Critical Review #3: Titon

Titon's article gives some useful background on the epistemology of ethnomusicology and goes into Titon's theories and beliefs regarding the best way to go about doing fieldwork. He talks about the different paradigms that ethnomusicology as a field has gone through in its progression from historical musicology to its current form, and he deals with such concepts as the difference between explanation and understanding and the relationship of phenomenology to ethnomusicology. Titon makes an interesting point that a great deal of ethnographic writing follows the model of the hero's quest myth, even if the ethnographer does so entirely unintentionally. In the end, Titon brings the article around to a discussion of fieldwork, and his belief that an ethnographer must develop friendship with his or her "subjects", based on "musical being-in-the-world."

QUESTION:
Standards of friendship, courtesy, and mutual gain vary greatly between cultures. If an ethnographer is setting out to follow Titon's fieldwork model of friendship and mutual gain and caring for one another, how can he or she determine if Titon's standards have truly been achieved with a given subject or if it only seems that way from the ethnographer's point of view?