Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Since the publication of The Anthropology of Music, the ethnomusicology community has continually returned to Alan P. Merriam’s three-part model of concept, behavior, and sound when debating the theoretical orientation, methodological tools, and identity of the discipline. This article aims to examine the canonical position of this book and to situate the relationship between Merriam’s arguments and Timothy Rice’s attempts to remodel ethnomusicology as a specific field of problematization shared around explanation, experience, and the construction of musical ethnography. In this context, a qualitative research design and a discourse-analytic approach are adopted at the methodological level. The data sets were derived from a comparative reading of The Anthropology of Music and a number of key publications on the topic. The debates these texts construct around concepts such as function, fieldwork, identity, and disciplinary formation are subjected to analytical examination. The findings show that Merriam’s model is organized around enduring tensions between ideals of systematic explanation and the open-ended apprehension of musical meaning, and that Rice’s remodeling proposal does not so much reject this legacy as reinterpret its fundamental issues within a vocabulary centered on experience, subjectivity, and narrative. Accordingly, the article argues that the relationship between Merriam and Rice constitutes a striking example of how the ethnomusicology canon operates and concludes that this canon functions as a dynamic arena of debate in which foundational texts are continually reinterpreted, certain aspects are selectively remembered while others are forgotten, and, more importantly, theoretical and methodological imagination is both constrained and stimulated.
Source: DergiPark (Istanbul University)
Author: Güngör, İsmail
Institution: Okan University
Language: English
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7140957804
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