A Response to Charles Keil

Abstract

I am especially taken by Charlie's strategy of written speech in this position piece: I can hear him speaking these lines. I doubt he will like hearing it called this, but his positionality is affectively enacted through strategic oratory. He calls for a grounded ethnomusicology with his feet on the ground. I can only second his proposal for ethnomusicologists to make themselves relevant by connecting themselves to neighborhoods, communities, right here and now, wherever 'home' is. This interpenetration of research and social action is tremendously appealing to me too, and I think I arrived at this idea after traveling a similar path to Charlie's. Ethnic studies (in my case, Asian American studies) provides models for connecting the academy to the community; Charlie's years in an American studies department have probably left their mark. Charlie's liberal social realismhis fist-swinging socialism-has characterized his work in ways that I have consistently found inspiring, even exhilarating. He has taken risks over and over again in his work by grappling with the cultural usefulness of ethnomusicology. I am therefore (generally) ready to jump on Charlie's bandwagon as it seems the right place to be, at least politically. Unlike him, though, I think we need critical theory to help us imagine new ways to connect scholarship, teaching, and the community (wherever it may be). If research and teaching is cultural advocacy, then we need more than conviction-we also need the critical tools that might help us focus and refocus what we think we're seeing and what we think we ought to be doing. Theory provides tools for thought as well as for action. Scholars working under the general rubric of poststructuralism share a keen acknowledgment of the constructedness and historicity of the theories they wield. This is as good a place as any for me to object to the word jargon (though it appears here without its usual companion, trendy). Cultural theory and its attendant vocabularies, often emergent, are neither