Anti-Colonial Strategies in Cross-cultural Music Science Research

THIS PAPER PRESENTS A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF ethical and methodological issues within cross-cultural music science research, including issues around community based research, participation, and data sovereignty. Although such issues have long been discussed in social science fields including anthropology and ethnomusicology, psychology and music cognition are only beginning to take them into serious consideration. This paper aims to fill that gap in the literature, and draw attention to the necessity of critically considering how implicit cultural biases and pure positivist approaches can mar scientific investigations of music, especially in a cross-cultural context. We focus initially on two previous papers (Jacoby et al., 2020; Savage et al., 2021) before broadening our discussion to critique and provide alternatives to scientific approaches that support assimilation, extractvism, and universalism. We then discuss methodological considerations around cross-cultural research ethics, data ownership, and open science and reproducibility. Throughout our critique, we offer many personal recommendations to cross-cultural music researchers, and suggest a few larger systemic changes.

Knowledge songs as an evolutionary adaptation to facilitate information transmission through music

I propose an adjunct to the two models presented in the target articles, a function of music that is ubiquitous and would have solved a clear adaptive problem, that of transmitting important survival information among pre-literate humans. This class of knowledge songs uniquely preserved cultural, botanical, medical, safety, and practical information that increased the adaptive fitness of societies.

Convergences and divergences between scientific and Indigenous and Local Knowledge contribute to inform carnivore conservation

There is increasing recognition that diverse knowledge systems can work in mutually enriching ways and that Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK) can enhance biodiversity conservation. However, studies using scientific knowledge and ILK in a complementary manner, and acknowledging convergent and especially divergent insights have remained limited. In this study, we contrasted proxies of abundances and trends of threatened and conflict-prone carnivores (caracal, cheetah, jackal, lion, leopard, spotted hyaena, striped hyaena) derived separately from scientific knowledge and ILK. We conducted camera trapping, track surveys and semi-structured interviews with local pastoralists from northern Kenya. We found convergences highlighting the need for conservation action and divergences suggesting scientific ecological sampling limitations or underlying socio-psychological phenomena. Overall, our study shows that complementing scientific knowledge and ILK as separate sources of information and opening up space for discrepancies can enrich our understanding of the status and trends of carnivores, as well as recognizing human-carnivore relationships.