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A meeting in Ninh Binh: reflections on Buber and the ethnographic meeting point

esbjörn WetterMark

note1) The research leading to this text would not have been possible without the continuous support and encouragement given by Håkan Lundström;

I am very grateful. I am also indebted to Pham Thi Hue for guidance in the world of Vietnamese music and culture;

to Jasmine Hornabrook for an unceasing enthusiasm in sorting out my English; and last but not least, Ha Thi Cau for letting yet another researcher in to her home.

2) The passage is taken from section three of I and Thou, in which Buber moves on to show how his philosophy of dialogue relates to mans relationship to God. The religious connotations aside, I think that this passage sums up Buber’s approach to human meetings in a graphic and beautiful way. I have chosen to use a Swedish translation of Buber in the main text as I find this more evoking of the meeting point than the English translation (see page 72).

Xam is a song genre which once flourished in the northern parts of Vietnam.

It was sung – and played on percussion, dan nhi (two-stringed fiddle) and dan bau (monochord) - by groups of blind beggars and musicians. Like many other genres of Vietnamese traditional music, xam suffered heavily during the turbulence of the 20th century. Today, the traditional xam repertoire has been more or less wiped out, and the occasional street singer you might encounter on the streets of Hanoi, would know little about the songs and music of their predecessors. As a singer who grew up, and spent her life, singing in the streets and marketplaces of towns and villages in the Red River Delta, Cau is often mentioned as the last authentic xam musician in Vietnam. Since a previous trip to Hanoi, I had listened extensively to a documentary CD with Cau and I was intrigued by her piercing, but beautiful, voice and rhythmic fiddle playing, as well as the titles of her tunes – such as Opium and A drifting life. I had heard my friends in Hanoi refer to her with deep respect, and she was always described as ”the last one left”. When Håkan Lundström asked me to conduct a small survey of possible interviewees for a research project on music and sustainability in Vietnam, Cau was already high on my list of musicians to meet and talk to.

On the map, Cau’s village in the Ninh Binh province seemed to be located not too far from Hanoi, but the trip took hours. I couldn’t judge whether it was roadworks, or lack of them, that kept us crawling along, often overtaken by overladen motorbikes. When we arrived, Cau’s daughter and son-in-law met us at the door, and in the main room, wrapped in an orange furry jacket, sat Cau. Hue introduced me and I tried to tell Cau why I was there. After being interrupted and humorously scalded for my bad Vietnamese, I let Hue do the talking. Cau gave us her consent in recording the interview and I turned on my microphone.

I won’t dwell on the details of our meeting, but, in short, the experience was everything I expected, from the difficulties of getting to the village, to her appearance and way of speaking. She had been asleep before we arrived, and although tired, she readily answered our questions, sometimes with riddles, rhymes, and joking comebacks rather than any formal answers; she asked for money to buy more booze; she was small, wrinkled, and in every way she

looked like she had lived the hard life; her dan nhi was old and kept together by pieces of string; she ate only peanuts, chewed betel, and drank rice vodka;

when she sang her voice, coarse and searching at first, soon wowed me, as it had on my CD. Cau was authentic, the real deal, ”the last one left”, the ultimate Other. When we prepared to leave, her daughter brought us a gift for Hue’s parents; a live hen, wrapped up in a plastic bag sealed with sellotape.

The visit was everything I expected it to be.

But, could this really be right? How could my expectations of an 80-year-old woman in the Vietnamese countryside, seem so close to reality? The correct question might be; whose reality was I actually visiting? In hindsight, it is obvious that my experience was deeply influenced by my own preconceptions – based on stories and the disembodied voice on a worn out CD. Additional research and interviews would have challenged these preconceptions, but this meeting did not lead to any follow-ups, it became a loose thread and ended as a vibrant memory of an old musician.

Although my account of our visit to Cau has an ironic edge, I am sure most people who engage in ethnographic research have asked themselves similar questions after a first fieldwork encounter. Can this be right, are my experiences genuine or the result of my preconceptions? However, in most cases a first meeting would only be the starting point for further interviews and research, and thus the mystery of the Other would be, at least partly, dispelled, and the uncertainty surrounding the first encounter forgotten.

But, maybe we should dwell a bit longer on this first meeting, because, is it not where our own background, our preconceptions and prejudices, good or bad, become the most obvious? In our enthusiasm, or disappointment, we may actually see ourselves, rather than the person or event we thought was the focus of our inquiry. Instead of erasing this moment, and disarm its spell with the theory, method, and critical thinking of supposedly objective research, we could take it as an opportunity; a possibility to look at our own stand point and reflect on how this may influence our research.

I introduced this text with a passage from Martin Buber’s book I and Thou, and it was Buber’s metaphorical account of the duality of human relations which made me recall my visit to Cau’s home, and the ambiguous feelings it note2) “If we go on our way and

meet a man who has advanced towards us and has also gone on his way, we know only our part of the way, not his – his we experience only in the meeting.

Of the complete relational event we know, with the knowledge of life lived, our going out to the relation, our part of the way. The other part only comes upon us, we do not know it; it comes upon us in the meeting.

But we strain ourselves on it if we speak of it as though it were some thing beyond the meeting.

We have to be concerned, to be troubled, not about the other side but about our own side, not about grace but about will.

Grace concerns us in so far as we go out to it and persist in its presence; but it is not our

ob-left me with. For Buber, human-to-human meetings are encounters where our own past comes to the fore, and whilst we may reach out towards the Other to learn about their past, we cannot see beyond the meeting point.

We call out for the Other, but are left with echoes from our own past. Only by accepting our own subjectivity, can we, at least metaphorically, reach beyond ourselves and fully meet. This authentic meeting demands that I allow the Other to come against me as an individual, not as a thing, not as a preconception, but as a thou. The difference between thou and it – between the objectification of people and things as it, and the embrace of another individual as thou – is central to Buber’s philosophy. Only by sacrificing the Other – the it – for the thou, only by letting go, is an authentic meeting possible. As long as the Other remains another, I can learn nothing new.

Buber writes with a poetic vagueness which nevertheless brings the encounter down to earth, and he seems to imply that to leave ourselves in the mercy of the thou of the Other is not only to surrender to the very subjectivity of being human, but also to accept the Other as our equal. As such, Buber’s text reminds us that, although our backgrounds and intentions may differ, we cannot escape the fact that we are all locked into our own humanity.

With this in mind, the ambiguity of my encounter with Cau becomes clear.

Throughout our meeting, Cau remained as my preconception of the ”last”

musician, and for Cau I may have been just another person with a microp-hone. Neither of us managed, or even tried, to leave the it of the Other behind, and I argue that it would have been impossible for us to do so. The conventions governing our meeting – conventions of research, of age, of gen-der, of politics, of culture – demanded that we fully remained with ourselves.

We might have called out and listened, but there was no surrender to the thou of the Other. Only by a mutual breakdown of conventions could we have met as I and thou, and any understanding gained without this sacrifice would have been an illusion. Therefore, I have to accept that our interview with Cau – the collection of information, of possible facts, of sounds, and of experiences – is nothing beyond itself, and Cau’s world remains a mystery to me.

My meeting with Cau was, in this sense, never authentic. However, its very inauthenticity allowed me to reflect on my own background and to confront

my own preconceptions and ideas. For that reason the ambiguity of the first meeting should not be forgotten – or treated as mere misunderstandings, to be rectified later as our relationship with the field deepens. The meeting point is an opportunity; accepting our own subjectivity, and our being as humans among humans, will allow us to turn our gaze towards ourselves and develop beyond theory and method.

esbjörn Wettermark is a Ph. d. student at royal holloway,

university of london and a former student at the Malmö academy of Music.

references

Buber, M. (2006 [1923]). Jag och Du. Trans. Norell, M. and Norell, C. Ludvika: Dualis.

Buber, M. (1958 [1923]). I and Thou. Trans. Smith, R. G.

Edinburgh and New York: T. &

T. Clark, Scribner.