Critical Review #2: Wong

Deborah Wong's article is an interesting analysis of how an ethnomusicologist can create performance ethnographies about his or her own participatory research, and how one can handle autoethnography. Because Wong's article was so self-referential, as she struggled with reconciling her deep personal involvement with taiko to her writing about it, at times I got a little lost as to what point she was trying to make. In the end, however, I felt that one of the main ideas of her article was that autoethnography of her own group allowed her to access a deeper current of social meaning in the performative practices of taiko. Additionally, it seems that she is trying to use the ethnographic writing as a method of self-discovery, to allow her "to learn how performative ethnography creates engaged encounters that offer strategies for social change" (Wong 88).

QUESTION:
Wong hopes that her ethnography will be "a study of what taiko might become in some of its possible futures". Do you think that, in reality, her ethnography will be what she hopes taiko will become in the future? She is very invested in the idea of taiko as an element of social, racial, and even gender identity and assertion (88), and she admits that she has "a stake in what taiko becomes" (88). Can she possible write about this in an unbiased fashion, does that even matter, and will her conclusions still be as relevant as (or possibly more relevant than) those of an unbiased ethnographer?