Music, Media, and Mediation

Abstract

This chapter considers ethnomusicology's relationship to media as a fundamental tool for cultural representation. It draws a circuitous line from Robert Flaherty's encounter with the Inuit people through Titon's work on American cultural communities to indigenous media makers' mediated performances, exploring how ethnomusicologists and ethnographic filmmakers embrace media's power to document, analyze, distribute, and sustain musical experience across culture and through time. These mediators work between the worlds of academic scholarship and the public sphere, and navigate the duality of face-to-face experience in real time against the capturing of musical culture in enduring and accessible ethnographic media in an increasingly mediated world.