Chapter 1
This chapter charts some important efforts of individuals who worked mostly outside the academy, who set a tone for diverse approaches to recording culture, modeling the very spirit of polyvocality that has become a central thrust for contemporary interpretive and critical qualitative researchers. We argue that many of the same issues that concern qualitative researchers today were also at work among professional and amateur observers during various periods of the 20th century. In particular, we find that their efforts to record and document cultural life reflect many of the goals advanced in our most important contemporary theoretical debates about qualitative research. But most important, we show how audio recordings can provide qualitative researchers with opportunities to more fully engage the people and places being studied while functioning as an alternative to a written representation of cultural life.