Prueba de hipótesis

I want my books to be a sort of toolbox that people can rummage through to find a tool they can use however they want in their own domain. (Foucault quoted by Gutting 2005:112)

In this chapter, I am concerned with extracting useful suggestions from Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge for my own project, a history of Romanian ethnomusicology through the lens of a single research institution. I am looking especially for procedural suggestions, as well terms and concepts I can transfer profitably to my own project.

Foucault is sometimes accused of expressing himself in difficult and inaccessible language.

After several years of reading his books, I find this complaint true in part - even when accounting for a cultural and temporal difference: he wrote several decades ago with a French education and perhaps primarily for a French audience. In part, his writing seems to me unclear or even contradictory in places while other parts are clearly, efficiently and even beautifully expressed. In some cases, his reluctance to define concepts seems to serve a methodological purpose, while in other cases I find it unfortunate that he did not find more precise words to express his thoughts.

In this chapter, I try to combat this aspect of Foucault's writing in several ways. Firstly, I try not to emulate his language and style; instead I write as clear as I can, occasionally risking oversimplification. Secondly, I include an introduction (section 2.2.1) to The Archaeology of Knowledge, which not only highlights my specific reading of his book, but which should also be accessible to those not familiar with Foucault's work in general. Thirdly, I do not gloss over parts of his work that I find unclear in the way that most of the secondary literature on Foucault does.

Instead, I point out the problems and contradictions I see. Lastly and perhaps most importantly, in my historical chapters, I try to apply Foucault's concepts in a way that should be intelligible and plausible even without Foucault's often unusual and sometimes idiosyncratic terminology.

Another important aspect of this chapter is that I select some parts of The Archaeology Knowledge and leave out other parts. I base this selection not so much on theoretical considerations, but on the results of my experiments. My main guideline for this process was the question if applying his suggestions to my data – ethnomusicological publications and interviews with ethnomusicologists - helped me saying things I wanted to say. I expect that people with a different perspective would chose different aspects and, conversely, that I chose aspects that others interested in writing the history of an academic discipline may or may not find interesting.

Although ethnomusicologists have frequently cited Foucault in the last two decades, they have rarely discussed his work in-depth. I begin this chapter with a short overview of Foucault's reception in ethnomusicology (2.1), and then I concentrate on The Archaeology of Knowledge (2.2). This chapter ends with a section (2.3) where I explain changes I made in applying Foucault's archaeological approach to my project.

THEORY IN ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

I believe that ethnomusicology in general has a love-hate relationship with theory. Some ethnomusicologists reject it, others embrace it. Some may do both at the same time. There still are hard-core positivists in our discipline who believe that there are only facts, and theory is nothing but a waste of time, and there are also more moderate and more numerous colleagues who voice similar arguments in a less radical fashion. Some seem to be upset that current discussions require them to keep up with current developments, especially since these often come from outside of what they perceive as their "own discipline", for example from cultural anthropology or, more lately, from social theory. At the same time, some professional journals and job markets seem to encourage the use of theoretical (and possibly fashionable) terminology, at least occasionally. And because this is so, those who dislike theory often voice their opinions in conversations, but not so much in writing. Thus, I rely here on what ethnomusicologists in Germany, the US, and Romania have told me over coffee during conferences, when visiting the Phonogram Archive in Berlin or during my own visits to the IEF. This may not be a particularly deep, balanced or representative analysis of the status quo, but it clearly points to a situation in which factions strongly disagree about the value and use of theory in ethnomusicology, but where resistance for the most part takes place outside the printed discourse.³² Faced with this love-hate relationship, it makes sense to provide some justification for my chapter on methodology.

Apart from these partial and possibly trivial, but nonetheless real, reasons for real antipathy against theory, there are also a few structural problems that complicate the discussion:

there is no agreement, for example, as to what theory actually is - neither among ethnomusicologists nor those specializing in the science of science, epistemology, the sociology of knowledge or other related fields. Here I propose to use general and by no means revolutionary definitions³³ of theory and related terms: Theory is an abstraction or attempt to describe general principles on the basis of concrete data. Some would call these general statements models or explanations; others reject those terms, possibly because they remind them too much of the hard sciences. A method is etymologically nothing else than "'following a way' (from the Greek meta, 'along', and odos, 'way')" (Caws quoted in Mehrtens 1999:833), and thus one can understand any more or less standardized procedure as a method. As with other -ologies, methodology comes with terminology to talk or write about its subject matter, in this case, methods. The idea here is to look for patterns in problem solving strategies. To talk about methodology should help us to

32 The only recent book-length publication I am aware of that directly tackles the topic of theory in ethnomusicology is a textbook (Stone 2008) which largely takes for granted what theory is and that working on theory is part of the ethnomusicologist's work. Stone does not discuss what I consider a widespread resistance against theory in our discipline, except in the most optimistic way, an approach that might be both productive and unavoidable for a textbook addressing early graduate students. As a consequence, however, Stone's book addresses neither the symptoms nor the reasons for the love-hate relationship I have noted. An ethnographic investigation of these issues among ethnomusicologists would be an interesting topic; however, it falls outside of this work's scope.

33 The definitions I suggest for the terms "theory", "method" and "methodology" include some but not all usual features for these terms, and thus can be called general, (cf. Sandkühler 1999, Mehrtens 1999). With these general definitions, I merely want to make my premises and intentions explicit; I do not mean to advance the science of science or similar fields.

discover and avoid flaws and to transfer problem solving strategies (or elements of them) to other cases.

It is not difficult to see that I am trying to salvage terms from a context that could easily be classified as positivistic, that I am attempting to rid these terms from a too limited and too positivistic interpretation, and that I seek to apply them in a productive, clear and simple way to deal with epistemological problems. This use of language runs somewhat against the anti-positivistic trends and language of some more recent ethnomusicological scholarship. I do believe, however, that the predilection I have for a certain kind of formalism with language, definitions, terms and concepts is just a matter of style and that what I have to say is actually closer to the post-positivistic impetus that shaped ethnomusicology in recent decades³⁴ than it might first appear.

If one looks at the history of ethnomusicology (and also that of cultural anthropology, where fieldwork and ethnography play a similar role), one finds a role for theory I find both convincing and timely: Based on concrete data produced mainly by participant observation, ethnographers develop what could be termed "middle-ranged theories" (Merton 1996:41–50):

general statements developed from concrete fieldwork observation and participation, which are slightly more general than the observations themselves, but far from universal. The abstraction involved here is modest. The aim seems to be not to generalize so much as to create a universal model that fits as many cultures or cases as possible, but to stay close to given case studies and to develop a model that explains these concrete observations. This kind of abstraction often has an ad-hoc quality. It is developed for the example at hand and can afford to ignore other Western thought on the topic to some extent.

Some examples may help to illustrate this practice. When Bronislaw Malinowski describes the Kula exchange, he is not much concerned with a universal model of exchange (as is Marcel Mauss at roughly the same time, Malinowski [1922] 1999, Mauss [1923] 2002). Also, he concentrates on his fieldwork data much more than on Western economic theory. More recently, Thomas Turino's (2000) musical ethnography on nationalism and cosmopolitanism in Zimbabwe shares these two features: Turino does not intend it as a universal model of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and he prefers to discuss local data rather than extensively analyzing the vast literature on this topic produced over the centuries in the West³⁵. In the end, some of the general results may be applicable to other cases, but that seems not to have been the main concern when the book was written.

What I am doing in this study follows the same pattern. This work is not meant as a step towards a universal historiography of ethnomusicology or music research as a whole, but rather as a particularistic investigation into the knowledge produced in one single Romanian research institution. I ignore a great deal of what has been written about epistemology, the sociology of knowledge and related fields, and instead put the specific case in the center. If what I present here

34 My allusions to a post-positivist ethnomusicology are based on a view of ethnomusicology's recent history as described by Phil Bohlman, Martin Stokes and others in various editions of the article on ethnomusicology in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (e.g. Pegg, Pegg et al. 2001).

35 For my relatively crude argument, it matters little which of the many possible definitions of 'the West' applies here.

differs in a significant way from other musical ethnographies, then it is in the fact that this text is more explicit in the treatment of terminological and methodological issues and that it attempts to take terms and methodological clues from one source or thinker and not from dozens (as for example Gilroy [1993] 2002).

The fact that I place an emphasis on one particular thinker, Foucault, is certainly a bit unusual for an ethnography. By doing so, I am taking up the experiments other ethnomusicologists have already begun (see literature review in section 2.1). I also hope to attract some readers interested in Foucault and in how to apply some of his concepts to an anthropological, historical or ethnomusicological context.

I do not take a ready-made theory, method or concept and apply it unchanged and unchallenged to an ethnomusicological topic. If a theoretical work is one that mainly reasons based on general principles (as, for example, by inferring conclusions from a syllogism), this work is not theoretical. My reasoning is little based on theory or method; instead it is driven by the data, mainly the publications of IEF and interviews with Romanian ethnomusicologists. I am, however, interested in suggesting a modestly generalized way of discussing my observations.

Why, then, do I spend so much time (or so many pages) discussing methodology? This text is written as a dissertation at the University of Cologne. Dissertations are required to show the validity of their approach, maybe more so than other kinds of scholarly publications. Secondly, in Germany, and perhaps especially in ethnomusicology at Cologne, there is a tradition of thoroughly discussing terminology – I regard this as a healthy legacy from comparative musicology – as well as general and methodological aspects of the topic at hand, as can be seen in Mendívil 2008, to name a recent dissertation, but also in Kuckertz 1963, to name a much older example.

Ultimately, I do not write about methodology to follow a tradition, even if I do so. I hope that what I have to say about methodology merits being corrected, adapted, re-used or consciously rejected for other studies and that some of the problem-solving strategies applied here might help others.

This perspective on methodology corresponds to Foucault's approach in some important ways. At least in The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault also "flirts" with positivism (Foucault 1972:124). Also, I share methodological interests that characterize The Archaeology of Knowledge: identifying units and objects in the history of an academic discipline. Furthermore, Foucault is also interested in what I have called here "middle-ranged" theories. He often avoids the far-reaching generalizations typical of the philosophical tradition in favor of more modest ones that stay closer to the historical cases he examines.

I chose to focus on Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge and not some of his more recent works, because when I began this work I was more concerned with finding a meaningful perspective from which to write intellectual history. As the work progressed, I found myself more interested in the analysis of cultural policy processes which keeps both the state and the individual and their access to power in mind, as outlined in Foucault's governmentality studies (such as Foucault 2007). However, in this chapter, I focus less on power relationships and governing, which feature more prominently in more recent writings of Foucault, but I do include power and

other concepts from Foucault's governmentality studies in my analysis of Romanian ethnomusicology where these topics seem to be relevant.

2.1 Foucault in ethnomusicology