The Lost Ethnographies
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The Lost Ethnographies

Methodological Insights From Projects That Never Were

Robin James Smith, Sara Delamont, Robin James Smith, Sara Delamont

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eBook - ePub

The Lost Ethnographies

Methodological Insights From Projects That Never Were

Robin James Smith, Sara Delamont, Robin James Smith, Sara Delamont

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About This Book

The Lost Ethnographies reports on the methodological lessons learnt from ethnographic projects that, viewed superficially, failed. Experienced researchers write about projects they planned, and were excited about, which then never began, had to be abandoned, or took such unexpected directions that it became a different piece of work altogether. The topics and settings are varied and disparate, but the lessons learnt have important similarities. This collection focuses on absences; topics and settings that remain under researched; taken for granted aspects of social life that have not been scrutinized, and finally the potential insights that are gained when absences are carefully examined and explored. Readers will learn a great deal about research design, fundraising, writing up, access negotiations, serendipity in the field, and the complex interaction between the body and the brain of the ethnographer and the realities of ethnographic research. Maximising learning from the 'failings' of ourselves and of others is the positive message of the collection. The most poignant chapters are those in which the author 'returns' to reread and reflect on a past project; something that is not done often enough, partly because it can be painful. The accounts of projects which had to be abandoned or radically changed offer hope to researchers facing difficulties in their own investigations. These reflections, on projects that were never even begun, show how to gain fresh energy and social science insight from apparent rejection, and the collection approaches the whole concept of lost ethnography in provocative ways.

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CHAPTER 1

PERIWIGS IN PRAGUE: THE OPERA PROJECT WE NEVER DID

Sara Delamont and Paul Atkinson

ABSTRACT

In this chapter the authors describe an ethnographic project that the authors were never able to undertake. It was concerned with the use of opera (such as those of Mozart) in the construction of cultural heritage in a number of European cities, including Prague and Vienna. The authors would also have undertaken fieldwork to study the local use of music and opera as tourist attractions. The authors would have studied operatic tourism as an example of secular, cultural pilgrimage. It would, therefore, have been a contribution to the sociology of culture, heritage and tourism.
Keywords: Ethnography; opera; culture; heritage; tourism; secular pilgrimage
New knowledge always leads to new horizons of what is unknown.
(Gross & McGoey, 2015, p. 1)
In this chapter we reflect on a project we wanted to do in 2003, but were unable to carry out because we did not get the funding we applied for and could not manage it without a grant. So we did not acquire or make the new knowledge we wanted, nor did we change the horizons of the unknown. Any advances in methods or methodological thinking that might have developed during or after the fieldwork are also ā€˜lostā€™. The focus of our ā€˜lostā€™ project was opera. Specifically, it was on how opera (and incidentally opera houses) can be used to frame European cities as distinctive cultural destinations for travellers and tourists. We were particularly interested in how opera could function simultaneously as the marker for a specific place, while appealing universal aesthetic and historical value. We wanted, as a consequence of this interest, to do some intensive fieldwork in one to three cities in Europe. The research design included a plan to interview people who chose to use specialist tour agents to visit European cities in order to attend operatic performances. Opera is one of the art forms that can provide the basis for travel and tourism. Others include ā€˜blockbusterā€™ art exhibitions and literary or film connotations. It is at once a performance art with global appeal and one with strong local connotations. Opera tourists can experience a ā€˜universalā€™ art form and an authentic or historically important local performance simultaneously. In the course of this chapter we provide a brief context, a summary of the ā€˜lostā€™ project itself and a more detailed account of the cultural field of opera tourism. We reflect on how we formed our foreshadowed problems and comment on what the project might have achieved at the time and subsequently.

THE CONTEXT

In this section we provide the context to our lost project. It is intended for readers who are unfamiliar with opera as a cultural phenomenon or with varieties of high-culture tourism. We identify several features of opera as a tourist attraction, starting with the physical spaces in which opera is staged. It is not only the performance of an opera itself that can furnish the cultural event. Opera houses can be attractions in their own right. The most famous ones ā€“ like La Scala in Milan ā€“ have guided tours in the daytime, include small museums and operate shops for souvenirs (posters, recordings, stationery and the like). Our research was to be focussed primarily on the opera house as a performance venue, but they are also architectural landmarks. Visits to an opera performance mean a visit to an opera house, which is far from being a neutral venue. Opera houses can have their own symbolic and aesthetic value. There are theatres of historical significance (the court theatre at Drottningholm in Sweden, the Estates Theatre in Prague, La Fenice in Venice), ā€˜classicā€™ nineteenth-century grand theatres (La Scala in Milan, the Vienna Opera, The Royal Opera House in London), modern ā€˜iconicā€™ architect-designed buildings (Valencia, Helsinki, Sydney). Some are notable for having been reconstructed as they were, where they were, after wartime damage or fire (The Liceu, Barcelona, La Fenice in Venice or the Semperoper in Dresden). Usner (2011) stresses how the Vienna State Opera House was one of the first buildings to be recreated and reopened after 1945, as a symbol of the rebirth of the city and the nation.
The phenomenon of country-house opera season (Glyndebourne, Grange Park in the UK, Glimmerglass in the USA) furnishes yet another combination of performance and venue that constitute a distinctive operatic experience. So too do unique venues and stagings, such as the opera-on-the-lake at Bregenz, home of spectacular, massive sets on a floating stage. ā€˜Arenaā€™ opera (Verona or Romeā€™s Baths of Caracalla) is yet another genre of spectacle that can appeal to the general tourist, perhaps more so than the ardent operagoer.
Now the cultural pull of the opera house is not unique to opera. People may go to visit the Mariinsky or Bolshoi ballets, with little emphasis on the actual work to be seen, as opposed to the company and the theatre. Likewise, a small number of art galleries can be sites of visitor experience, almost irrespective of the artworks on display at any given time (the Guggenheim in Bilbao, designed by Frank Gehry, is an obvious case in point). But opera does seem to have a particularly well-developed culture of venues. Opera ā€“ again not uniquely, but certainly distinctively ā€“ is the basis of multiple festivals. Each can have its own character, in terms of repertoire. Some are based on individual composers: Wagner at Bayreuth, Puccini at Torre del Lago, Rossini at Pesaro. Others have distinctive kinds of repertoire, such as specialising in Baroque opera. The annual festival at Wexford can be relied on to stage performances of relatively little-known works: rarely performed operas by famous composers or obscure pieces by neglected composers. Donizettiā€™s Maria Padilla is an example of the former and Marittiā€™s Salome of the latter. One journalist suggested that ā€˜The majority of the Wexford audience are probably suffering from BohĆØme fatigueā€™ (Kellow, 2016, p. 1502).
So opera can be tied to particular locales by a variety of connotations. It can be packaged in various ways to encourage travel, with a strong sense of place. Brochures from specialist travel companies can offer ā€˜Richard Strauss in Leipzigā€™, or ā€˜Monteverdi in Veniceā€™ or ā€˜Dresden Mozart Daysā€™. So the global appeal of opera (to a very particular fraction of the population) is tied to highly localised venues. Together, they can offer the opera-traveller a characteristic cultural experience. For instance:
We are delighted to return to Latvia for the Riga Opera Festival which in 2017 will present ā€¦ Faust, Eugene Onegin, Tannhauser and Carmen ... In the jewel-like Latvian National Opera House.
(Travel for the Arts Brochure, 2017, p. 9)
One of Europeā€™s best preserved mediaeval cities, Prague is also a proud musical capital with two opera companies ā€¦ we shall attend performances ā€¦ including works by the nationā€™s two best loved composers, Bedrich Smetana (1824ā€“1884) and Antonin Dvorak (1841ā€“1904).
(Kirker Opera Holiday Brochure, 2017, p. 25)
Maribor, Sloveniaā€™s second city, is closer to Graz than it is to Ljubljana, and musically ambitious, so its performances are sometimes more interesting and its programming more adventurous than that of the capital.
(Opera, April 2017, p. 482)
Warsawā€™s Teatr Wiekkl had gathered an outstanding group of Polish singers for a new and long overdue production of Goplana ā€¦ first performed in 1896.
(Opera, March 2017, p. 352)
These extracts are from the brochures of two specialist travel companies that offer British clients packaged trips to attend opera performances ā€“ Travel for the Arts and Kirker ā€“ and from reviews of performances in a monthly magazine devoted to opera. Because opera is a minority activity in Britain, and foreign travel to attend opera is a relatively unknown form of tourism, the ā€˜lost projectā€™ described here is a bit esoteric, but perhaps all the more interesting for that.
Like many projects ā€“ both ā€˜lostā€™ and ā€˜foundā€™ ā€“ the ideas we wanted to pursue arose from a mix of personal and intellectual engagements. As we outline, it arose partly from Atkinsonā€™s interests in opera itself. That engagement was in itself personal and intellectual, as he is an operagoer, was pursuing a part-time degree in opera studies and had conducted ethnographic fieldwork in an opera company. It drew on the musicological expertise of our collaborator, Adrian Thomas. Delamont and Atkinson were committed to the extension of ethnographic research and methodology. Delamont had a professional interest in tourism, partly grounded in her teaching of the anthropology of Europe. Again, in common with many projects, the research itself would have been unthinkable in the absence of shared passions and commitments.

THE UNFUNDED PROJECT

Early in the 2000s two of the grant-giving bodies in the UK, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), announced a jointly funded research programme called Cultures of Consumption. The programme ran from 2002 to 2007. We prepared a bid with Adrian Thomas, then a professor of music at Cardiff University, who is an expert on twentieth-century Central and Eastern European (especially Polish) composers and is fluent in Polish. While our proposed project was not exclusively focussed on Poland, Adrianā€™s musicological expertise was, we believed, central to the credibility of our planned research on opera, which would inevitably draw in wider considerations of music in contemporary society.
We intended to do fieldwork overseas and in the UK. In Europe, our plan was to explore the globalised consumption of opera in several cities, at least one of which had been behind the Iron Curtain before 1989 and was by 2000 post-communist. In these countries opera had previously been heavily state subsidised and companies had not needed to attract tourists. By 2000 they were de facto competing for audiences with West German and Italian houses. Our proposed sites included Prague, which was already a lively tourist destination, and Warsaw, which was less so. The plan was that a local social scientist would interview key informants in the opera companies about the post-communist changes, and their programming and production choices. We envisaged elite interviews using our own and Adrian Thomasā€™s contacts to reach key decision makers in the opera houses. We also planned street ethnography of ticket touts done by ourselves or a local research assistant: observations in the tourist areas to watch the tourists being accosted by the vendors of concert, opera and ballet tickets. Those sellers are often dressed in ā€˜Mozartā€™ costume (hence the title of this chapter). If possible, some of the vendors were to have been interviewed by local researchers too.
In the UK we hoped to be able to interview managers of the UK-based travel companies and to get their permission to send a request for volunteers from their customers to fill in a questionnaire or be interviewed. We thought we would pay for ourselves to travel on an organised trip to the opera in Prague and Warsaw with at least two of the companies (one for each city) to do ethnographic work. It would a mixed-methods project, but the participation in the opera tours and the street fieldwork on ticket sellers were classic ethnography. At the time of our planning, online surveys or focus groups were rare and relatively untried. We did envisage collecting flyers, photographing street encounters and perhaps making a DVD of our results for the respondents.
The project was not funded as a part of that research initiative. We cannot comment on the reasons for its rejection. Such research initiatives drew large numbers of applications. They were highly competitive. More researchers seemed to follow a newly announced initiative than were seeking ā€˜responsive modeā€™ research funding. So, like the great majority of proposals, ours fell at the first hurdle and was not longlisted. Consequently, we had little or no feedback on the failure. Given the extraordinary levels of interest that all Research Council initiatives elicited at that time, we were disappointed but not surprised. But it was the initiative itself that prompted the planned collaboration.
Before we set out our foreshadowed problems and our plans for the project, we offer a short biographical context. Paul has attended operas since he was a teenager and goes regularly to the Welsh National Opera (WNO) in Cardiff and other venues. He has also published an ethnographic study of the WNO Company (Atkinson, 2013). Sara is not an opera-lover, but goes to one or two performances a year, with Paul. When we planned this research we had only once patronised any of the tour companies and had only occasionally gone to the opera when we were on holiday in a city. Since 2002 and the failed grant application we have ourselves been opera tourists. We have used several of the companies to go to operas in Antwerp, Barcelona, Berlin, Budapest and Munich, and once to get tickets for something in London that had ā€˜sold outā€™. In each case our motivation was to see a rarely done opera. On one occasion the person on the telephone laughed and said ā€˜No one else has asked to see thatā€™ when we said we wanted to see the double bill of The Dwarf (Zemlinsky) and Erwartung (Schoenberg) in Budapest.

OPERA AND A GLOBAL WORLD

Opera has been global since the era of transatlantic liners which took Italian opera stars to sing in Manaus, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. In that era the singers travelled to perform for local audiences. Today, in the UK, there is clearly a business opportunity to take audiences to opera houses across the world (like the Tannhauser in Riga or Rusalka in Prague for companies like Travel for the Arts and by Kirker). Opera, a magazine for enthusiasts, carries reviews of productions from all over the world. A British opera lover can read about and easily book a trip to see a Ring Cycle in Melbourne, or a premier in Argentina or performances in New York, Santa Fe or Wexford. The September 2009 issue of Opera carried advertisements from three companies: Liaisons Abroad, New World Travel and Show and Stay. The February 2017 issue carried advertisements for three different companies: Travel for the Arts, Opera Holidays and Single Travellers. The specialist travel companies advertise in the opera magazines and in the general classical music periodicals such as Gramophone. These tour companies, of which there were at ...

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