S-town

S-town doesn’t stand for sustainability town, but the S-town project bears on sustainability because it’s a documentary project sort of like the ones that anthropologists, folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and sociologists undertake and call ethnography. S-town, as many readers will recall, was a very popular NPR podcast that aired early last spring. An example of personal journalism, it was a radio documentary edited by Brian Reed and sponsored by Serial and NPR's This American Life. Reed followed up an email received from one John McLemore, an eccentric resident of a small Alabama town, who called it in S-town. As I recall from listening to the podcast last April, the persistent McLemore invited Reed to visit and investigate an alleged murder. It turned out there wasn’t a murder after all, but McLemore fascinated Reed so much that he kept coming back, eventually becoming friends with him and learning about the community from McLemore’s perspective and meeting some of McLemore’s friends and acquaintances. The documentary gradually reveals aspects of McLemore’s mysterious life, as Reed came to understand it. Reed documented his conversations and phonecalls with McLemore by recording them with audio equipment. S-town consists of these audio recordings, edited and intermixed with Reed’s narration of his quest, first to investigate the supposed murder, and eventually to understand McLemore. But the narrative changes abruptly after McLemore commits suicide. Now Reed’s quest shifts: he wants to understand why McLemore killed himself, which must, he thinks, be further tied up in the mystery of his life. In the process, though, Reed has to contend with the people who want to inherit McLemore’s estate, or parts of it. One of McLemore’s closest friends, a man named Tyler, believes (probably correctly) that McLemore wanted him to have certain of his things upon his death. He takes them from the estate, whereupon McLemore's cousin and heir, who has not been in McLemore's life for many years, shows up to claim her inheritance and asks the police to arrest Tyler and charge him with theft. Reed is upset by all these events, and he feels sorry for Tyler, who as the story ends is facing a likely arrest and court date, while Reed tries to tie up the loose ends and offer his explanation of McLemore's life and death.

S-town gained a great deal of attention in the media. There were articles about it in The New Yorker, in The Atlantic, and on line, both as it went along and at the end. It was heralded as a breakthrough in personal radio documentary, but at the same time questions were raised about the ethics of what some saw as an invasion of privacy, first McLemore’s, and then Tyler’s. My take at the time was that McLemore probably was happy with the attention and would have welcomed the podcast. Tyler, on the other hand, was not one to want the spotlight. He had been in trouble with the law for the kinds of minor infractions that some teenagers and younger adults who have little in the way of education, resources or prospects get involved with. He was not someone who listened to public radio and probably did not understand the kind of project that Reed was involved in. Even if he did, he did not have the ability to protect himself very well other than by refusing to cooperate--but then, he would have compromised his relationship with McLemore, who had invited the attention; and McLemore was his employer. In many ways, Tyler was representative of the underclass of people ethnographers have documented in the South—poor whites—ever since they were sketched in nineteenth-century fiction as “Crackers,” and later portrayed as hillbillies. The best-known documentation of Tyler’s people in Alabama was Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the book originally published in the early 1940s by James Agee and Walker Evans, and reprinted many times since—also an example of personal journalism, as intense if not more intense than Reed’s radio documentary. Privacy concerns were expressed about it, also, but Agee and Evans used pseudonymns for their subjects. Reed’s documentary broadcast their real names.

As media events do, S-town faded from public consciousness during the summer. But then in September, it was revealed that Bryan Jones, the prosecutor in the case of the alleged burglary of a few of McLemore’s items after his death, had doubled the number of charges against Tyler, after having listened to what was revealed on the S-town podcast. He also argued against Tyler’s release on bail, based on some things Tyler said that Reed recorded and broadcast. Jones told the Tuscaloosa News that “In the podcast, he basically admits to the trespass and the burglaries and thefts.” What Jones didn’t say was that Tyler believes these items are rightfully his because, even though he had not specified it in a will, McLemore promised them to him. 

Last month, in a plea deal Tyler admitted guilt for taking lumber, junk vehicles, and a laptop computer from McLemore’s estate, in exchange for a ten-year suspended sentence, plus five years to be spent on probation per agreement. Would Tyler have been found out at all in the absence of the podcast? Probably; the McLemore heir reported the items missing, and the sheriff would likely have found Tyler and the items anyway. He made no attempt to hide them, and the old junk cars would have been obvious in his yard. Would the sentence have been less than it was? Probably, though some would argue he was lucky the judge didn't give him jail time. And what did Tyler think about his privacy having been compromised? “Hasn’t really helped much,” he told WTVM-13, a central Alabama news station. “Sometimes I regret ever speaking into that microphone because I was probably upset, or wasn’t thinking clearly.” 

Personal journalism of this sort is subject to invasion of privacy suits, of course, but there is little likelihood that Tyler or any of the inhabitants of S-town will sue. Ethnographers, also, are subject to similar legal action, but the professional ethics standards of our disciplines—anthropology, folklore, sociology, ethnomusicology—published on the websites of our professional societies, state that we have a responsibility to protect the interests of our subjects and consider the possibility of harmful consequences, inform our subjects of any, and obtain their informed consent in advance. Almost all do. I don’t know whether Reed obtained informed consent—possibly he did—but the point is not just to obtain consent, but rather to refrain from publishing ethnographic materials that could have harmful consequences. Cultural sustainability requires documentation, but documentation that does not conform to standards of ethics will not sustain anything—or anyone—in the long run.

Post-Truth, Ethnography, and Religion in Appalachia

What’s happened to the ethnographic study of religion in Appalachia? In the last two decades of the 20th century it was a controversial, almost a hot topic within Appalachian Studies; in this century it’s cooled way down. At the 2016 Appalachian Studies Association conference, there wasn’t a single paper delivered on the subject, whereas in 1990 a special plenary session was devoted to a book that had recently been published on Appalachian religion, namely Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church (University of Texas Press, 1988). Perhaps the reissue of this book, forthcoming next year from the University of Tennessee Press, in a second edition with a new Afterword, will encourage more ethnographic research into this rich area of expressive culture.

Most of us who did this research in the last century have either grown old, lost interest, moved over to other subjects, or decided not to write much if anything about it any longer—or all of the above. The most prolific writer among us, Howard Dorgan, passed away. Why the current lull? It may be due to changing conditions within the academic world, or changes in ethnographic research and writing, or both. Typically, ethnographic research takes a long time. As opposed to survey work, which covers a broad area quickly (and sometimes superficially), ethnographic documentation means in-depth study of a single community for a year or more, though not necessarily a continuous year. Good (that is, accurate) ethnographic documentation requires meticulous attention to detail. Whereas religious beliefs and practices of indigenous peoples have always been an important topic for social and cultural anthropologists, the study of religion in the developed world, even among marginal groups, never attracted as much attention, nor did it carry much academic prestige. In today’s difficult job market, where hiring, promotion, and tenure often turn on research that makes a strong contribution to theory, and on topics that have broader than specialist appeal, the ethnographic study of religion in Appalachia has a hard time meeting either criterion. At the same time, ethnography itself has changed from an endeavor that attempted objectivity to one that recognizes the difficulties, if not the impossibility, of an objective approach. Religion is an especially difficult subject for ethnographers. Some religious practitioners feel that its essence is beyond the reach of science to begin with. Others make truth claims that ethnographers need to respond to, either by saying they are true, that they are false, or that it is best to set aside the truth or falsity of those claims and concentrate instead on describing the claims themselves, and the way they are practiced and experienced by the individuals and the social group that holds them. Documentation, once thought to be unbiased, no longer rests on so strong a scientific foundation; and the scientific study of religion was challenged even before ethnography itself was. Both its authority and its worth is questioned, and as a result it has become less appealing for this reason as well.

Recently, though, the dangers of living in a post-truth society, in which a fact is whatever one claims to be a fact, have become plain. In a review in the current issue of the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), Sam Leith reminds us that the Oxford Dictionaries declared “post-truth” the 2016 word of the year, defining it as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Post-truth leads to deception, including self-deception, which leads to misjudgment and ill fortune. This is true for populations and societies, as well as individuals and social groups. Ethnography’s claim to evidence-based solidity, if not complete accuracy, ought to become more attractive to those academics, and others, who resist the assault on settled opinion in matters of law, ethics, or, to take an example closer to the theme of this blog, climate change and sustainability. Possibly for that reason ethnographic research in general, and into religion specifically, will begin to gain more practitioners. 

Team Fieldwork

I've neglected this blog while completing work on the Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology and preparing and delivering a keynote address for the Ecomusicologies 2014 conference that took place in Asheville, North Carolina a few weeks ago. That was an extremely stimulating conference and I plan to say why in due course. Much of my reading lately has been in the area of sound communication among animals, following up on the ideas about sound signaling presence and co-presence. That field is dominated today by a cluster of assumptions coming from game theory, natural selection, and bio-economics. I will be posting some things about that in the near future.

Last week there was a lively discussion on the public folklore list concerning team fieldwork and the use of still photography. Betsy Peterson, head of the American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress, asked for information on those topics from those folklorists who undertook fieldwork in the 1960s and 1970s. Shortly after the AFC was founded, in 1976, it sent teams of folklife specialists into particular geographical areas to survey the folklore in the region and, usually, turn the documentation into an exhibit which toured in that region and then was deposited in archives there or in the Library of Congress or both. Usually the teams were led by employees of the AFC, but they also utilized local-based folklorists who already knew something about the region's folklife. Although teams of two or three researchers were not new in folklore, these AFC teams were larger and in some ways resembled the teams of anthropologists and sociologists who assessed the social lives of people in a given geographical area. My response to Betsy was this:
    
     "Speaking from my North American perspective—I don’t know how this all went down in Europe or elsewhere back in the day, but when I studied folklore in the 1960s, what I encountered was “collecting” or survey work, rather than “fieldwork” in the longitudinal, Malinowskian ethnographic sense, or in the sense of some of the collaborative long-term team fieldwork projects that anthropologists were doing. Folklorists went into the field to survey and find and “collect” folklore, either individually or collectively (no pun intended). If memory serves, the language of the American Folklife Center’s early team projects was also expressed in terms of field surveys, which is what I understood them to have been. Documentation was part of the process of collecting. Earlier examples of collaboration in folklore field collecting include Milman Parry and Albert Lord in the late 1930s collecting epic songs together in Yugoslavia, and the collaborative field trips undertaken by Alan Lomax with Zora Neale Hurston and also with John Work, not to mention those that Alan went on with his father John. At some point in the 1960s/1970s the ethnographic turn in folklore seems to have replaced the idea of collecting (surveying). Now fieldwork was no longer regarded primarily as collecting folklore, but as doing ethnographies of expressive culture, in an anthropological sense, longer term and in one place. My work on the Powerhouse projects, Henry Glassie’s work in Ballymenone—there are several examples from the 1970s. My work on the Powerhouse project was collaborative, by the way. In anthropology, examples of larger teams doing anthropological fieldwork include the long-term projects undertaken by professors at Harvard and the U. of Chicago and their graduate students, after World War II. This isn’t to say there were no folklorists in the 1960s doing longitudinal work with individuals or in particular places, nor that they didn’t conceive of it as fieldwork; but it wasn’t the norm.
    When I studied ethnomusicology beginning in 1966 I encountered the term fieldwork, and I also encountered it the same year in an introductory anthropology course. Of course, the idea we were taught way back then was that a fieldworker was, ideally, a scientific observer, fly on the wall, investigative reporter, even when fieldwork was done by a group of fieldworkers; the notion that fieldwork involved collaboration among fieldworkers and “informants” (or what we’d call nowadays field partners, consultants, teachers, co-subjects, etc. as discussed recently on this listserv) was being advanced back then only by a few of the more radical action anthropologists.
     My own fieldwork in the 1960s I think of more as visiting than fieldwork, something I’ve actually written about here and there, the idea of visiting and friendship, collaborating with blues musicians, learning music from them, helping them in their careers by getting them gigs, recording contracts, etc. and mostly hanging out with them, not just learning about music but about a way of being in the world. There was a group of blues musicians in Minneapolis, Lazy Bill Lucas, JoJo Williams, Mojo Buford, Sonny Boy Rogers, kind of a floating group that congregated at Bill’s apartment on Lake Street, where we ate Bill’s fried chicken, drank Fox Deluxe beer, played music, and “shot the shit” (talked, as it was called back then) about life and love and music, made plans, and so forth. In the 1970s most of my fieldwork on the Powerhouse project was collaborative, with Ken George, who was a grad student in folklore at Chapel Hill at the time. (He’s since gone on to become a well-known anthropologist; taught at Harvard, Oregon, and Wisconsin, and is now teaching in Australia.) But even before then I wasn’t alone in that kind of fieldwork; when I taught at IU for a summer, Sandy Rikoon and I went together to a few Pentecostal and Baptist churches, where we documented the services, interviewed the evangelists, and so on. Sandy would remember that.
     Re visual documentation, again, this was something that was part of the ethnographer’s toolkit as I learned in studying ethnomusicology and anthropology back in the 1960s. I don’t recall it being a part of folklore studies, but certainly there were folklorists back then who were doing it intensively and well—Bruce Jackson and John Cohen spring immediately to mind. My own introduction to photography came from my father, who had me taking pictures and working in a darkroom as a young teenager; and after devouring _Let Us Now Praise Famous Men_ in high school, I decided I wanted to do what Agee and Evans did, which meant among other things making documentary photos. My dad had brought back a couple of 35mm cameras from World War II, a Leica and a Balda; he gave me the Balda to use. Interestingly, until he died I never saw the WWII photos he made in France as part of the American liberating army; he was one of those who never talked about the war, but he did save the photos and I have them now. In the 1960s I shot some 8mm movies of my blues musician friends and tried to synch them up with reel tape recordings I made at the same time, but I could never keep them in good synch and gave up. How I wish I’d had enough money or a grant to rent Super-8 synch sound equipment to do that back then. When I went with Bill and his friends to perform at the Ann Arbor Blues Festivals in 1969 and 1970, I made 5” reel tape recordings with a Sony TC-800B (called, at the time, the poor person’s Uher) portable recorder and shot still photos, this time using my dad’s Leica which by then he’d given to me. In the mid-1970s I got a $1500 grant from the NEA Folk Arts division (back then it had the words jazz and ethnic in its name also) for fieldwork with Rev. C. L. Franklin and with the grant money I promptly bought a videotape recorder, a combination of a reel video tape machine that could fit on a large backpack frame, along with an outboard video camera. It was called a video “portapak” and shot grainy black-and-white video on 1/2” reels, and I used it to make videos in the Powerhouse project as well as the Franklin project. I also took it along when Sandy Rikoon and I visited those churches in Indiana nearly 40 years ago."

     Last April I showed one of those old videos from 1977 at the conference celebrating Rev. C. L. Franklin's legacy, more than 35 years after I shot it, and nearly 30 years after Rev. Franklin's death. It turns out that the seven videos I shot of his preaching--all complete sermons, in 1977 and 1978--with that technically challenged portapak, are the only visual documentation made of his preaching; yet he was widely acknowledged as the finest African American preacher of his generation: as a preacher, of course. Martin Luther King, Jr. was his contemporary, and of course King's sermons were magnificent political orations. But Franklin was regarded as the finer preacher.