Ep #76 The Sounds of Fieldwork & Choosing Your Fieldsite: This Month on TFS

This week we’d like to introduce a new Familiar Stranger, Jarrod Sim! Jarrod is a PhD student at the school of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University. His current research is an anthropologically-led study of how landscape has shaped the auditory cultures of a Paiwanese community in Taiwan. He investigates and comprehends sound as layered and is interested in its role in contemporary understandings of culture. Welcome Jarrod!

This week’s panel centres around the various sounds of fieldwork. Jarrod’s work with the Paiwanese community got us thinking about how our respective field sites sounded and how sound is a really integral part of fieldwork. We also dive into the difficulties of conducting ethnomusicology online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

We then discuss a question sent in by a listener! They wanted to know what kind of considerations the strangers made when choosing a field site and what were some of the practical constraints that had to be considered.

Our Facebook page and Facebook group are back up and running so don’t forget to head over to our Facebook group The Familiar Strange Chats. Let’s keep talking strange, together!

If you like what we do and are in a position to do so, you can help us to keep making content by supporting us through Patreon.

Our Patreon can be found at https://www.patreon.com/thefamiliarstrange

This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.

Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com

Shownotes by Matthew Phung

Podcast edited by Alex D'Aloia and Matthew Phung