...or, "I be misrepresentin'"
Academia is a very insular community, so it is difficult to ask whether a researcher has any obligation to provide a wider angle on the music they study to the general public. The perspective they give will rarely be read by anyone outside the field or in the classroom. What is the role of the researcher in society, exactly? Many times, what they produce becomes policy, new business practices, drugs, and things with what we call "real world" applications. But a lot of the time it echoes around in the ivory tower. So who exactly will have the misrepresented picture? Fellow academics would likely be tuned in to the problems in writing an ethnography and will always find critiques with that in mind. A mainstream audience would not have very much exposure to this anyway.
However, many ethnomusicologists play the role of cultural advocate to make their research available to a broader audience. Here is where accuracy and misrepresentation become real concerns. This is the position in which researchers should feel like they have an obligation to provide that wider angle, but there are dangers that come with this. It is hard to preserve something that is constantly changing, so a researcher risks presenting something that, in twenty years' time, will be very different. Just think about how much American pop music has changed over the past 20 years! Researchers do have an obligation to present a wide, accurate picture. The question is how exactly they can accomplish this.
But there is such thing as bad research. If the culture in question is completely misrepresented, then something is wrong. No one can really know if an ethnographer misrepresented a now extinct musical culture and no one can do anything about it. However, I feel that there is a very strong taboo against this dishonesty and fact-checking has become easier than ever. There is and should be an ethical code guiding the actions of researchers.
Academics really do try and provide the most accurate picture they can of the cultures they study. Their participation in the music they study is probably the most useful trend in ethnomusicology. We have talked about the observer-participant dynamic and how it should be carefully considered going into any project. Being a westerner automatically associates you with larger "western" musical society, making you somewhat of a participant even if you claim to be observing it. Observer participation seems to be a nice little way of getting around this conflict. Furthermore, non-western ethnomusicologists are also now giving their perspectives on their once-misrepresented musical cultures. Ethnomusicology at home means very different things depending on where home is.
Finally, consider that misrepresentations are still representations and can at least give us an idea or some facts about the topic studied. Although many of the articles published in the 50's are to us amusingly misrepresenting the cultures they're studying, we still read them beyond the context of examining the history of ethnomusicology. If work misrepresents a musical culture, was it worth it to study the culture at all in the first place?
2 comments:
That was an interesting question at the end: "...was it worth it to study the culture at all in the first place?" I agree with pretty much all of your points. Most academic research does have a limited audience and is very much stuck in an ivory tower. To answer your question, I believe the worth in studying the culture at all is that the study is for the benefit of a certain audience. Yes, It would be beneficial for everyone to be well versed in various cultural aspects, but I feel most research is directed at a particular group of people. I also liked that you mentioned the government's use of research; I didn't think about that.
Bad research is a problem but it is asking a lot of someone to present something as accurately as possible because there is only so much you can represent in words or even other media.
I think whether or not you believe it was worth it to study the culture in the first place depends on what you think the goal of research to be or even if you believe in research at all. Should we be spending resources trying constantly to connect different spheres of knowledge or should those resources be going somewhere else? I think it's really tricky when the government gets into it because what these researchers do benefit only a few people. And sometimes the "benefit" isn't something tangible or "useful." It is just the knowledge that something out there exists.
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