ABSTRACT
The question of intimacy, of the ideologies and practices of “closeness” in the contested public/private spaces of the modern world, has had an impact on ethnomusicology in recent years. The ethical dimensions of this recent “affective turn” have not been adequately explored, though, as the first part of this chapter demonstrates. (A particular problem here has been recourse to music psychological argument about empathy.) I argue here for an approach that locates the problems of intimacy in a broader history of sentimentalism. Rousseau’s Essai sur l’Origine des Langues—and the question of what it is, if not vibrations, that moves us and binds us affectively in music—shows these problems might also be entangled with the history of ethnomusicology. Some of the ethical dimensions of the question of intimacy might be more fully and productively identified from this broader theoretical and historical vantage point.
