activism are still unfolding.
For others, the Field to Media experiment represented a dramatic starting point for such work. For example, truer to the methodological intent of the experiment, Roy did not yet know her collaborators before entering the field. In a summer's work she came to know her musical colleagues through concerted media production. In addition to producing a striking and informative musical video, evidence of successful fieldwork, Roy's Field to Media experience marks the beginning of longer-term research with these musician-activists, rather than an end point. Still, Roy, like Pedelty and Dirksen, was drawing on a breadth of cultural experience, preparation, and preproduction work that belies suggestions that Field to Media work may be completed in the same or less time than traditional ethnographic field research. Roy had previous field and media experience in the Sundurbans and knows the area well, although this was her first time on the Bangladeshi side of the Sundurbans.
In light of those limitations and challenges, Field to Media is perhaps more of a methodological tweak than an epistemological overhaul. Our subtitle may indicate the more significant contribution of the team project: ‘Applied ecomusicology in the Anthropocene’. In orienting our projects towards environmental challenges, we hope that the Field to Media experiment contributes a few new ideas for fellow music researchers, including student and early career colleagues, as they develop research to take on the Anthropocene's immense challenges.
Acknowledgements
As the authors of this paper, we extend our thanks and appreciation to the Mellon Humanities without Walls consortium at the University of Illinois, all of our colleagues and co-adventurers in the filming process at our respective field sites, and Grad Lab Practicum student Kennedi Johnson for her detail-oriented assistance with the reference list.
