Fieldwork at Home: European and Asian Perspectives

Many ethnomusicologists, possibly the majority worldwide, carry out fieldwork in their home societies. This chapter focuses on the experiences of two such field-workers, one from England and one from Taiwan. As partners, we have carried out much of our fieldwork together in recent years, comparing findings and sharing interpretations, each of us casting a shadow across the other’s fields of inquiry, a point we return to at the end of this chapter. Jonathan Stock undertook the writing-up, so his work is described in the first person and Chou Chiener’s in the third person, but this is very much a joint account.