Literature Reviews Reveal the Real People Behind the Discourse

This blog is repost. The original can be found on APU Writing Center’s Graduate Writing Blog.

This blog post series on literature reviews demonstrates that ideas, especially in the humanities and social sciences, do not shape themselves. While disciplines are built around specific topics and interpretive paradigms (also called theories), these ideas do not develop on their own. People are always behind them. For this reason, Christine Pearson Casanave argues that doctoral students must come to see the real people behind the discourse. She puts it this way: “Graduate students need to learn that when they read, they are being ‘spoken to’ by real people and need therefore to respond thoughtfully and critically rather than just absorb information from so-called experts” (Casanave 2008, 19). Discourse is not a lecture—you are not being spoken at, you are being spoken to. As a participant in a discourse, you—the graduate student—are therefore expected to contribute to a discourse by speaking back to other participating voices.

One way to see the real people behind the discourse is by attending academic conferences.

At my first national conference for ethnomusicologists as a first-year master’s student, I squeezed into a hotel elevator with several other conference participants on their way to yet another paper panel. Reading the nametags of the people in that elevator was like looking at the reading list of one of my theory of ethnomusicology syllabi—only instead of attached to the front covers of books, these nametags were attached to real people! I literally encountered the people behind the discourse. This experience made it easier for me to associate real faces with the ideas that I was reading in class.

Any national conference I have attended since then has included encounters like that one, which continues to remind me that people are behind the discourse. One of persons with whom I shared an elevator at a conference was an ethnomusicologist named Bruno Nettl (1930-2020). Nettl has written on music in Native American cultures and the Middle East as well as the state of music education in Western higher education. However, he is best known for his writings on theory and method in ethnomusicology, which read like an intellectual history of the discipline. In his writing, he keeps in sight the people behind the discourse, which makes Nettl one of my favorite theorists to read.

Nettl’s career spanned decades of development within ethnomusicology. Nettl himself was the son of Paul Nettl, a noted European musicologist who worked under Guido Adler—the scholar who defined the fields of music study, specifically musicology and comparative musicology, which became ethnomusicology. Nettl studied for his doctorate at Indiana University at Bloomington, which has one of the oldest programs in the anthropology of music in the United States. Many of Nettl’s own students at the University of Illinois have become significant figures within the field of music scholarship. Because he personally knew, studied with, taught, and worked with so many of these foundational scholars, his own relationship with each of them weaves many of his reflections and essays together (Nettl 1983/2005, 2010).

To give you a feel for how Nettl focuses on people and why his writing choices are effective, I’m going to contrast his writing style with another typical style used in academia—that modeled on technical writing. This more technical style is demonstrated in the following paragraph:

Three approaches characterized North American ethnomusicology in the early 20th century: recording and transcription, classification, and an attention to cultural context. Recording and transcription gained traction as complimentary research methods due to the invention of the gramophone and the proliferation of ideas concerning folk and nationalism prevalent in Europe during the early 20th century. The pseudo-scientific bent of comparative musicology made classifying the collected fragments of folk song the default way of organizing then interpreting musical material. In addition to these imported European approaches, the centrality of fieldwork as a research method finds its roots in humanistic, cultural anthropology as practiced in North America at that time. Consequently, recording and transcription were coupled with classification to generate and organize collected materials while approaches in cultural anthropology were used to interpret the material as data. Together, these methods were the watermark of ethnomusicology’s holistic approach in the early 20th century.

A lot of passages I read written by doctoral students take on this style. From a composition standpoint, this paragraph is well constructed. It has a topic sentence; each sentence has a role in the paragraph, giving it coherence, and all the sentences are grammatically correct. Certainly, the writer’s strategy is straight forward: provide a list, and then explain each of those items in the list. Most of this paragraph also employs active voice, so readers can easily follow what is happening in the paragraph. Consequently, doctoral students think that the passage has an objective, academic tone. However, this paragraph is missing some crucial things.

In this case, a technical writing style is neither objective, nor does it meet our purposes for writing. First, this paragraph lays out ideas as if they natural, but these ideas are anything but natural—they neither propagated on their own, nor did they follow an inevitable, pre-determined trajectory. However, the passage’s writing style is not conducive for that critique.

Second, this iteration loses sight of the fact that people are having these ideas, which translate into specific actions—in this case, research methods and approaches to interpreting data. People are especially important in ethnomusicology because the discipline is interested in what people do with music. A focus on people would also allow us to be more critical of what actions are happening here.

Third, and related to people, connections are missing between these people’s actions and their sociological and historical context. People do not do things in a vacuum. Why would a researcher need to transcribe music if they could capture it on the gramophone? What did the ideas of folk and nationalism have to do with music research at this time? And what made fieldwork a central method of North American anthropology at that time? This paragraph raises more questions than it answers.

Fourth, the paragraph is dry and unengaging. Good academic prose should be quite the opposite. Technical writing is never absolutely wrong—many discipline-specific cases call for it—but it should be applied judiciously in the social sciences because we’re still dealing primarily with people and their actions.

Nettl chooses to talk about North American ethnomusicology through a portrait of George Herzog, under whom he studied at the University of Indiana. This section is part of an essay tracing the origins of professional societies for ethnomusicology, both in the United States and Western Europe:

In Herzog’s methodology, three approaches stand out. He began his studies at the Royal Conservatory in Budapest, and although I have not been able to ascertain that he studied directly under Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly, he regarded Bartok’s approach to folk music research as canonical, a methodology to be emulated in other areas of the world, and he used aspects of it in his later research in American Indian music. He proceeded to study in Berlin, with Hornbostel, working for a time as his assistant and becoming his disciple.

I don’t know why Herzog left Europe without completing his doctoral studies, but he emigrated in 1925 and took up the study of anthropology at Columbia University under Franz Boas, whose approach to that field was similarly many-sided and syncretic. The point is that he was able, from all these European-based strands of methodology, to fashion an approach that was the most comprehensive to date in its view of musical culture. His mature studies on American Indian music thus combined the elements of his background and served as models for the holistic approach to music that came to be widely used in ethnomusicology in North America. (Nettl 2010, 141)

In this passage, Nettl is not just waxing nostalgic about his mentor. Instead, he is showing how specific approaches to studying music in North America during the early and mid-20th century came from Herzog’s personal interactions with other prominent figures involved in studying music—recording and transcription as well as classification from Europe (Bartok, Kodaly, and Hornbostel) and an attention to fieldwork and thus cultural context from the United States (Boas, who was academically trained in Germany). Herzog’s resulting “holistic approach to music” set the standard for further music research.

Because Nettl is writing for an audience of ethnomusicologists, he trusts that his audience will implicitly make connections. For example, by mentioning Bartok and Hornbostel, he implies the methods that characterized their work. Mentioning these names also brings to the forefront their historical context—one characterized by waning European imperialism, the idea that folk embodied nationalism, and a pre-specialization of disciplines, which meant music was studied alongside other sociological and cultural phenomena. In this passage, Nettl draws on intertextuality to further illustrate his points. Not all Nettl’s essays read like memoir (though he’s written two of them, Nettl 2002, 2013); however, readers get the feeling that these are real people with real intellect as well as flaws and limitations.

You might not (yet) have Nettl’s experience, but you can take a cue from his approach: Tracing ideas within a discipline will highlight who is having these ideas and provide a context for how these ideas came about. Such a style denaturalizes ideas by showing their human origins, and thus demonstrates critical thinking.

References:

Casanave, Christine Pearson. 2008. “Learning Participatory Practices in Graduate School: Some Perspective-Taking by a Mainstream Educator.” In Learning the Literacy Practices of Graduate School: Insiders’ Reflections on Academic Enculturation, edited by Christine Pearson Casanave and Xiaoming Li, pp. 14-31. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Nettl, Bruno. 1983/2005. The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One Issues and Concepts. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Nettl, Bruno. 2002. Encounters in Ethnomusicology: A Memoir. Harmonie Park Press.

Nettl, Bruno. 2010. Nettl’s Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology. Urbana, Springfield, Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Nettl, Bruno. 2013. Becoming an Ethnomusicologist: A Miscellany of Influences. Scarecrow Press.