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Vol. 54, No. 2 Ethnomusicology Spring /Summer 2010
Disciplining Ethnomusicology:
A Call for a New Approach
Timothy R ice / University of California, Los Angeles
T
his is a call for a new approach to articles written in this journal, a new
approach with important implications for our discipline. It follows from
my survey in the Serbian journal Muzikologija of articles published in Eth-
nomusicology on the treatment of the theme of music and identity. That
survey revealed that ethnomusicologists writing on identity in our journal
“take for granted identity as a category of social life and of social analysis.”
Furthermore,
. . . their particular studies are not contextualized, for the most part, in the eth-
nomusicological literature on music and identity. I am left to infer that these
authors understand implicitly that music and identity is a theme around which
ethnomusicologists organize their work, but how previous work might impact
their work or how their work might build toward useful generalizations or more
insightful treatments of the subject doesn’t interest them. They seem content,
in other words, to leave such work to overview essays such as this one. What
worries me is that their failure to think more clearly about identity as a social
category and to understand their own particular ethnographic work in relation-
ship to a growing literature on this theme in ethnomusicology is symptomatic of
a general problem with the discipline of ethnomusicology, at least as practiced
today in the United States. By not embedding our particular ethnographic stud-
ies in these two literatures, we are limiting the potential of our field to grow in
intellectual and explanatory power. (Rice 2007:20)
This call provides some suggestions for how this problem might be solved by
revisiting my assessment of our treatment of the music-and-identity theme.
To place this call in context, and to acknowledge its limitations, I would
point out that our ethnographic studies can be understood to exist on two
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Rice: Disciplining Ethnomusicology 319
perpendicular axes. One axis contains what I have taken to calling our com-
munity-based studies: (1) geographically focused studies on large areas of
the world, nations, regions, cities, towns, and villages; (2) ethnic, racial, and
minority groups; (3) the musical life of institutions like schools, prisons, and
clubs; and (4) the social life of musical genres. The second axis includes the
themes and issues around which we organize our work: music and politics; the
teaching and learning of music; concepts about music; gender and music; and
many others. The website of the Society for Ethnomusicology currently lists
ninety-two of these themes and issues, which it calls “subjects and theoretical
categories.” In providing this assessment of the state of our discipline through
the prism of one of these themes, I am well aware that I am doing so based
on just one tiny point in the vast plane of ethnomusicology’s disciplinarity.
The relationship between music and identity is one of the most com-
mon themes around which ethnomusicologists organize their work. At the
2005 annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, for instance, this
theme seemed to underlie the largest number of presentations (more than
80 of nearly 500), far in excess of the second most popular theme (space,
place, and geography), which accounted for 38 papers (Rice 2005). If it is
such a common theme, then I suppose that an analysis of ethnomusicolo-
gists’ treatment of it should tell us something important about the nature of
ethnomusicology as a discipline.
I began that analysis with two assumptions about our treatment of this
theme. First, I suspected that writers on this theme were all telling the same
basic story: music is an important symbol of identity and this is how it works
in this particular case. To be frank, I wondered how often we could repeat
this story and still have it engage us. Second, I assumed that this theme, along
with the ninety or so other themes we tackle in our field, would be an impor-
tant locus for conversations, generalization, cross-cultural comparisons, and
theorizing among scholars working on different communities of musicians
and their publics in different parts of the world. After all, why else would
we organize panels at our scholarly conferences, and some of our university
courses, around such themes and issues?1 A partial review of the literature
in Ethnomusicology revealed that neither supposition was true.
As for the first assumption, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that ethno-
musicologists are not telling the same story but quite a few different stories
about music and identity: how the amateur performance of music can create
an identity superior to one’s vocational identity (Witzleben 1987); how mu-
sicians negotiate between their own low-status identity and the high-status
identities they may wish to achieve (Waterman 1982); how the performance
of music (or its absence) defines the identity of social groups (Thompson
1991); how new forms of music play a role in the construction of new, emer-
gent identities (Manuel 1989); how changes in the performance of music
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320 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2010
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Rice: Disciplining Ethnomusicology 321
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322 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2010
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Rice: Disciplining Ethnomusicology 323
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324 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2010
Notes
1. A quick, online review of undergraduate and graduate course offerings at some of the
largest ethnomusicology programs in the United States revealed that courses on musical com-
munities are listed by virtually all of them, but courses on themes and issues are sometimes
absent, buried, I would suppose, under generic titles such as topics, seminar, or special problems
in ethnomusicology. Some programs had one or a few theme-and-issue courses: for example, at
Columbia (agency in African-American music), CUNY (music and diaspora), Harvard (music and
language), Indiana (heritage and cultural property), NYU (music, war, and memory), UC Berkeley
(theory and method in popular music studies), and UCLA (music and religion). Brown Univer-
sity’s program had the longest list of issue-oriented courses, at least nine, including modernizing
traditional music, music and cultural policy, music and identity, music and technoculture, and
so forth.
2. Ten years earlier the Canadian editor and producer Gilles Potvin (1972) wrote a “short
contribution” with identity in the title.
References
Barth, Fredrik. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Difference.
Bergen, Norway: Universitets Forlaget.
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Rice: Disciplining Ethnomusicology 325
Daughtry, J. Martin. 2003. “Russia’s New Anthem and the Negotiation of National Identity.”
Ethnomusicology 47(1):42–67.
Goertzen, Chris. 2001. “Powwows and Identity on the Piedmont and Coastal Plains of North
Carolina.” Ethnomusicology 45(1):58–88.
Hall, Stuart. 1996. “Introduction:Who Needs Identity?” In Questions of Cultural Identity, edited
by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, 1–17. London: Sage Publications.
Koskoff, Ellen, ed. 1987. Women and Music in Cross-cultural Perspective. New York: Green-
wood Press.
Manuel, Peter. 1989. “Andalusian, Gypsy, and Class Identity in the Contemporary Flamenco
Complex.” Ethnomusicology 33(1):47–65.
McLean, Mervyn. 2006. Pioneers of Ethnomusicology. Coral Springs, FL: Llumina Press.
Potvin, Gilles. 1972. “The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Canadian Folk Cultures:The
Preservation of Ethnic Identity.” Ethnomusicology 16 (3):512–15.
Rice, Timothy. 2005. “President’s Soundbyte: What are we thinking?” SEM Newsletter 39 (4):1,
3, 40.
———. 2007. “Reflections on Music and Identity in Ethnomusicology.” Muzikologija/Musi-
cology (Journal of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts) 7:17–38. Available online
at http://www.komunikacija.org.rs/komunikacija/casopisi/muzikologija/VII_7/02/
download_gb
Stokes, Martin. 1994. “Introduction: Ethnicity, Identity and Music.” In Ethnicity, Identity and
Music: The Musical Construction of Place, 1–27. New York: Berg.
Thompson, Gordon R. 1991. “The Carans of Gujarat: Caste Identity, Music, and Cultural Change.”
Ethnomusicology 35(3):381–91.
Turino, Thomas. 1984. “The Urban-Mestizo Charango Tradition in Southern Peru: A Statement
of Shifting Identity.” Ethnomusicology 28(2):253–70.
———. 1999. “Signs of Imagination, Identity, and Experience: A Peircean Semiotic Theory for
Music.” Ethnomusicology 43(2):221–55.
Waterman, Christopher A. 1982. “‘I’m a Leader, not a Boss’: Social Identity and Popular Music in
Ibadan, Nigeria.” Ethnomusicology 26(1):59–71.
———. 1990. “‘Our Tradition is a Very Modern Tradition’: Popular Music and the Construction
of Pan-Yoruba Identity.” Ethnomusicology 34(3):367–79.
Witzleben, J. Lawrence. 1987. “Jiangnan Sizhu Music Clubs in Shanghai: Context, Concept and
Identity.” Ethnomusicology 31(2):240–60.
Wong, Deborah. 2008. “Conversations.” SEM Newsletter 42(4):1, 6, 28–29.
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