Category: Graduate Seminar
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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“…To refer to the culture of the Caribbean geographically–other than to
call it a meta-archipelago–is a debilitating and scarcely productive
project…” (Benítez-Rojo 1996: 24). Recent trends in ethnomusicology
have included a greater emphasis on the study of translocal cultural
formations, social processes, and musical idioms, as well as on the
processes of globalization and intercultural exchange, and often less
emphasis on bounded geographical specificity. This graduate seminar
will explore the implications of this shift by examining how various
scholars have approached “the Caribbean” through locally situated
ethnographic research and how they have engaged with locality,
transnationalism, and the conditions of coloniality and
post-coloniality? We will consider what value “area studies” still
holds in ethnomusicological research? How does one identify an“area” in
globalized spaces? And more generally, how and where do we locate “the
Caribbean?” We will begin by surveying a number of important early
scholars working in the Caribbean basin (Carpentier, Cesaire,
Herskovits,Ortiz, among others), assessing how their influence has
shaped our present conceptions. We will then turn to a number of
scholars from outside of ethnomusicology whose work has exerted
considerable influence on more recent scholarship (Benítez-Rojo,
Clifford, Duany, Flores, Gilroy Hall, Roach, et.al.). We will finally
turn our attention to a number of recent ethnomusicological studies of
the Caribbean (Averill, Guilbault, Largey, Moore,Manuel, Ochoa, Veal,
Wade, among others) analyzing how each author grapples with the larger
questions of place and the post-colonial conditions fully reverberant
with varied notions of homeland, diaspora, cultural pride, alienation,
and displacement.
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A study of the theoretical and practical aspects of ethnomusicological
field work, using the New York area as a setting for exercises and
individual projects. This is the second in a sequence of two courses.
Students are expected to have developed an ethnographic research
project based in the New York area, and to have begun field research on
the project. The focus of Field Methods II is on the analysis and
interpretation of qualitative research data, and the planning and
writing of a musical ethnography. The seminar is run as a writing
workshop, and there will be weekly assignments that should culminate in
the completion of a draft MA thesis or article-length study.
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