Ethnomusicological Praxis

The introductory chapter to each of the two volumes in Transforming Ethnomusicology offers a critical discussion of a range of socially engaged approaches as well as their deep historical roots that we consider foundational and fundamental to the ethnomusicological endeavor. These approaches affiliate variably with such intellectual traditions as Marxism, feminism and anti-racism, Post-colonialism and Indigenous Studies, Participatory Action Research, analyses of heritage practices and sustainability challenges, studies of intellectual property regimes and ecologies, and other work in ethnomusicology and cognate disciplines in the social sciences. Our aim is to deepen the conversation about how intellectual history has informed our discipline and to probe the premises, activities, and assumptions of scholars past and present who strive to respond to the concerns of the communities with whom they work.

The Earth Is (Still) Our Mother

As many large-scale protests by Indigenous people have articulated, lands inhabited by Indigenous communities (such as desert margins, small islands, lakes and rivers, high-altitude zones, and the circumpolar Arctic) are particularly vulnerable to the dramatic shifts in climate currently underway. The delicate ecosystems upon which Indigenous communities rely are in flux, and the accelerating rate of climate change—outpacing the direst scientific projections—amounts to a crisis that is every bit as threatening as the legacy of European colonialism. Fortunately, for millennia Indigenous communities have cultivated an intimate awareness of their ecology and have remained, throughout the era of world-wide industrial devastation, adept at adapting to environmental change. This awareness and adaptive power has been discussed within the framework of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Using traditional stories and songs in Indigenous communities as a touchstone, this chapter will explore three interrelated aspects of TEK: (1) its role in assisting Indigenous communities in adapting to the effects of climate change; (2) its potential to inform and influence Western-generated climate science; and (3) its promise as a unifying thread tying Indigenous communities together, strengthening global self-determination.

Music for Global Human Development

This chapter outlines a model for engaged ethnomusicology fostering human development, locally and globally, through sustainable music-centered community collaborations. Human development is a process of upholding human value in the world—rights, freedoms, social justice. Human development is impeded by dehumanization—the human treated as a nonhuman through an impersonal world system (and ironically shaping much “development” work today). The model builds on Habermas’s duality of system and lifeworld, but argues that the maintenance of the lifeworld—locus of human value—depends not only on rational “communicative action” (as per Habermas), but equally on affective social connectivity, constructed primarily through a profoundly social “soundworld,” where sonic feedback loops of thought-feeling produce “resonance.” The chapter describes projects that use participatory action research to forge collaborative, community-engaged networks, blurring differences between “researcher” and “researched,” drawing participants into a shared, resonant soundworld, across boundaries of ethnicity, religion, nation, and class. Projects based in Liberia, Ghana, and Egypt address post-conflict trauma, public health issues, maternal and neonatal health, cultural continuity and civil society. The chapter suggests that resonant networks of participatory action research in ethnomusicology have the potential not only to transform local communities—whether rich or poor—but also to transform the networks themselves, toward global human development.

A Sound Economy

A sound community announces the presence and potential of an ecological rationality. In a sound community, music is communicative, as natural as breathing, participatory and exchanged freely, strengthening and sustaining individuals and communities. A sound community exhibits a sound economy, just, participatory, and egalitarian. Wealth and power are widely distributed and shared, and maintained through the visible hand of democratic management. A sound economy is based in a sound ecology where exchanges are based in honest signals that invite reciprocity and trust. In a sound ecology, sound being and sound knowing lead to sound action, which is cooperative, mutually beneficial, and just.

The Modernity of the Songlines

Aboriginal Australia is facing a time like no other. This chapter reflects on our ever-adapting culture, as we are lamenting the passing of our cultural custodians, each of whom is a library of profound knowledge. It articulates how a global groundswell of creative work, controlled and created from an Aboriginal and/or first peoples perspective, works to retain language and revitalize ritual forms. Our creative practices have enabled Indigenous arts industry workers across all genres a relevant voice, better employment prospects, community outcomes, and, most important, the control of how we are perceived. Viewers of museum exhibitions now have more awareness of the sophisticated and complex societal structures we have developed and lived for thousands of years. But what of the continuing cultural obligations and clan/nation responsibility, the cultural inheritance of the oldest living race? While the author believes it is vital for the next generations of first peoples to build bridges, develop indigenous capacity, generate employment, and ensure the health and well-being of their communities, she asks how we are ensuring our youth are experiencing the old ways of traditional, intergenerational knowledge transmission, and how relevant we consider it in the twenty-first century.

Music Endangerment, Repatriation, and Intercultural Collaboration in an Australian Discomfort Zone

To the extent that intercultural ethnomusicology in the Australian settler state operates on a colonialist stage, research that perpetuates a procedure of discovery, recording, and offsite archiving, analysis, and interpretation risks repeating a form of musical colonialism with which ethnomusicology worldwide is inextricably tied. While these research methods continue to play an important role in contemporary intercultural ethnomusicological research, ethnomusicologists in Australia in recent years have become increasingly concerned to make their research available to cultural heritage communities. Cultural heritage communities are also leading discovery, identification, recording, and dissemination to support, revive, reinvent, and sustain their practices and knowledges. Repatriation is now almost ubiquitous in ethnomusicological approaches to Aboriginal music in Australia as researchers and collaborating communities seek to harness research to respond to the impact that colonialism has had on social and emotional well-being, education, the environment, and the health of performance traditions. However, the hand-to-hand transaction of research products and represented knowledge from performers to researcher and archive back to performers opens a new field of complexities and ambiguities for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants: just like earlier forms of ethnomusicology, the introduction, return, and repatriation of research materials operate in “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (Pratt 2007 [1992]). In this chapter, we recount the processes and outcomes of “The Junba Project” located in the Kimberley region of northwest Australia. Framed by a participatory action research model, the project has emphasized responsiveness, iteration, and collaborative reflection, with an aim to identify strategies to sustain endangered Junba dance-song practices through recording, repatriation, and dissemination. We draw on Pratt’s notion of the “contact zone” as a “discomfort zone” (Somerville & Perkins 2003) and look upon an applied/advocacy ethnomusicological project as an opportunity for difference and dialogue in the repatriation process to support heterogeneous research agendas.

Ethnomusicology and the Meeting of Knowledges in Music

Universities in Latin America (and, to a certain extent, in the entire non-Western world) were created in the colonial and republican periods as replicas of modern European universities, which had stabilized criteria for the classification, organization, and hierarchy of knowledge and for the legitimation of truth following closely the Napoleonic and Humboldtian reforms in the 1800s. Traditional Latin American traditions of knowledge, both scientific and artistic, were discriminated against and totally excluded from the university curricula in the name of an exclusively eurocentric epistemic paradigm. As a consequence of this epistemicide, all the music schools today, both basic and superior, teach primarily the erudite European musical genres, whereas the popular, Indigenous and African-derived musical traditions, which are extremely rich in the entire continent, do not form part of the curriculum available for music students. In order to offer a positive alternative to this monothematic and historically limited musical environment, we have devised the methodology of the Meeting of Knowledges, through which masters of traditional music, most of them people with little or no formal literacy, are hired to teach regular courses in music, dance, theater, and correlated arts, in courses given equal relevance and prestige to those of the Western erudite musical tradition. Started in the University of Brasília in 2010, the Meeting of Knowledges has already expanded substantially. This chapter sums up the theoretical and methodological foundations of the Meeting of Knowledges and explore connections with other epistemic and political interventions in ethnomusicology and music education.

Ethical Friction

This chapter describes a music program in the Richmond, Virginia, city jail and the ethical ambiguities arising from the author’s overlapping roles as organizer and observer. The author examines the vague boundaries between applied and academic ethnomusicology, voluntarism and work, and personal and institutional ethical standards. An ethnomusicological approach to music in jails and prisons exposes ethical frictions between policies, methodologies, and codes espoused by IRB (or other ethics review) boards, ethnomusicologists, their interlocutors, and academic societies. The tension between the author’s status as a volunteer and ethnographer raises a number of questions: How is ethical knowledge differently defined? Which definitions have more authority and how is that authority established? Where are the epistemological and ethical boundaries between academic and applied ethnomusicology? How is ethnographic knowledge connected to social change? An examination of the ethnomusicology’s relationship to IRBs reveals ongoing ethical ambiguities, especially regarding research on “vulnerable populations.” The author examines the ways in which IRBs might impede the production of public knowledge that would serve the ethical demands of social justice.

Reengaging Sound Praxis in the Real World

This chapter questions the politico-epistemological potentials of and challenges notions of dialogue and collaboration in current scholarship on sound praxis. It addresses variable meanings of both dialogue and collaboration as general signifiers central both to social processes and the ethnographic experience. What motivates dialogue and collaboration, and how do variable motivations play (or not) in contexts of struggle for political recognition and valuing of forms of knowledge and practices under pressure from exploitation, inequality, and criminalization of the oppressed? The argument proceeds through three basic steps: (a) a synthetic examination of recent reviews of collaborative/dialogic/advocacy/applied/engaged work in both soundscape and music scholarship vis-à-vis the increasing and generalized self-awareness of local-global political struggles and tensions; (b) highlighting the role often ascribed to the so-called arts in mediating the negotiation of human coexistence in conflictive and post-conflict contexts; and (c) opening a debate on political-epistemological alternatives to research on sound praxis drawing on the theorists Paulo Freire, Orlando Fals Borda, and Luis Guillermo Vasco Uribe.

Sonic Mapping and Critical Citizenship

This chapter explores the methodological and ideological challenges and opportunities faced in an urban soundscapes project based in the small, multicultural, and post-industrial city of Limerick, Ireland, which is currently undergoing a process of urban “regeneration” following decades of challenges (high unemployment rates, rapid demographic shifts brought about by global migration, social disenfranchisement in marginalized neighborhoods, gangland criminality, and considerable stigmatization by the national media). Facilitated by an interdisciplinary team involving ethnomusicologists, urban sociologists, and information technology specialists, the project combines ethnographic approaches from urban ethnomusicology (Hemetek & Reyes 2007, Jurková 2012) with mapping practices from soundscape studies (Murray-Schafer 1977), through an evocation of “critical citizenship” (Nell et al. 2012), in order to generate a soundscapes model that has the individual as a networked, social being and creative critical citizen at its core. LimerickSoundscapes invites participants from a wide range of backgrounds, sourced through pre-existing routes and pathways (Finnegan 1989—including clubs, charities, educational organizations, and societies—to engage in basic sound recording training on small, handheld devices. These sonic flaneurs or “citizen collectors” make short recordings of the sounds of their city, which are shared on an interactive website. For the ethnomusicologists on the research team two tensions emerge. The first is around the research model, which makes collectors critical collaborators that has implications for the open, creative, and participatory process by having an underpinning social activist agenda. The second relates to stepping outside the bounds of musicking (Small 1998) and how that changes the more traditional role of the ethnomusicologist. The chapter teases out these challenges and performs a preliminary evaluation on the efficacy of the project.