FIELDWORK AND ETHNOGRAPHIC WRITING: BRUNO NETTL AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF ETHNOMUSICOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE

This article examines the theoretical and practical distinction between ethnographic fieldwork and ethnographic writing in ethnomusicology and clarifies how these practices correlate in the construction of ethnomusicological knowledge. It takes as its central focus the tension between field-centered and text-centered approaches in the discipline. This tension is explored through Bruno Nettl’s reflections on doing and writing musical ethnography and the notion of the “textual turn” associated with James Clifford, George Marcus, and Clifford Geertz. Rather than drawing on new ethnographic field data, the study is based on a comparative analysis of key texts on the subject. With particular reference to ethnomusicological doctoral dissertations in Turkey, it aims to map the categorical distinction between fieldwork and ethnographic writing, identify the consequences of this distinction, and develop recommendations for the design of such dissertations. Methodologically, the article adopts a form of critical discourse analysis that offers an analytic reading of the arguments advanced by the above-mentioned pioneering figures and situates this reading in dialogue with Timothy Rice’s proposal to synthesize field methods and field experience. The findings show that these debates consistently differentiate the social, institutional, and experiential processes of field research from the textual, discursive, and argumentative nature of ethnographic writing, while also making visible how these dimensions are recombined in concrete research projects. The article concludes that, for ethnomusicological doctoral dissertations, discussions of field practice and discussions of writing strategies should be explicitly separated and then systematically reconnected to show how these elements together constitute ethnomusicological knowledge.