Ethnography, mediations and pragmatism

Abstract

From a field of research that forms a sub-discipline -the sociology of music and the amateurs-, the work of Antoine Hennion contains a specific and relevant contribution to social sciences. Hennion's efforts question the limits of constructivism to give rise to a sociology of irreversibilities that integrates the relations between the human and the non-human into heterogeneous arrangements. In his work, music will no longer be just what musicology privileges. But this will not be denied in the name of social forces. Music will be a relationship, a heteroclite arrangement that must be apprehended within that complexity. In this paper, we refer to emergent discussions of his work, which offer us the possibility to draw consequences for the contemporary ethnographical practice. With this purpose, we first expose Hennion’s position respect to constructivism, then we explore the sense of pragmatism in his recent work and finally we review the aspects of ethnographic practice we call into question from that perspective. Particularly, we underline the value of pragmata as a concept which affords us to rethink “the native's point of view” and, specially, to emphasize the dialogical character of ethnographic knowledge.