another thought

I think we briefly talked last term about the work of the ethnomusicologist John Blacking.  He lived with the Venda for many years attempting to better understand "their music".

In the book of his essays that we use in TL 705 he provides what I think is a critical distinction that many of us with western-style educations are not likely to fully appreciate.   He suggests that we discard the concept "music" and instead use a reformed or revised word-tool of "musics".  

This seems to be a bit of the described phenomenological import of Yi-Fu Tuan's book on fear.   It's not about "fear".  It's about "fears" and how they are grounded and rooted differently.  Only when one begins with a pluralistic accounting and description of these fears—probably including how we make even a general reference to them—one that acknowledges the bedrock diversity of the general phenomena we're approaching—it's only then that we are latching on to a more practical epistemology about the world in which we live and transact.