ABSTRACT
Ethnomusicology has several disciplinary safeguards for ethical practice ranging from institutional review boards that govern work with human subjects to informal mentorship in graduate school and professional peer feedback. There is good reason for the concern. Our use of interviews and observation—in short, our representation of people—for print publication is fundamental to the discipline. Thanks to reflexive scholarship that acknowledges power, politics, and ethics, the people we engage are often less “subjects” than they are “interlocutors,” “collaborators,” or “informants.” To a degree, the presence of a camera changes disciplinary ethical considerations. Cinematic representation in ethnomusicology requires rethinking our obligations to the people with whom we conduct our research.
This chapter will consider ethical practices of ethnomusicologically minded filmmakers through a series of interviews with the filmmakers regarding preproduction, production, postproduction, and distribution. How can we avoid camera-level malpractice when shooting? How can we make our own developing ethical concerns legible to audiences? Given the economies of the internet mediascape, to what degrees are the participants in our films providing unpaid labor and is there an implicit exchange of speculative labor that promises future work through visibility and academic legitimization? Lastly, filmmakers have an ethical responsibility to their audiences in presenting truth and critical perspectives. What are some of the diverse ways by which filmmakers meet those obligations to audiences? As scholarship adapts to an online digital world, ethical considerations are in need of an update. This chapter weaves together individual responses from practitioners to begin thinking through practical ethics collectively. The intersection of concern among ethnomusicologists and the decades-long practices of documentary filmmakers can begin a discussion that considers power, representation, and goals of ethnomusicological scholarship.
