Fifty Years of SEM in the United States: A Retrospective

Abstract

Like all politics, all ethnomusicology is How true this is, becomes repeatedly obvious f r those f us who pursue field research in plac beyond United States, as we intersect with scholars abroad. Considering identity of us individuals on this panel, seems to imply national. The voices of two of us from United States?McAllester and my self?represent two other senses of local, that is, temporal in terms of generation, and spatial in terms of academic discipline: he trained as an anthropologist, I as a musicologist. The title of panel?Perspectives on History of Ethnomusicology?permits another sense of local; for tunately, each of us has been given license to make of our own experiences a kind of locality. My remarks are informed by those four senses of the local. I fervently hope that when we celebrate our next major anniversary, racial formation of our field will be reconfigured to include racial and cultural diversity that informs societies in which we live. I hope that such diverse voices will not only be more visible and audible, but also place other senses of local at microphone in sessions like this. I want to acknowledge many Americans who have taken stances, have tracked history of, or otherwise ruminated about field of ethnomusi cology in United States. As Philip Bohlman has pointed out, self-reflexivity has been a hallmark, if not a canon of our field. I have found it very challeng ing to craft remarks that will impart something of richness of our history, logic and passion behind it, and deeply individualistic nature of it, without re-recording once again luxuriant detail already offered by others. The format for my paper is first and foremost that of list.1 One list details a number of ways in which I perceive field to have changed here in past fifty years. A second list pertains to a very few ways in which it seems to me that our endeavor has remained same. No doubt readers will