ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the implications of importing a generic regime of ethnographic ethics to musical ethnography. As ethnographers, the maintenance of solidarity and deferential treatment toward the people we study is a necessity for producing our signature forms of knowledge as well as a hinder to our claims to advance social justice through research. If we aspire toward intellectual intimacy, collaboration, and reciprocity with those we study, our research will be as righteous as they (and we) are: scholar-informant solidarity is epistemologically indispensable and morally volatile. This chapter intervenes to ask how that epidemiological and ethical dynamic changes in the study of people making music. How does solidarity manifest in the ethnography of music, and how does it render us accomplice to the (im)morality of those we study and the culture the produce? My analysis centers on the positive valence often attached to music at large, and argues that this feature may allow ethnomusicologists to escape or conceal the moral volatility that otherwise attends their hallmark methodology.
