Writing Musical Ethnography

Catalog description

This seminar examines the role of ethnographic writing in musical anthropology, exploring how ethnographic knowledge is produced, authorized, and consumed. It critically interrogates ethnography's generic conventions, probing its relation to travel writing, memoir, poetry, and fiction, and engaging narrative, experimental, reflexive and auto- ethnography. Drawing on performance studies, it considers the textuality of musical events and weighs the particular challenges, possibilities, and limitations of writing ethnographically about sound, music, and movement. In doing so, it explores the temporality and spatiality of ethnographic writing, engages related critiques of the so-called ethnographic present, and considers issues of representation and subjectivity. Students will approach these questions through critical readings in anthropology and ethnomusicology as well as through weekly workshopping of their own writing.