What’s the Difference? : Reflections on Gender and Research in Village India

Abstract

Abstract In 1974, coincidently about a year before I first heard of a field called ethnomusicology, Edward Ives wrote the following in a manual on field research. About setting up the initial interview, he said, “There are two questions that students often ask at about this point. The first, and by far the more common, frequently comes out something like this: ‘Do you think it’s going to make a difference that I’m a girl when I go talk to Mr. Bilodeau about lumbering?’ My answer is usually, ‘Of course it’s going to make a difference, but I can’t tell you what kind of difference.”’ Ives goes on to say a bit later, “Just about every time I have predicted how the man/woman of it would work out in some particular case, I have been wrong, which means that I have stopped predicting” (1980:37). This may be the wisest statement that I’ve come across concerning the difference that gender makes in field research, although it probably wasn’t the answer the student was looking for.