Exotism and Populism: Hopes and dangers
written by Ingo Stoevesandt

Two Positions, two arguments
“Populism” is a very difficult word if it gets viewed by scientific aspects. In politics it means that someone is putting complicated structures in simple matters in order to get a vote for his political goal. In other words in politics “Populism” stands for the manipulation of masses.
In science “Populism” seems to stand for a simplification of a complex facst, which also involves a lack of detail and the danger of a wrong interpretation. Both associations are not really positive.
“Exotism” carries an even stronger stigmata. It reveals a kind of xenophilia which is rather pathological.
Both terms stand for accusations which actual science has to deal with everytime. Research always means spending time, energy and money on things which do have no fast economical effects on a society. For ethnomusicology one of the most often heard arguments is that somehow every culture changes through time and this natural process being not stopable anyway denies wasting energy in preserving stuff for the future which is not needed anymore.
On the other hand scientists like ethnomusicologists often react on this with a sort of exclusion:
As people react with a lack of interest and understanding for their scientific topic they refuge in a selfconstructed isolation. Scientific facts are presented in a way that only “Insiders” understand what it is about, and public ways to present a new scientific research as a new argument for further research are neglected. If an article dares to simplificate some facts, if it dares to leave out a cataloge of details just in order to make it more readable, it will soon be declassified as “non-scientific” and “not serious enough”.
So, what is the way out of this dilemma? How do we convince science to be more “populistic” without serving “Exotism”?
Returning to the traditional music of Vietnam we might see a chance for the future. Whenever I present Vietnamese music in Germany people ask the same question: “This music is strange. Why should I listen?”
It seems strange, but I feel that this question also comes up more and more in Vietnam. The reason for this is that the tonal language of this music is already gone. If you walk down Vietnamese streets how much “traditional” music do you hear? If you look into music schools in Vietnam what are the main instruments that are taught - are those Vietnamese? If you stop a young boy or girl passing by and aks her to sing a traditional Vietnamese folk song, what will you hear?
Even if we keep in mind that this problem is faced by musical traditions worldwide, we still have to find a good answer for the question
“Why should I listen?” - to answer this question, we maybe should ask ourselves the same.

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