Vol. 54, No.

2 Ethnomusicology Spring /Summer 2010

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Call and Response

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

© 2010 by the Society for Ethnomusicology

 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

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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
320   Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2010

allow musicians to express a number of different social identities (Turino

1984); how powerful institutions such as the state, community organizations,

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and the commercial media can overpower and undermine individual agency
in the production of identities through musical performance (Goertzen 2001);
and so forth. There are, in other words, more interesting and different stories
about music and identity in the literature than I had anticipated.
As for the second supposition, I was disappointed to learn that there is
almost no theoretical discussion in our article-length musical ethnographies
on the theme of music and identity. I base this conclusion on a survey of all
the articles in Ethnomusicology with the word “identity” or “identities” in
the title published in the twenty-five-year period between 1982 and 2006.
There are seventeen such articles: sixteen idiographic musical ethnographies
and one theoretical paper. It is the sixteen ethnographies that principally
concern me here, and three things are striking about this corpus.
First, when Chris Waterman introduced the term identity for the first time
in our journal in his 1982 article,“‘I’m a Leader, not a Boss’: Social Identity and
Popular Music in Ibadan, Nigeria,” it was apparently for him already a taken-
for-granted category of social analysis.2 I say this because he explains neither
what identity is nor in what sense he is using the term. As I read Waterman’s
article, it occurred to me that before 1982 his might have been an article about
a musician’s negotiation of social status. Instead, he transforms a sociological
study of social role into a psychological study of self-identification and self-
authoring. The musician he quotes in the title is attempting to tie himself to
two different social groups simultaneously: the upper classes who patronize
his band, and the lower-class “band boys” on whose loyalty he depends. Thus,
“identity” as a theme for ethnomusicological analysis enters the field through
an unremarked-upon and largely unnoticed move from sociological to psycho-
logical analysis, a move perhaps related to a shift in emphasis in our field from
socially stable communities to socially mobile ones.
The second striking feature of this corpus of sixteen ethnographic articles
is that, like Waterman’s, none of them cites any literature or theories about
identity from the disciplines from which we traditionally borrow: anthropol-
ogy, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, critical theory, and the like. This
is especially surprising since I think many of us would agree that ethnomu-
sicology, in general, is a gluttonous appropriator of theoretical perspectives
from other disciplines (see McLean [2006:337] for the notion that “American
ethnomusicology is now awash with theory”). But this turns out not to be
true of writing on this particular theme, at least in Ethnomusicology.
The third striking feature of this corpus is that, with one exception
(Daughtry 2003), no author cites the work of any other author in this cor-
pus. So the person writing in 1989 doesn’t cite Waterman’s 1982 article; the
person writing in 1996 cites neither Waterman nor the 1989 article, and so
 Rice: Disciplining Ethnomusicology   321

on up to 2006. I found this lack of intertextual reference to work in our own

field on this theme surprising and disappointing.

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I had always assumed that when we wrote our ethnographic accounts
on one or another of the ninety themes and issues around which our work
crystallizes, we would collectively address interesting questions and prob-
lems that arise when thinking about music’s connection to that theme. We
would cite colleagues working on the theme, no matter which community
of music makers they were documenting. Clearly that has not been true for
the theme of music and identity, at least in this corpus.
Before I continue by proposing a way forward, I want to make clear that
my interest is not to criticize these particular authors but rather to critique
a literature that has arisen from our collective action. I certainly include
myself in this collectivity. If I looked at my own work on this theme, I am
sure I would find that I have fallen prey to the same problem I identify here.
Furthermore, I was the editor the journal when it published some of these
articles, and my own Ph.D. students are authors of works in this corpus. Two
referees recommended each of these articles for publication. In other words,
we are all part of an intellectual collective that has produced this corpus of
work and with it a discipline with, I think it is fair to say, serious problems.
In fact, these articles are written by outstanding scholars in our field.
Each one is, in its particular idiographic way, a gem. But when the jewelers
(the readers) put down their magnifying glasses, these gems turn into a flat
desert of individual ethnographic grains of sand. To flourish as a discipline,
to build our discipline, and I dare say to protect it, we need some general-
izing theoretical moisture to, depending on the metaphor you prefer, green
our intellectual garden or pull together these ethnographic grains of sand
into an adobe brick of shared and contested ideas. From these theoretical
bricks we can build our disciplinary house. We can’t build it from grains of
ethnographic sand.
So, if we want to build a thematic brick, and thereby build our discipline,
in the domain of music and identity, where would we look for our theoreti-
cal moisture? It can come from at least three sources: (1) from the general
theories or paradigms we read from outside the discipline; (2) from reading
on the topic of identity in other fields; and (3) from our own ethnographic
work on music.
The first wellspring of moisture for our brick might come from the “grand
theory” or large-scale paradigms we routinely borrow from other disciplines:
structural-functionalism, Clifford Geertz’s interpretive anthropology, Pierre
Bourdieu’s practice theory, and semiotics, to name a few. For instance, Thomas
Turino, in the one theoretical article in this corpus published in 1999, applies
the semiotic theory of the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce to make
many arguments about the relationship between music and identity. Among
322   Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2010

other things, he claims that music is a powerful sign of identity because it

is a sign of “direct feeling and experience” unmediated by language (Turino

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1999:250). Those who work on the theme of music and identity after this
1999 article have five choices: (1) embrace it and use it to moisten their
particular ethnography; (2) reject this theory as unsound; (3) modify it to
suit better their particular study; (4) declare it irrelevant, for some reason, to
their particular study; or (5) ignore it. Sadly, in my view, we have ignored it.
We do this, I believe, at the peril of building our discipline. I want to be clear
that I am not arguing that Turino’s approach, his theory if you will, is correct
and true and therefore must be taken seriously. I am agnostic on this point.
But to build our discipline we need to respond to and engage with it until
we have a better sense of its explanatory potential. Reading other theories,
Turino has written a theory about music. To build our discipline, we need
to take the theory we write as seriously as we take the theory we read. (This
distinction between “the theory we read” and “the theory we write” was Larry
Witzleben’s elegant summation of my awkward attempt a few years ago to
explain to him in conversation how I approached the teaching of theory in
ethnomusicology.)
A second source of moisture for our music-and-identity brick in the edi-
fice of ethnomusicology is the literature specific to the theme of music and
identity from outside our discipline. When I read that literature, and I admit
that I have done so only in a cursory way, many general questions for authors
in our discipline came to mind. Here are a few of them:
1. Do we want to argue that music contributes to the psychology of an indi-
vidual’s identity or to some form of collective social identity or to both?
2. If we want to argue that music contributes to the psychology of identity, then
are we talking about a sense of “who am I?”—that is, “what is my essential
nature?”—or are we talking about a person’s desire to “suture” himself or
herself to a social group (see Hall 1996 for the notion of “suturing”)?
3. How many identities does an individual have? Do all individuals have the same
possibilities for multiple identities or are the possibilities constrained by social,
economic, and political inequalities? Does music contribute in the same way
to all of them?
4. If we are arguing that music contributes to the social identity of a group,
then how does it do that? Through performativity? Symbolization? Boundary
formation? Martin Stokes borrows from this general literature on identity in
the introduction to his 1994 edited collection, Ethnicity, Identity and Music.
Citing social anthropologist Fredrik Barth (1969), Stokes makes a case for mu-
sic’s role in identity boundary formation and maintenance. In principle, after
1994, authors writing about music and identity should be asking whether, in
their particular case, music is contributing to identity formation or to some
other process involving identity. But in the seven articles published in Ethno-
musicology after Stokes’s essay, none of the authors cites him or Barth.
 Rice: Disciplining Ethnomusicology   323

The third source of generalizing moisture for our disciplinary brick-

making is our own idiographic, ethnographic work. In fact, some of the au-

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thors in this corpus reach conclusions that could be interpreted as providing
generalizing proposals. But since they usually don’t ask general questions to
begin with, they don’t provide even tentative answers to them, and it is left
to the reader to pull out the general implications of each case study. The au-
thors could begin the generalizing process by asking, at the very least, one or
another of arguably the two most basic questions regarding this theme.What
does music contribute to identity formation? Why is music so effective in this
regard? To give just one example of theory that arises from idiographic work,
Chris Waterman, in another article in this corpus, provides what might be a
general theory for what music contributes to identity construction. He points
out that the identity label “Yoruba” was invented in Nigeria sometime in the
early twentieth century. Whatever is labeled Yoruba music is contributing,
along with language-based discourses in politics, journalism, and education,
to the on going construction of Yoruba social identity. But what is music’s
contribution, and is it different from the contributions of cultural forms rooted
in language? Waterman implies, but doesn’t state directly, that music’s con-
tribution to identity formation is different from those couched in linguistic
terms. He argues that jùjú performances “externalize [Yoruba] values and
give them palpable form. [Yoruba music gives Yoruba identity] its interactive
ethos or ‘feel’: intensive, vibrant, buzzing, and fluid” (Waterman 1990:376).
After Waterman, those of us who write about identity need minimally to ask
whether music is contributing to identity formation by giving it its “feel” or by
some other mechanism. If not through feel, then how? Popularity? Ubiquity?
Association with, or imposition by, political or marketing power? A symbol
of difference from an “other”? Sadly, in my view, we have not done this.
Having painted a conceptual picture of the theme of music and identity,
I asked myself whether this arid desert of particular musical ethnography
is unique to this theme or whether it is a general problem for our field. I
can’t really answer this question at this point, but when I thought about it,
I imagined that one theme on which I would surely find some shared ques-
tions and the emergence of some possible general answers would be music
and gender. So imagine my surprise when I read Ellen Koskoff’s comment in
a recent issue of the SEM Newsletter on what has happened in this area of
interest since the publication in 1987 of her edited collection, Women and
Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective: “What has not seemed to happen (and
I’m not sure why not) is that ethnomusicology has not developed its own,
disciplinary-specific theory of gender and sexuality that can work for all (or
many) of the different cultures in which we live and work” (Wong 2008:28).
Could it be that even this very productive theme has suffered the same fate
324   Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2010

as music-and-identity studies? If so, could it be that this problem is a general

one for our field and not one specific to the theme of music and identity?

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To conclude, the failure to weave together our idiographic article-length
studies of the relationship between musical practice and the symbolization
or construction of identity through the use of intertextual references and
the development of generalizing or comparative theoretical proposals is a
lost opportunity for us to build some intellectual sophistication and explana-
tory power into our discipline. If this pattern is true for the other ninety-plus
themes around which we organize our work, then, as I wrote in my earlier
article on this theme,“we have a serious structural weakness in our discipline
that diminishes the efficacy of our research in general and limits the poten-
tial of ethnomusicology, at least in its American form, to make a powerful
contribution to scholarship on music” (Rice 2007:37).
This quite pessimistic assessment contrasts with my usually optimistic
and sunny view of our discipline. It leads me to issue this call to arms, as it
were, to exploit our article-length idiographic studies in the future for the op-
portunities they provide to engage in serious cross-regional, inter-community,
thematically oriented conversations that will lead, I believe, to the building
of some theoretical muscle and the creation of a more vigorous discipline.
In other words, I call for us to reform in the next twenty-five years the way
we seem to have been doing business for the previous twenty-five years—
minimally on the theme of music and identity, and perhaps in addition on
the more than ninety themes that, taken together, define one axis of the
disciplinary plane of ethnomusicology.

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.

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