Glad I get to include Kokuho in my "Musics of Japan" course this year
Pat Savage
@patrickesavage.bsky.social
2.7K followers 818 following 1.1K posts
Author: Comparative Musicology (academic.oup.com/book/62353; open access) Director: @compmusiclab.bsky.social Host/PI @manyvoices.bsky.social Rutherford Discovery Fellow @U Auckland Assoc. Prof. @Keio U Music, evolution, diversity He/him Tangata tiriti
![For all his complaining about autoethnography, his report is utterly dependent on it. He begins the report with a story about his arrival at UCLA in 1993, along with an autoethnographic accounting of his intellectual journey from cultural to biological anthropology. His analysis is, to quote a critic of autoethnography, one in which he “take[s] a central role…in a narrative of struggle and suffering as [he] confronts the challenges of life” (Henrich pg. 37-38). It’s just that rather than emphasizing “the experience of racism, sexism, capitalist exploitation and othering” (pg. 37-38), he instead emphasizes the experiences of ideological pressure, professional intimidation, and the marginalization of dissenters in the discipline (of which he is apparently one). He bases his understanding of the biological/cultural split in some departments almost entirely on his own experiences in two different departments at elite private schools. There really is no attempt to be systematic and rigorous in his analysis of those events in a broader, more general way than what he and his friends experienced.
Throughout the report, he explicitly states his own positionality as exactly the kind of credence-lending thing he rebukes when others do it. “My immersion in these other disciplines, which includes earning tenure and promotion to full professor, gives me a unique perspective on Anthropology” (pg. 3) may as well have been phrased, “as an anthropologist myself…” This is precisely the kind of work autoethnography and reflexive positioning does, but I guess it’s only verboten when it is Others positioning themselves in relation to structures of oppression. In his case, it’s just adding context and is totally apolitical!
At the top of pg. 39, Henrich quotes Susan Pickard’s critique of autoethnography:
What distinguishes self-expression from scholarship? What are the limits of subjectivity as data? What about distortion, selective seeing, the dangers of solipsism? The speakers were a…](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:mm4ujzh5bqccjs7g2oerjemp/bafkreihucz7n2gdl5g2x256n4m4s3oviru3ts5qm4pg5blz3txk6r5jw7u)
