The purpose of this course is to become familiar with some of the classical social science literature about the arts. We will focus on material that is significant to the development of critical modes of thinking about music. For this version of the course we will highlight the relation between culture, nature, language and diversity, focusing on some of the debates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.This focus for the course was chosen because of the significance that these topics have today: the relation between biology, environment and culture is seen as crucial to gaining new understandings of the definition of culture itself, and this relation is being posited as a response to some of the impasses of contemporary identity theories. The course will also explore how the relation between nature, language and music was forged in large part by the colonial-modern global world system. Today the question of epistemology is being transformed by a rethinking of disciplines not solely as emergent in Europe but in the multiple cosmopolitan relations generated by the colonial-modern world system. Therefore, during the second half of the course we will consider the issue of pluralism and its relation to Atlantic crossings, focusing in particular on Native South American ethnographies and histories.

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