Critical Review 3

Agawu discusses ethics in Ethnomusicology, and the difficulties or impossibilities of defining a set code of ethics for all who do fieldwork. The difficulty here is that different cultures have different ideas of ethic that may conflict with the Ethnomusicologist's, certain ethics may be helpful to one party, but hurtful to another, we might desire to respect a culture about which we write an ethnography, but our means of being "ethical" contrast those of the culture we represent, etc. In other words, "ethics" are completely subjective. Agawu describes how we can better understand a culture's ethical standards by looking for clues in things such as song text and practices such as that of the Anlo-Ewe which promotes exchanging insults in songs (by listening to insults and hearing what one ethically SHOULDN'T do, we can gain better insight as to what is expected one ethically should do). Agawu gives several examples of written works that seem ethical or unethical, but really just exemplify the subjectivity of ethics, such as Kisliuk's work with the BaAka tribe and Agawu's fictional writing in "African Rhythm: A Northern Ewe Perspective.



In the example of Kisliuk's writing, Agawu notes that, while she presented a completely personalized and reflexive account, Kisliuk completely left out that she ended up marrying her informant. Because it seems nearly impossible to account for all experiences when doing fieldwork, we inevitably pick and choose, even if we don't realize we are choosing. Sometimes certain occurances stick out in our minds more and we forget others, and thus what is important to us ends up being what is represented in the ethnography. To what degree is it our responsibility to account for these choices? Is it totally up to us what we include and leave out? Do we have to somehow write a disclaimer that not only is the point of view of the ethnography subjective, but the actual events or conversations included are subjective choices also? Do we have a responsibility to the culture we represent to find out what is most important to THEM to have represent their music in an ethnography?