Challenge Question Commentary

The concerns that Trevor raises about missing important facets of a culture by only giving a snapshot of one day are valid. He is right that one can only grasp a culture by being present in it for a long time, and so one can only represent it truthfully by painting an imagined picture of this culture; it seems that a scholar must have boundaries, however, and that these boundaries are unclear.

This leads me to wonder whether scholars can EVER write an effective ethnography—can any scholar truly understand another culture well enough to portray it on the page? Are scholars like Agawu (who, himself comes from the culture he describes) the only ones with valid opinions and thoughts? Can any outsider ever write an ethical ethnography?

Trevor acknowledges that scholars must be transparent in their work, and I agree that this is a very important in writing an ethnography; there is still a danger, though, that even the most transparent of scholars will fictionalize and generalize aspects of a culture with which the actors of the culture might not agree. Even with the reflexive work that ethnomusicologists have been doing in recent years, it remains impossible, in my opinion, to capture an unbiased and objective picture of any culture.

It seems, then, that all ethnographies are fictional. Each describes a culture as one person (the author) saw it at the moment of the book’s writing. These can be valuable sources, but even with the transparency and all-encompassing work that Trevor suggests, I do not believe that an ethnography can be separated from the ethnographer.