ABSTRACT
Using Rommen's (2007) concept of “ethics of style,” this chapter explores the processes of applied research in post-mission Christian contexts in Aboriginal Australia. Drawing on my research as a choral facilitator with the Lutheran Aboriginal community of Hopevale, Northern Queensland, I will show how performative contexts influenced the ways in which the Aboriginal Hopevalian Community Choir became more aware of their ensemble's aesthetic and the influence it had on constructs of local identities. I show how, as an applied, participatory action researcher, I approached the “ethics of style” in the highly politicized context of post-mission Australia. I suggest that while applied research has lost its stigma related to problematic notions of “objectivity” and undesirable scholarly “meddling” (Merriam 1964), applied research in Christian contexts has not. Using my positionality as an atheist music facilitator in a fourth-generation Lutheran Australian Aboriginal context, I argue that Indigenous religious beliefs and agency should determine the outcome of applied research projects. This, I will show, will sometimes require that secular, Western-educated atheist researchers such as myself, set aside their personal (absence of) religious beliefs to accommodate reciprocal, ethical working relationships with the community in which they are based.
