Challenge Question Response to Feedback

Jake's Question and My Response

Jake's Feedback

My Response to the Feedback:

I want to address some the question and observations you brought up in your response to my post:

Towards the end of your paper you discuss ethics, and you’re right to point out that ethical problems still exist with insider ethnographies. In a response to one of my challenge questions, Joe Maurer wrote about importance of outsider ethnographies in a world where insider ethnographies are available, and he made a similar observation. Joe argued that insider ethnographers may miss/exclude important details that an outsider would pick up on, and ultimately concluded that including both insider and outsider ethnographies is important to understanding a music-culture. After reading Joe’s response, I realized that I was too quick to write-off outsider ethnographies. As you mentioned, both ethnographies lend themselves to different ethical problems and bias, so the only way a scholar can hope to begin to understand a music-culture is to read both. I should have focused more on further elaborating my point that outsider ethnographies are over-represented rather than try to calculate the relative values of insider and outsider ethnographies.

Besides the discussion about the value of insider versus outsider ethnographies, I was trying to show that the predominance of westerners in the field perpetuate colonial relationships, not because of how they approach their field topics, but simply because of their predominance in an age where equal representation is feasible. My intentions were to extol insider ethnographies by debasing outsider ethnographies rather than raise the issue of improper representation. That was a poor logic/writing choice on my part. Therefore, I wasn’t trying to suggest that “the idea of a western traveler being exposed to a new culture pre-disposes us to think of that culture as an ‘other’ ” though my rant on etic perspectives probably did.

Even though my response did not intentionally address this idea, you do bring up an interesting question: “is emphasizing the non-western-ness of a culture the same as emphasizing the western-ness of the ethnomusicologist?” I think the answer is yes, it does. If I’m interpreting your question correctly, “Emphasizing the non-western-ness of a culture” is the same as highlighting the unfamiliar traits. The purpose of ethnographies should not be to point-out or only focus on what is foreign, but to explain what effect these foreign and similar traits have on a music-culture and how/why they arose within the culture. Familiar traits in a music-culture are just as valuable as the non-familiar. Therefore, when an ethnomusicologist wishes to describe a music culture without comparison to another culture, there should theoretically be no distinction between the unfamiliar and the familiar. I would like to a write a whole response to that question, but this isn’t the essay do that in. This is a good challenge question in itself.

Thanks for all the positive comments on my response. I also appreciated your feedback. You made me think about some important points in my response, and you posed ideas that I did not even consider.