Engaged with a discipline built on music, participant-observation, and fieldwork, ethnomusicologists position the experience of music and culture as a lens for studying the social creation of meaning. Ethnomusicologists' methodologies (e.g., approaches to fieldwork, analysis, and ethnography) are collaborative social acts and defining elements of the discipline. Yet in the second edition of Shadows in the Field, a foundational reader on ethnomusicological field research, Bruno Nettl laments that “most of our literature treats these matters at best as an essential step toward whatwe are trying to find out and not as a central activity” (2008:viii). While increasing numbers of ethnomusicologists are engaging fieldwork and its theories as objects of inquiry, this area would benefit from still greater scholarly attention. In this article, we explore the methodological implications of collaborative fieldwork by analysing what happens when ethnomusicologists deliberately go into the field together.

In this article, I address collecting and re(p)(m)atriation as research orientations. I draw on examples from Métis music to situate the impact of collection-oriented research, to interrogate my own practice as a Métis-music scholar, and to point to possibilities for the future. In presenting a history of collecting alongside an overview of re(p)(m)atriation, I offer readers an opportunity to meditate on the pervasiveness of collection-oriented research and how we might create a new ethnomusicology—meditations encouraged through poetic expressions. I suggest that twenty-first century ethnomusicology needs to turn towards rematriation, not only as an act of returning artifacts, but also as a way of orienting our work as scholars.

The sounds of percussion, guitar, singing, and clapping guide us from the heat of the summer pavement of the parking lot to the cool shade of the trees in the garden. Parents, staff, children, youth—we all gather here first thing in the morning. Some children immediately sit on the ground in front of the musicians, others navigate their canes or walkers to find a seat on a chair or bench or find a good spot for their wheelchairs. Some parents linger. The singing continues as everyone gathers and joins in with voices, clapping, and percussion to participate in the familiar “The boat goes down to the river, it takes me to my home …” This was our place of arrival at Spiral Garden.

The people of Bali undertake an unusually large number of vibrant and frequent festivals and religious rites. Hindu Balinese culture is particularly famous for its numerous temples (approximately 25,000) and the Odalan festivals held at them each year. The Sasak people on the neighboring island of Lombok had at one time a large number of shrines with a similar schedule of annual or seasonal Gawe or Alip festivals. As Sasak society gradually transformed from a polytheistic culture to one which follows a reformed version of Islam, most of these pre-Islamic shrines were dismantled or abandoned. Only a few polytheistic shrines remain active in the latter twentieth century, and these have assumed Islamic associations.

The scientific exploration of musical instruments of non-European peoples and of European folk music instruments began in the second half of the nineteenth century and was intensified in this century. The purpose of its initial phase was to make some kind of inventory in order to have the necessary scientific sources at hand, which would serve as a basis for further investigations of musical instruments. Field research among the world's most varied peoples has yielded even more data concerning a substantial number of new instruments, which hitherto have remained unknown.

Les relations commerciales entre les habitants du Golfe Persique et ceux de Zanj ou Afrique orientale sont très anciennes: n'oublions pas non plus que Mascat et Zanzibar étaient liés par une union politique de 1690 environ jusqu'à 1861. On a souvent parlé de l'influence arabe sur les peuplades de la côte est d'Afrique; on a beaucoup moins parlé des conséquences de la présence de minorités importantes d'Africains dans les principautés arabes du Golfe.

La musique arabe de Kuwait, de Bahrain et de la Côte des Pirates n'est pas sensiblement influencée par les musiques africaines: la seule exception notable concerne les danses de guerres normalement appelées ardha à Bahrain, ayala sur la Côte des Pirates; les mélodies, les textes et les danses sont indiscutablement d'origine béouine mais l'influence africaine est sensible dans les rhythmes produits par le groupe de joueurs de tambour qui danse entre les deux rangs de chanteurs arabes.

Asked to comment on several excellent papers in a session at the 2001 ICTM World Conference, I was inspired by a Brazilian metaphor and a breakfast banana to develop a description of the challenges of analysis and comparison in ethnomusicology. While what follows is a short meditation on an overextended metaphor, I hope it makes some more profound points in a way that can be reproduced at breakfast tables or classrooms anywhere in the world. Since the conference, I have found it useful in courses at the University of California at Los Angeles.

A long-standing conception in the history of the study of culture has been the model of two distinct types of traditions interacting with one another but remaining essentially separate. Dichotomies such as folk vs. high or fine art, little vs. great, rural vs. urban, or village vs. court have been used in reference to this distinction. There are a number of problems with such a model, to be sure, but it is not my intention to consider them all here. Rather, I intend to refer to the binary division, because it is so widely held in so many cultures around the world, as popular conception, and to view recent developments within a particular tradition as a response to that conception. The division usually implies a hierarchy. Carriers of what is seen as a lower tradition may be dissatisfied with that status. One response they might choose is to abandon that tradition altogether in favor of a more widely respected one. Another is to modify its practice in such substantial ways that it resembles other more widely respected traditions. But still another response—one which counters the notion of these two types of tradition as separate entities—is to adopt some elements of the other in order to legitimize their own. For musical traditions these elements may include authoritative texts, notation, terminology, theoretical writings, codification, distribution through the media, and formalized transmission in an academic setting.

Zambia is, for administrative purposes, divided into eight provinces: the Northern, the Luapula, the Western, the Northwestern, the Eastern, the Central, the Southern, and the Barotse. Linguistically, it is divided into four main language groups: the Bemba, the Nyanja, the Tonga, and the Lozi. The language groupings coincide to a great extent with the provinces, with the Bemba-speaking people spread over the Northern, Luapula, Western, and parts of the Central provinces. The Nyanja speakers are in the Eastern Province, the Tonga speakers in the Southern and parts of the Central provinces, and the Lozi speakers in Barotse Province. The Northwestern Province is occupied by a group of tribes whose lingua franca is usually regarded as Luvale-Mbunda.

Oral tradition is the theme for the event that we are initiating now. We will attempt to present a synthesis of the emergence and development of popular music and its importance in Brazilian culture. It is our intention to present a brief summary of all this trajectory throughout the national territory, particularly focusing, though, on popular music in the city of Rio de Janeiro.

Twelve years ago during the IFMC conference at Copenhagen, Arnold Bake gave an excellent paper on Nepalese folk music, which unfortunately appeared in the Journal of the IFMC only as a short summary. But even this brief summary shows the very complicated situation arising from the fact that in Nepal two communities, the Nevari and the Nepali, have lived together for two hundred years, each preserving more or less intact its own language and separate musical tradition as well as its own hierarchy of castes. These castes, because of their social separation, continue to keep pure their separate traditions. Hence, one cannot understand the different styles of Nepalese music in their cultural context without taking into account the caste system and its effect on the music.