ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on the ethics of ethnomusicological research work at the “faultlines” of society, both problematic due to the multivalent complexities of such entanglements and essential for us in contributing toward repair and rejuvenation. It argues for the concerted cultivation of more caring ways of witnessing, listening, and walking alongside. The author first summarizes the many, intersecting forms of trauma that in recent years have impacted Haiti, where her music research is based. Then, the chapter makes a case for an ethics of care intended to allow compassionate and collaborative research in a traumatic setting while avoiding the risks of white saviorism, extractivism, scholarly voyeurism, and disaster capitalism that come already tied up with ethnographic models, and more widely as a principal for our work in general. An ethics of care is thus not an alternative to efforts for justice, but an essential counterpart to it. Three components comprise the foremost caring practices available to ethnomusicologists: witnessing, listening, and walking alongside, and these can lead us toward a radical empathy that has the potential to transform and repair.
