"Ethnography and popular music studies" Critical Review

The main points in the reading “Ethnography and popular music studies,” by Sara Cohen were about the differences in effectiveness between ethnography and anthropology. Although anthropology uses a more statistical and theoretical method of researching about a “culture,” ethnography requires the researcher to be in contact with the people in the “culture” first hand. The main difference between ethnography and anthropology is that ethnography researches the individual, social relationships, and the many different dimensions that affect the definition of a “culture.” Cohen also talked about how living in a community to learn about the individuals within it is relative to the person doing the research and the people you choose to interact with. This led to her point, which I thought was particularly important, that “general statements tend to mask the complex interrelatedness of contexts, events, activities and relationships involved with popular music.” In a reference from Finnegan, she describes "culture," in respect to the social differences related by music, as "musical pathways," which shows how dynamic the individuals within a "culture" can be, as well as how many different "cultures" they could be grouped into.

This reading was basically about what ethnography is and how ethnographers conduct their research. This is related to the class because we are learning about different subcultures of music and which youth communities they appeal to, which is similar to learning about a specific culture and the individuals that identify with it. Also, since this class focuses on ethnography, it is good to learn about the methods used and the ideas to keep in mind.

Lawrence Grossberg suggested that “anthropology’s focus upon the ‘other’, its boundaries between us and them, bear little relation to the situation of ethnography within the contemporary advanced industrial world of mass media, where the relationship between the strange and the familiar is increasingly difficult to define…” With this suggestion in mind, can there still be specific “characteristics” of a certain ‘culture’? or is everything too intertwined and overlapping to even consider a sort of criteria?