Anthropological Perspectives On Music And Emotion

Abstract

Abstract The study of anthropology is the study of the modes of being human, while the study of ethnomusicology is the study of the modes of music making as a means of cultural expression and as sources of meaning. Both are concerned with human behaviour and the cultural ideologies that inform behaviour; both tend to rely upon ethnographic research and techniques of participant observation, with the results later written and published as a monograph.Within each discipline there are ‘universalists’ who tend to look for commonalities of behaviour and beliefs, and ‘particularists’ who are more interested in how we differ one from another, one group from another group. Whatever the difference of perspective, nearly all anthropologists and ethnomusicologists subscribe to the dictum that one must attempt to understand behaviours and belief systems from within, that is, the necessity for making the effort to understand other musics and other styles of emotional expression from the perspective of their owners. This is related to, but not the same thing as, what is called ‘cultural relativism,’ which is taken to mean a refusal to make value judgments about beliefs and practices of peoples outside one’s own group. A commitment to trying to comprehend the motivations and underlying paradigms of another’s actions certainly delays or impedes a ‘rush to judgment’.

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