ABSTRACT
This book’s introduction examines fundamental ideas about the nature of social and cultural theory in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Characterizing theoretical work as the search for broadly applicable insights into social life and culture, the first part of the introduction places theory in the context of other kinds of projects that ethnomusicologists pursue in research (description, interpretation, and analysis), shows how all scholarly work entails theoretical dimensions, discusses the role of theory in critical and activist research, and explores the relationships among theory, everyday life, and larger social forces. The introduction continues by providing a framework for making sense of theoretical paradigms and considers the connections between theory and method. Readers are offered ideas that will help them navigate intellectual history and make theory useful in their work. The introduction concludes by presenting an overview of the book’s organization and examining the relationships between theory in individual disciplines and the broader interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary discourses of social and cultural theory. Throughout, the authors attend to the diverse ways in which ethnomusicologists have engaged in theoretical work and emphasize the unique contributions that scholars in our field have made to broader theoretical debates across the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
