Listening through partitions: ethnomusicology’s immunological paradigm

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. At the time of publication, this powerful statement of epistemic refusal by some of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s most vulnerable members and its challenge to the ethnomusicological status quo has been attenuated by attention levied on a particularly controversial moment in the keynote that took the form of a visual display, in the relative absence of the acoustic. In this sound review, I intentionally foreground the Seeger Lecture’s thesis itself, understanding it to provide an extraordinarily productive framework with which to approach the acoustic dynamics at work in conferences like the 2023 SEM meeting.

2. Donna Haraway famously describes this deemphasis of place as the “god-trick” of modern science – the conceit that knowledge exists independently from the material and intellectual conditions of its production, and is accessible “from everywhere and [therefore] nowhere” (Haraway 1988, 590).

3. Several images of the 2023 Seeger Lecture’s location, the Confederation Ballroom, are viewable on the Westin Ottawa’s website under the “Events and Meetings” heading: https://www.marriott.com/en-us/hotels/yowwi-the-westin-ottawa/photos/.

4. As Banu Subramaniam points out in Ghost Stories for Darwin, for example, the most heated resistance to arguments for combatting the global profusion of invasive and hybrid species – an expression of ecological partitioning – came, at least in the horticultural world, from agribusiness executives “fueled by the politics of an ebullience of commerce, of unbridled choice” (Subramaniam 2014, 116).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tyler Yamin

Tyler Yamin is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music (Ethnomusicology) at Bucknell University. His current work explores the methodological, ethical, and political intersections of sonic and biological knowledge in the world of endangered species conservation, and his publications include a 2019 article in Ethnomusicology awarded the inaugural Best Article Prize by the International Council for Traditional Music.