| Sumario: | In New York City there are telephones — in virtually every apartment (and via extensions and portable models often in every room), every office (many times on every desk), on street corners and subway platforms. Cell phones live in people's pockets, purses, or hands and telephone conversations occur just about anywhere. This article examines the seemingly antithetical relationship between using the telephone and conducting fieldwork, using as an example some of the experiences and conundrums I encountered while conducting fieldwork among women of New York's mainstream jazz community. I argue that to understand the antithetical relationship that exists between fieldwork and the phone we need to examine both the cultural notions that surround telephone use as well as our notions and ideals of anthropological practice. I further argue that as we recognize the telephone as an important medium of contemporary social life and incorporate it into our ethnographic toolkit, we open the door to a kind of fieldwork that can help move us beyond our localizing tendencies and lingering adherence to face-to-face interactions as the “real” stuff of social life. {telephone, fieldwork, community, ethnography, jazz} Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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