In his article "The Ethics of Representation," Agawu explores ethicals in ethnographic research by focusing on ethical issues in fieldwork done on African music. He begins by discussing ethics broadly, and raises a number of rhetorical questions about who determines what is ethical and whether anything can truly be ethical. Moving on to fieldwork in Africa, it is often difficult to determine what constitues ethical performance in African music. Is it ethical if sacred aspects of music are obscured with increasing commercialization or if traditional songs use a canonical form of insult? Since ethical though in Africa and Euro-America are quite different, it is often unclear to the ethnographer writing for a Western audience how to act ethically. Agawu himself has had to use deception in the field to preserve the integrity of his research or to protect his and his team's wellbeing, actions that he argues are not unethical. Turning to the question of ethics in representation, he proposes that fictional ethnography may be ethical if it is somehow more true than reality. In reflexive ethnography, he asks, is it ethical to excludes elements of one's own experience in the ethnography or to emphasize certain details excessively? Agawu's article raises a lot of important questions, and does not seem to answer them in many specific ways. The crux of his argument, it seems, is that ethics is highly subjective and context dependent. It is not specific rules regarding action, he concludes, but an attitude that defines ethics.
Discussion question: Agawu's reference to an "ethical attitude" is very brief and barely elaborated on. What might this attitude consist of? What examples that he provides earlier in the article might illustrate it?
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