Co dělají etnomuzikologové? Stará otázka pro nové století

• Authors: Adelaida Reyes

Title variants

EN

What do ethnomusicologists do? An old question for a new century

• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Throughout ethnomusicology’s history, the breadth of the discipline’s field, its multidisciplinary nature, and its historical relations to other subdisciplines within musicology have raised questions of identity. Is ethnomusicology a discipline in its own right? “What is ethnomusicology?” is the form in which the question has persisted through changing contexts and contingencies. The resulting entanglement with definitional issues have distracted us from what historians and scientists such as Thomas S. Kuhn and Freeman Dyson have pointed to as the real repository of what gives a discipline its identity: what its practitioners do. To avoid the tendency to have the accomplishments of the discipline’s outstanding members dominate the narrative, and to focus on the activity of practitioners in general, this article explores the power of dialectics to generate new knowledge or new insights by creating a chain of questions and answers engaged in critical exchange and taking into account the oppositions and tensions that leave their mark on the work of practitioners. Addressing the issue that has stood most obstinately against a unitary identity for ethnomusicology – the issue of integrating what has been called “two ethnomusicologies” or a bifurcated discipline – the article first examines ethnomusicology’s problems of identity in historical perspective. From this base it looks at ethnomusicology from the perspective of the humanities and the sciences. Ultimately, the article aims to re-discover and re-articulate the bifurcating elements in their particular time and place, the better to address issues of generalizability, upon which the discipline’s recognizability and identity stand.

Keywords

EN

Identity; generalizability; logic of means and ends “two ethnomusicologies”; bifurcated discipline; music as expressive; culture

Discipline

• ETHNOLOGY: ETHNOLOGY

• Publisher: The National Institute of Folk Culture
• Journal: Národopisná revue (Journal of Ethnology)
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 26
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 100 - 109

Contributors

author

Adelaida Reyes

• Národopisná revue, redakce, Národní ústav lidové kultury se sídlem ve Strážnici, Zámek 672, 696 62 Strážnice, Czech Republic