I agree with you on the depth and seriousness of the subject. Some fascinating studies include:

Saga’s Sorrow: Femininities of Despair in the Music of Radical White Nationalism

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/ethnomusicology.58.3.04...

Transnational Encounters: Music and Performance at the U.S.-Mexico Border

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265829427_Transnati...

Is Birdsong Music? Outback Encounters with an Australian Songbird

https://books.google.com/books/about/Is_Birdsong_Music.html?...

I can’t tell if you are being serious or sarcastic.

FWIW I think all of those things sound interesting and cool.

Here’s the abstract from the ‘Saga’s Sorrow’ paper:

“This article examines the construction of gender roles in contemporary white nationalist music. Grounded in extensive and ethnographic fieldwork, the article traces the rise of leading Swedish singer Saga and argues that her music frames women as besieged embodiments of racial and national essence dependent on men for deliverance. The discussion of Saga’s music draws from a review of recent social and ideological shifts in radical white nationalism, insider interviews, performance observations, and structural and textual analyses.”

For some reason I’m reminded of the Zack Snyder film ‘300’.

> I can’t tell if you are being serious or sarcastic.

Of course they were trolling. I don't claim that there isn't a lot of bogus stuff in ethomusicology (as the OP sarcastically proves), just that it is a perfectly legitimate field. You can also find a lot of pompous bullshit in machine learning publications, but that does not mean that ML is bogus.

Not trolling and absolutely serious. I've spent a lifetime exploring the world through the lens of music and I'm an admirer of the field of ethnology. Such studies have been highly useful to how I view the importance of music in society, aside from being entertainment it bonds communities and the study of it sheds fascinating light as to our cultures and ways.

Cool : ). Yeah I honestly wasn't sure and appreciate your response : ). And I agree.

Just for fun I'll throw out Ursula le Guin as one of my favorite science fiction authors because she explores issues of human nature via anthropology and such.

Well, ok, sorry about that then. I'm much more into the "musical" part of ethnomusicology than into the philosophical/ cultural/political aspects, which I find completely uninteresting. But good for you if you find interest in it. I thought you were trolling due to the 3rd book, whose title sounds like a joke to me. As in "is dog barking literature?"; of course it isn't, literature and music are, pretty much by definition, things that humans do.