[rolfea]

Yes, exactly! I have a couple of "expensive music degrees" and in my experience, most folks within the academy who are applying western-tradition theory and analysis on non-western-tradition practices are doing it full well knowing it's a limited lens to use. It's usually a pragmatic move, because the alternative ways of discussing the music are sometimes not very clear, or you end up using time stamps generated in audacity to try to demonstrate "they kind of rush this 5/8 bar, but it still sounds cool and carries a lot of energy with it."

I've had similar experiences trying to transcribe non-western folk music, like Bata drumming from Cuba. You can definitely notate it, but the formal structure of the songs doesn't fit well into traditional notation, so it is necessarily an incomplete technique that more or less HAS to be married to audio recordings or videos if you want to learn the music at a later point.