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

A literature review in the social sciences often evaluates the state of knowledge on a given topic to demonstrate research gap and situate new research within an existing body of knowledge. (If you’re in a professional program, then you will most likely be writing a systematic literature review, which is a different genre entirely; therefore, this blog post series is not as applicable to your work.) In the introduction to this blog post series, I showed how scholars do not randomly cite each other. Instead, their scholarly engagement often comes out of personal engagements with other scholars. I painted a rather congenial picture of scholarly relationships—going to dinner at conferences, engaging in social media discussions, and performing together in music ensembles (at least in the case of ethnomusicologists!). Certainly, good ideas grow from good partnerships, but on closer examination, those same activities would also reveal deep ideological divisions.

You see, references and citations—deceptively called documentation—are more than technical; rather, their presence signals relationships, camps, and alliances. Christine Pearson Casanave captures this idea when she says,

Citation practices…are usually considered textual conventions, which they are, but they are also deeply social (they connect authors to other authors) and political (they reveal an author’s perception of status, prestige, and alliances within disciplinary communities). (2008, 17)

Citations are therefore not neutral demonstrations of how “familiar” doctoral students are with the literature; rather, who doctoral students cite reveals much about their academic training and perceived place in the discipline. As such, rather than just “citing more literature” or “showing examples,” you need to strategize how you engage with literature—these references show with whom you are, academically speaking, sharing a bed.

With these principles in mind, what are some steps you can take to better strategize your engagement with literature?

Foundationally, you can think critically about your own graduate program’s position within your discipline. What method classes are you taking? Whose ideas are prominent on your syllabi? Who is mentoring you? What trajectory within your discipline do all these things represent? Critically understand that what you’re learning in graduate school is not the end-all be-all of a discipline; rather, your graduate program has been curated for you.

For example, broadly speaking, ethnomusicology in North America has two streams—an anthropological one and a musicological one. The anthropological approach examines music as a cultural process—a particular kind of behavior through which people imbue meaning into their worlds. On the other hand, the musicological approach examines music as a cultural object—a product of culture, and something that has its own internal logic.

Of course, these two streams are not clear-cut, but a dissertation project often emphasizes one stream over the other. For example, someone who is focused on the classical performing arts of North India may take a formal musical apprenticeship. As a musical disciple of a professional performer, they will likely focus more on the role of gesture in performance or how musical style is in part determined by musical lineages. Such a study is quite musicological—they’ll spend a lot of time talking about the form and characteristics of the music itself—even if they don’t ignore the anthropological—examine the meanings that performers attach to these elements. On the other hand, for someone studying the fans of K-pop boy bands, they might participate as a fan: going to concerts and participating in online fan communities, boy band themed karaoke nights, and whatever other activities fans do. This study would be overwhelmingly anthropological, prioritizing what these music-related activities and musical sounds mean to fans.

Even though both projects contain musicological and anthropological streams, different programs will attach merit to these projects based on the training of tenured faculty. A graduate program with faculty who formally studied ‘classical’ traditions of another country, teach lessons on those instruments or vocal styles themselves, and whose published works are full of musical transcriptions and analysis may not support a dissertation about fandom because they don’t view it as ‘serious scholarship.’ They would favor a project focused on gesture in performance or stylistic differences between musical lineages. On the other hand, a graduate program whose faculty have interests in cultural studies and media studies and even have their own classes cross-listed with these departments in the university course catalog would be very excited about a chairing a dissertation project focused on fandom. However, they may not be as excited about a study on musical lineages or the role of gesture in North Indian classical performances; depending on how deep their prejudice goes, they may label such as project as ‘old ethnomusicology’ or ‘dated.’

In reality, both projects fall within the scope of contemporary ethnomusicology. One project does not inherently have more merit than the other; they simply have different objectives, and thus the chosen research questions and methods differ. Nevertheless, these projects may not find equal support in the same graduate program.

Now that we’ve set that foundation, what are some other things you can do to better strategize your engagement with the literature?

First, when you engage with a work—either a book or article—spend some time with the reference list to see whom that author is citing. As you read the work, ask how the author is engaging with those sources. Are they critiquing these authors? Using them to support their own argument? Outlining the counterargument to their own position? Asking these questions as you read will help you begin to see those relationships, camps, and alliances that Casanave references, especially if authors are engaging with many of the same ideas.

Second, in addition to reading individual books and articles in your field, reading about the authors themselves can be helpful. You can read biographies of key theoreticians and look up contemporary authors on the internet to see where they earned their doctorate, with whom they studied or collaborated, where they taught, and what else they have written. This information will give you key contexts for their ideas.

Third, read reference works that outline major theories, concepts, terms, and even people for your discipline. These kinds of works—the ones that summarize what key theoreticians said—are often more accessible than the original works. For example, I have found Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists by Jerry D. Moore and The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms as well as Raymond William’s classic Keywords all to be helpful, quick references for important ideas, theories, and people related to my own work in ethnomusicology. These works also help me keep broader frameworks in mind. They will also help you accomplish the next point.

Fourth, keep track of how a concept or term changes over time. I’ll use another music example to illustrate why this point matters. I first learned about madrigals—a poetic and music form popular during the Renaissance—as an undergraduate music major. What became confusing was, as we progressed through the centuries, I noticed several musical genres were called “madrigal” but were increasingly unrelated musically. It did not help that my course textbook failed explicitly state that madrigals in the early Renaissance were completely unrelated to madrigals in the late Renaissance; they only (unfortunately) shared a name. One of my classmates missed several class meetings, and thus she missed the changing definition of madrigal. When she expressed her confusion to the course instructor, he paused and then said dramatically but not unkindly, “I regret to inform you that you are stuck in the 14th century; the rest of the class has moved on to the 16th century.”

Musical terms aren’t the only terms that change. Within social theory, many of the same terms get thrown around but their definitions change depending on the era or even the theorist. For example, Max Weber writes about class, but he doesn’t use this term in the exact same way that Karl Marx does (who was his contemporary). While Marx only defines class in terms of economic production (and reduces social relations to economic ones), Weber talks about how patterns of consumption also characterize class; he talks about class, status, and party to account for not only the economic sphere but also the social and political spheres to collectively talk about a “class situation” instead of just “class” (Giddens 1977/1988; Callinicos 1999). Tracking how a concept changes over time will help you not only better understand how other scholars are using these terms, but also effectively deploy these terms yourself. To put it more crudely, keeping track of nuanced differences and the historical trajectory of concepts and the terms used to describe them will ensure that you’re putting ideas in bed that belong together.

Remember, historiography examines “how other scholars have framed a subject and analyzed its discourse” (McCollum and Herbert 2014, 362; emphasis mine). Become critically aware of what lines are drawn within your own field of study to strategically think about with whom you are engaging—and strategize your place within that conversation.

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.

Callinicos, Alex. 1999. Social Theory: A Historical Introduction. New York, NY: New York University Press.  

Giddens, Anthony. 1977/1988. “Marx and Weber: Problems of Class Structure.” In Social Class and Stratification: Classic Statements and Theoretical Debates, edited by Rhonda F. Levine, pp. 114-118. Landham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.