I had some issues with Agawu's discussion on how to approach the ethical systems of other communities. He cites another researcher in saying that African ethical thought are "as follows: traditional societies are communitarian...rights are essentially 'corporate'...the structure of thought is antiuniversalist." According to him, "...this is only true of precolonial or traditional society." Coming into another society with this "knowledge" might encourage aligning experiences with these generalizations, which I personally am uncomfortable with. Assigning this sort of inherent cultural character to a group of people seems irresponsible.
He then asks about how to approach communities who have "encountered" Christianity, Islam, and "modernizing forces." We've discussed in class how ethnomusicology has acquired a normative component of preservation and advocacy. I wonder if it is ethical to do this. There may be a desire among ethnomusicologists (a self-interested one, even) to thematize and align their experiences in the field with the world views they encounter in academic research. Agawu brings up a great question: "Could it be that protecting the BaAka...is a way of protecting our research? Do we want the BaAka to remain different so that we can continue to thematize them in our writing, exploit them intellectually?" I've discussed before the perils of wanting to separate and isolate a musical tradition from modernizing forces because it just isn't the way things work. Field researchers of popular music address these forces all the time and seem to be fine.
However, he says some interesting things about how an conceptual framework for ethics can only come from a community. But is the imagined community of academia really that different from our more traditional conception of a community? With better communication and more opportunities for exchange, is it possible for it to synthesize a system of ethics?
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