Agawu Critical Review #3

Agawu raises a lot of interesting questions about ethics in ethnomusicology, but ends up shying away from answering them in favor of a conclusion that is a bit of a cop out. Some solid points he makes are ethnomusicology being a study for the west, by the west; and that a universal system of ethics is hard to come by when cultures each have their own sets.

Agawu falls into some traps later in the article: picking on other ethnomusicologists while basing the complaints on speculations and assumptions, overemphasizing the flaws of self-reflexivity, presenting some false dilemmas and slippery arguments to defend his own questionable ethics, and raising some truly ridiculous hypothetical examples (What does it matter if Herbie Hancock stole the idea of a pygmy whistle sound? Music is all about this kind of "theft." I get the point he was trying to make, but it was through raising a question that was moot.)

Finally, Agawu concludes with a wishy washy conclusion that the only way to go about ethics is to have an "ethical attitude." It seems silly to me to put so much effort into counterexamples and reducto ad absurdum techniques to come up with this answer, which could have been reached in a far more concise and linear fashion.