Songwriting as Ethnographic Practice

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the ways that songwriting and ethnographic writing are different tools that serve to narrate and humanize a small sliver of human experience for outsider eyes and ears. It argue that paying as much attention to emotional authenticity and alchemy in social science researchers ethnographic writing as them do in their songs and paying as much attention to specificity, detail, and cultural nuance in their songs as them do in their ethnographic writing could serve to enliven the former and broaden the resonance and applicability. If ethnography is understood not as a science but as an interpretive art then it is in the interpretation and the craft of writing about a lifeworld with compassion, depth, and nuance where the greatest skill arguably lies. Specificity is central to songwriting and ethnographic writing, where sense-bound imagery and specific places, times, and identities are essential to bringing listeners into a story.

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