Publisher's Synopsis
This anthology deals with the "environment" of "research" in a wider empirical sense, taking "field research" as the basis and looking at its contexts within the whole process of research. The book focuses on the experiences and results of field researchers from various disciplines who for many years cooperated with the Phonogrammarchiv, where their audiovisual recordings are preserved and kept for further study. Five chapters highlight the following topics: "general - individual: field research", "oral tradition - spiritual experience - surreal communication: ethnology", "multi-dimensional: ethnomusicology", "documentation - standardisation - analysis: linguistics and discourse analysis" and "traditional structure - virtual access - permanent availability: archivistics". The book serves as an impetus to revive and broaden the discussion of field research as a tool in cultural studies. As Andre Gingrich put it in his introductory essay: "On the one hand, we have become more modest and self-critical in our scholarly self-image. Yet at the same time this means that we have learnt to listen and watch more carefully and flexibly. Numerous contributions in this book point to such self-reflective new forms of realism.
