Facing the Musical Other

Abstract

Abstract The philosopher Alfred Schutz labored to unite Max Weber’s sociology with Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, while Emmanuel Levinas theorized the ethics of encounter with another consciousness. Similar in background and age—both were European Jews whose work in the mid-twentieth century was fundamentally shaped by World War II—these thinkers are rarely considered together because they represent different traditions within phenomenology. In this chapter, we argue that their writings on ethical social relations, if drawn upon purposefully and strategically, can illuminate the ethnographic investigation of musical experience. Taking Indonesian dangdut music as our case study, we demonstrate the utility of a Levinasian-Schutzian approach for understanding the social dimensions of musicking and addressing the ethical ramifications of ethnographic research.