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Ethnomusicology in Times of Trouble

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2018

Timothy Rice
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Extract

I am not quite sure when the world fell apart. When I began my study of ethnomusicology in 1968, there was a great deal of excitement and optimism about this relatively new field of study, even though the United States was in the middle of a horrible war in Vietnam. It seemed that, as we say in English, “the world was our oyster.” We could apparently go anywhere (with the possible exception of Vietnam) and study any music that struck our fancy. Since then, however, not only has this naïve optimism and energy been subjected to a withering postcolonial critique but, especially since the end of the Cold War in 1991, the situation for many people in the world seems only to be getting worse and worse, making the prospect of doing fieldwork in a growing number of places in the world nearly unimaginable. For a few people, including most readers of this journal, our personal worlds have probably improved during this period, but what of the rest of the world, including the poor and unfortunate in our own countries? The United Nations today lists more than sixty countries in which there is open, armed conflict between groups or between resistance groups and the government. The HIV/AIDS pandemic has wracked some parts of the world, most notably Africa. All reports indicate that the gap between rich and poor is growing, both in developed, capitalist countries, and between rich and poor regions of the world. Climate change seems to be posing an ever-more-obvious threat to life on our planet, and rising ocean water levels are causing some people in the Pacific to plan for a future far from their native atolls. Where can we go to work ethnomusicologically today, and what kind of work should we be doing there?

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Articles
Information
Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 46 , 2014 , pp. 191 - 209
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by the International Council for Traditional Music

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