Musical ethnography under Spanish colonial power in the modern age
The addition of a historical dimension to Western
ethnomusicology has permitted the birth of a new kind of
research. This focuses on the authors of what one might call an
"integrated and unpremeditated ethnomusicology", a kind
of research engaged in the colonial project for three centuries
or more during the modern period. My purpose is to emphasize the
complexity of thought manifested by travelers from the
Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Far from restricting their own
worldview to the conventional notions of this period, some of
them left accounts remarkable for the plurality of their
convictions and methods, as well as the irreverent doubts they
express about their culture and way of looking at the world. Such
a wide diversity of attitudes problematizes the extent to which
the view of the observer is conditioned by his or her time and
place.