Scientific event

The anthropology of music, often called ethnomusicology, studies music not merely as a collection of notes, but as a total cultural and social phenomenon. It analyzes how societies produce, experience, and transmit their sonic expressions, and how their achievements reflect the values, beliefs, and myths that shape and sustain human societies.
We will focus primarily on music and anthropology, as the goal is to place a practice and a field of knowledge into perspective, without one taking precedence over the other. In doing so, we aim to ward off a dual tendency: on one hand, formatting music according to an anthropology that was established without it; on the other, isolating it within a narrow musicology that inherits the very perspectives, practices, and concepts of Western music.
Our presentation is divided into two points: the first recalls how ethnomusicology historically constructed its object of study through the media created by the West—first musical notation, and later sound recording; anthropology only entered the picture very late. Finally, the second point examines the current perspectives of our discipline.
The perspective presented here, while not entirely unique, does not necessarily align with those of the entire profession: a privilege of its paradoxical institutional fragility, ethnomusicology is a discipline too weakly anchored in academia to practice homophony and belong to a single school of thought.