Organizer and Chair: William Kelly, Yale University
Discussant: Paul Noguchi, Bucknell University
Sociocultural anthropology has long based its knowledge claims and disciplinary identity on intensive, extended "fieldwork" in a local setting. The massive transnational flows of people, capital, goods, and ideas that characterize the contemporary era have generated serious debates in anthropology about the feasibility and efficacy of our root method. This is keenly felt by those of us who do research in the public and commodified arenas of leisure and entertainment. How does one bound a field site as sprawling as a music genre or a sport? What is the position of a scholarly observer in a public space filled with professional media observers? Music and sport are both intensely personal and sensual and also coldly commercial and exploitative. How does one situate the experiential pleasures within the structures of profit that produce mass culture? This panel offers four case studies of recent fieldwork in such sites in contemporary Japan—with a professional baseball team and a stable of sumo wrestlers, in a hip-hop club and a fitness club. Our common thematic is, what is the place of fieldwork when the fieldworker’s place is so problematic? Each paper analyzes one of the manifold challenges of an identity and a methodology that are both so fruitful and so fraught with intellectual and ethical dilemmas.
Our discussant is himself a talented ethnographer, and we intend that four brief papers and a single discussant format will allow ample time for discussion with the audience of fieldwork and field methods.
Ian Condry, Yale University
As an anthropologist studying Japanese rap music in Tokyo (1995–97), I faced fieldwork dilemmas common to other scholars of popular culture. I wanted to understand the current fascination with hip-hop among Japanese youth, but quickly discovered that asking people why they like the music elicited only equivocal responses. It was "cool" (kakko-ii) and "my friends like it"—end of story. So, I spent all-nighters in the clubs, jostling in the dark with the sweaty masses of beer drinking teenage hip-hoppers. I felt the booming bass that rattled teeth. In my baseball cap and Timberland boots, I tried to get down. But how could I get that down on paper? And wasn’t putting it into words exactly what these fans and musicians would reject? Hip-hop had to be felt with the body (taiken) on the scene itself (genba).
A study of popular culture needs to grasp in some way the lived experience of the participants, something beyond both analysis of texts (e.g., lyrics) and overarching critiques of the commodification of pleasure. While participant-observation is ideally suited to achieving this middle ground, in practice it raises difficult questions. What counts as an observation? What sites are most revealing? How does one situate a wide-ranging network of hip-hop enthusiasts? If we are to gauge the meaning, value and effects of global popular culture, we need to improve our analytical tools regardless of discipline. The lessons I learned reveal important advantages (and limitations) of fieldwork among the B-Boys and B-Girls of Japan.
R. Kenji Tierney, University of California, Berkeley
Like other mass culture productions, professional sumo (Ozumo) has a cline of success for observers and fans alike. For millions of fans, Ozumo is the three-hour NHK broadcast of the year’s six fifteen-day tournaments, a televisual of the pinnacle of top wrestlers. For those few lucky enough to obtain and afford tickets to the tournaments themselves, it is a multi-sensory spectacle of the full range of wrestlers at close quarters. And in the back rooms of the arenas and in the dormitories and practice rings of the wrestlers’ stables, the routines of a close-knit world unfold in guarded protection. "Access" then is a central question for a would-be observer of Ozumo, but it is illusory to pursue, it is as a quest for the inner sanctum, seeking the core performers in their essential guise.
Ozumo exists as the lived routines of the stables but equally in the mediated sites of tournament arenas and television studios, in the pages of sports papers, and in the national and foreign imagination of a Japanese "national sport." Ozumo also exists within the larger world and longer history of sumo, and Ozumo’s conservative, xenophobic practices dominate, but are not unchallenged by, alternate representations and organizations.
Gaining access, then, is not merely a logistical problem but a conceptual issue of how one should formulate a world of being and performing that is privately lived, thoroughly mediated, and contentiously represented. Deciding where and what Ozumo is illustrates the interpenetration of method and theory that is always at the heart of anthropological fieldwork.
Laura Ginsberg, Yale University
Participant-observation has been recognized as the methodological bedrock of anthropology for almost a century. It is less appreciated, though, that this embodies a fundamental contradiction. Participation implies insiders’ knowledge of how to behave competently. Anthropological observation, on the other hand, begins in deliberate ignorance, checking one’s cultural baggage in order to learn things from a different point of view. Inevitably, then, most anthropologists do far more observing than participating.
When conducting recent fieldwork in Japanese metropolitan fitness clubs, I tried to create a research role that was more fully participatory. As a U.S.-certified aerobics teacher, I was "hired" as an unpaid instructor, and was able to enter the field not only as a participant, but as an expert participant. Wearing the staff uniform gave me instant rapport, and the access and authority to interview club members. At the same time, however, it proved difficult to get full explanations, when I was assumed to be the expert.
Thus, I complemented my participation as an instructor with observations in another fitness chain where I remained merely a member. This allowed me to assume an appropriate naiveté, but it rendered serious conversations with fellow members futile. Many betrayed the terrified look of deer caught in headlights, as they struggled to position the foreigner asking probing questions. This presentation will explore the unique responsibilities and expectations, problems and benefits that accompany the distinct and often contradictory roles of instructor and member, expert and novice, and participant and observer.
William W. Kelly, Yale University
Sport is clearly significant in understanding the structures of modern life, but researching the topic through fieldwork presents novel challenges to familiar conventions of participant observation. Here I focus on one such difficulty recently encountered in my efforts to study Japanese baseball through fieldwork with a well-known professional team, the Hanshin Tigers.
The problem was my unconventional role as an observer of an arena already filled with other observers—not a quiet, anonymous locale but a site under constant, daily, national scrutiny. The anthropologist in a village, classroom, or workplace is generally a lone, intrusive observer, and questions of access and identity arise from the position’s singularity. The anthropologist at the Hanshin ballpark is literally lost in a jostling mass of professional observers. Some sixty reporters, photographers, and broadcast announcers are assigned to the Hanshin team, and they all have great expertise, clearly defined interests, and strategic savvy. They interrogate players and managerial staff who need publicity and are as adept as the media in spinning their story. Between the two is a team public relations apparatus, nervously brokering access and managing the flow of information. Enter the anthropologist, with press credentials and carrying the same spiral reporter notebook but otherwise feeling decidedly ambivalent, as I moved continually in and out of the well-worn conceptual and physical space of other observer/reporters of the game—often before I fully understood the consequences of such shifts. This presentation analyzes my experience of maneuvering for position and learning how to speak as a positioned fieldworker.