Universalism against contextual thinking in multicultural music education – Western colonialism or pluralism?

Abstract

Hellenic-Cartesian-Kantian thinking is omnipresent in Western and European culture. This paradigm is culturally lived and experienced in music education as well. Could African thinking in its implicit cultural constructions recall for Westerners their long forgotten ontology? Could African music form a backdrop for the amnesis of Western music teachers and researchers? What are the concrete structures and practices which constitute knowing and understanding on the basis of sound? For Africans, music signifies social sharing and attendance in the most forceful ways. Is it possible for a Western music educator to gain the experience and insight of the modes of meaning which constitute traditional African music? Models which are based on the typical Western dichotomy between subject and object and between body and mind or which represent atomistic methodological individualism, should be abandoned when African music is included in education and research.