Transforming Ethnomusicology Volume II

Book excerpt: For decades, ethnomusicologists across the world have considered how to effect positive change for the communities they work with when faced with challenging social, political, and environmental issues and institutional structures. The two-volume collection Transforming Ethnomusicology aims to deepen and broaden dialogues about social engagement within the discipline of ethnomusicology. Its many voices, from scholars and practitioners from diverse backgrounds and working in a variety of cultural situations, explore how ethnomusicology can transform the world by contributing to social change. Through their illuminating case studies and reflections, they at the same time transform how we understand ethnomusicology as a discipline. The second volume of Transforming Ethnomusicology provides much-needed new examinations of social and ecological concerns and centers around the recognition that colonial and environmental damages are intertwined and grounded in the failure to respect the land and its peoples. Featuring Indigenous perspectives from America, Australia, and South Africa, this volume critically engages with the question how ethnomusicologists can support marginalized communities in sustaining their musical knowledges and threatened geographies within institutional and historically-grown structures that have long worked toward their destruction. The volume ends with a radical model for change that is based on a profound rethinking of established structures of knowledge.