Shelemay Critical Review (Barz and Cooley, ch 9)

Shelemay discusses the active role of the ethnomusicologist in the field.  She approaches this subject through the dichotomy of the ethnomusicologist and the anthropologist-musicologist.  She clearly falls in the former group, as she has become an active member in the communities she has studied.  In the ethnomusicologist's role of transmission, she sums up three common ways a fieldworker is implicated - preserving tradition, memorializing tradition and mediating tradition.  After discussing these three points, she concludes that all three are important roles for a fieldworker, and then lays out a set of guidelines for anyone studying in the field.  Ultimately she concludes that people aren't studying some "culture" or "field", but instead establishing relations with a "stream of individuals to whom we are subsequently linked in new ways" (page 153).  

One question I have is why does an outside observer have to infiltrate a culture to extract information?  I know Kiri mentioned the professor at Harvard who felt that instead of educating ethnomusicologists here, they should be educating ethnomusicologists in other cultures.  This would make it easier to establish a relationship built on a foundation of sharing knowledge.