Beyond the binary of choreomusicology: Moving from ethnotheory towards local ontologies

Ethnotheory, the practice of deriving concepts and principles from a study of emic terminology or classifications, is an established and accepted practice in ethnomu-sicology. While aimed towards a goal central to fieldwork-based disciplines-that of getting inside others'cultural and philosophical conceptions-it has also generated backlash for implicitly or explicitly separating "our" from "their" theory and failing to provide real theoretical abstractions. Anthropology's ontological turn can provide a way out by prioritizing the kinds of data ethnotheorists collect in such a way that new ontologies are generated\ In this article. Hood and Hutchinson consider recent models for choreomusical research on and from Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as how an ontological turn might inform and enrich them. The authors argue that the ontological turn can help achieve a long-held goal of many choreomusicologists: That of breaking down the music-dance binary at the heart of the field itself.