Ideas for Ethnomusicology - tools for thinking

From Canadian Centre for Ethnomusicology
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Some operating concepts/contrasts

  • More ideas - tools for thinking:
    • Critique and Problematization
    • Explanation/understanding :: Science/humanities :: experimental method/interpretive strategy :: nomothetic/idiographic :: law/meaning
    • Inductive vs. deductive (theory/method)
    • Networks, social and semantic (what is a network? what is a social network?) and Social Network Analysis for Music Studies.
    • S-nets: interleaving social (intersubjective) network, semantic (symbolic) network (cf: society and culture). (I thought I'd come up with this idea when I discovered a whole field of social network analysis called "Socio-semantic network analysis")
    • Society and culture intertwined as an (increasingly global) S-Net. Fieldwork as repositioning of the self within S-Nets.
    • Phenomenology and Hermeneutics as tools of understanding within this network.
    • Degree of network immersion (time, space, language, life)
    • Agency vs. Structure , or Lifeworld vs. System (both representable as networks)
    • Rapport as key element of the positioning (and network links)
    • Truth : between the objectivistic and the solipsistic
    • Units of social analysis ("community", "culture", "city", "scene"...)
    • Problem of boundaries: Culture areas as a partition of humanity into non-overlapping sets (e.g. eHRAF or Global Jukebox vs. social identity as set of overlapping circles representing affiliations
    • Ethnography: description vs. grounded theory; localized vs. comparative/multisited; linguistic vs. multimediated (ethnomedia?)
    • Wide range of methods available (browse Sage research methods map (and many other valuable materials on their site)
    • Culture as self-observing (E.g. El Mastaba (http://www.el-mastaba.org/); fieldworker as "second order observer", the "observer observing observation" (Luhmann system theory)