Rebecca makes great points about the inaccessibility of ethnomusicological language - overcomplicating the simple, referencing previous definitions, authors not being mindful of their non-ethnomusicological audience. She identifies all the hurdles more casual readers face.
She is spot on about the use of specialized languages among experts, and raises the even more important question about the ends justifying the means, that is the final product of ethnomusicology justifying the use of its language. Her question of the purpose of ethnomusicology to those who aren’t ethnomusicologists is absolutely critical. The best purpose I can come up with is an amassing of knowledge. What that knowledge is used for is sometimes determined by the ethnomusicologist (e.g. those that choose to do serious advocacy work for their subjects) and is sometimes determined by whoever else seeks out that knowledge. The point seems to be mainly that the information is there; it is recorded and can be accessed by anyone looking to satisfy curiosity or do something more significant, as long as their willing to put in the language legwork.
However, I think in a lot of cases, ethnomusicologists let their purpose stop at this amassing of knowledge, believing that it is innately good or useful. I think the next question that ethnomusicologists as a collective needs to ask and answer is “How do we want our work to be used in the end?” If the answer is to inform and educate the greater public, maybe language accessibility should be emphasized. If the answer is to provide a knowledge base for specific interested individuals pursuing larger goals (e.g. popularization/commercialization of a type of music?), then ethnomusicologists need to be mindful over how their final products are being used and how much of a role they would like to play in that process. Either way, I think having a vision of the end result of their work, beyond a paper, will help inform ethnomusicologists’ language choices.
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Your response brings up so many good questions. If the purpose is to amass knowledge, then why involve theory? Should this mass of knowledge just be a collection of straight up accounts of findings? Dictionary-style? Trying to contextualize and make things relevant by involving theory in the game seems to put an added weight on the discipline that goes beyond "amassing knowledge." Given, "knowledge" is different from "information," and perhaps holds broader expectations of context.
ReplyDeleteWhat if ethnomusicology was a just a method rather than a profession? What if necessity drove ethnography, rather than ethnography existing in an academic vacuum of discovery? A loosely related example: I've been reading Never Cry Wolf, which is Farley Mowat's account of observing wolves in northern Canada. He was sent there to get proof that the wolves were the ones depleting the caribou population in the area. To those who sent him there, his trip was more of a technicality: they knew it was the wolves doing it, and they just needed firsthand proof that wolves were a menace so that they could have that justification when they went in to kill the wolves. Mowat got there, met with an Inuit man who gave him a brief orientation to the place, and then set up a tentsite next to the wolves' den. He observed them, lived with them, and then quickly realized that the wolves caused little harm to him, that they were largely subsisting on mice, and that it was the trappers in the area who were killing hundreds of thousands of caribou a year to feed their dogs.
He went in with one set of assumptions, saw what was actually going on, and then came out with findings in opposition to those he was supposed to conclude. It seems to me that he went in with a purpose free of the domain of ethnography, but by using the practices of ethnography, he was able to commit to a different purpose. I realize that wolves aren't people. This is just an example of an instance in which some of the ideals and methods of ethnography served to answer a specific question with a tangible result. Part of it, I think, has to do with understanding the purpose from the beginning and having that purpose drive the research from beginning to end.
There was a question, the ethnographic method was the most worthwhile way of answering it, and those facts determined an outcome opposite to what its askers had expected. I can understand how having a driving question could bring up accusations of bias or agenda, but having a question from the start does not have to mean that the findings are tainted by the question. If the question is asked by one party and the research done by another, independent party (the ethnographer), then that would seem to move ethnography beyond "amassing knowledge" into the field of actually impacting change.