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Conviviality and Collaboration: The Intimacies of Ethnographic Practice and Popular Music Production between Tanzania and the United Kingdom

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Over the last more than fifteen years we have worked together on the production of music, lyrics, knowledge and research. In this chapter we reflect on the evolution of this over decade long musical and research collaboration. We explore the role of music making as both a site of convivial collaboration and as the source of our epistemic orientation. The ‘we’ in this article are Tanzanian rapper and researcher Hashim Rubanza and anthropologist, cultural studies scholar David Kerr. It was initially through the immersive practice of ethnographic research that we met and a shared intellectual interest in questions at the intersection of knowledge production, everyday life and popular music performance developed. It is from ethnographic practice that the various forms of cooperation and co-creation that form the basis of this chapter have emerged. The conviviality, intimacy and messiness of ethnographic research have shaped our practices of collaboration.

Keywords: co-creation ; cultural intermediaries ; cultural producers ; equitable collaborative research ; ethnography ; hip-hop ; knowledge production ; music production ; participatory research practice ; Research teams

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Conviviality and Collaboration: The Intimacies of Ethnographic Practice and Popular Music Production between Tanzania and the United Kingdom
Intellect , 51 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1386/9781835950579_5
/content/books/9781835950579.c02
/content/books/9781835950579.c02
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References

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  5. Bejarano, Alonso, Juárez, López, García, Mijangos and Goldstein, Daniel (2019), Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science, Durham NC: Duke University Press.
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     [Google Scholar]
  7. Gay y Blasco, Paloma and Liria de la Cruz, Hernández (2012), ‘Friendship, anthropology’, Anthropology and Humanism, 37:1, pp. 1–14.
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  11. Kerr, David (2015), ‘“Underground” rap performance, informality and cultural production in Dar es Salaam’, Journal of African Media Studies, 7:1, pp. 69–85.
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  15. Kibona Clark, Msia (2013), ‘The struggle for hip hop authenticity and against commercialization in Tanzania’, The Journal of Pan African Studies, 6:3, pp. 5–21.
     [Google Scholar]
  16. Laliberte, Nicole and Schurr, Carolin (2014), ‘Introduction: The stickiness of emotions in the field: Complicating feminist methodologies’, Gender, Place and Culture, 23:1, pp. 72–78.
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  18. Macharia, Keguro (2015), ‘Visiting Africa: A short guide for researchers’, The New Inquiry, 21 February, https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/visiting-africa-a-short-guide-for-researchers. Accessed 5 December 2023.
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  20. Mohammed, Wunpini Fatimata (2022), ‘Bilchiinsi philosophy: Decolonizing methodologies in media studies’, Review of Communication, 22:1, pp. 7–24.
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  21. Musila, Grace (2019), ‘Against collaboration – or the native who wanders off’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 31:3, pp. 286–93.
     [Google Scholar]
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  26. Ogude, James and Joyce, Nyairo (eds) (2007), Urban Legends, Colonial Myths: Popular Culture and Literature in East Africa, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  27. Rubanza, H. and Kerr, D. (2020), ‘The sound of Tanzania: Imagining the nation through Dar es Salaam's studios’, Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music, 4:1, pp. 72–85.
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