Page 126 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Introduction 101

IntroductIon

eDitorS

As a response to cultures shaped, spread and enforced by communication
technologies or so-called mainstreams, ‘popular’ cultures often hap-
pen to be advocated and called to display alternative forms of com-
munication pregnant with more genuinely humane content. Against
the industrial supply of ‘mass’ symbolic products, we focus once again
on them for purpose of hopefully discovering ways of creative and
native initiatives to be possibly followed. In the previous volume we
already took cognizance of oral mythical narratives as a people’s his-
tory of sorts. Indian myths (Poitevin 2001) by and large are cognitive
discourses that authoritatively deal with fundamental queries such
as community status, collective identity, social order, common good,
gender, power, and so on. We presented practices of reappropriation
of narratives prompted by purposes of collective recognition, political
mobilization, cultural awareness and social distinction. Further, we
showed that human groups try to fulfil the wishes of inner cohesion and
outer distinction in elaborating highly sophisticated and ‘discursive’
systems of work relations and health practices transmitted by word
of mouth only.
We are now going to deal with the epistemological foundations and
the methodological implications of such practices in a perspective of
critical cultural anthropology. On what grounds can communities le-
gitimately vindicate such functions for their myths? To what extent can
they actually claim for their heritage of ancient narratives a capacity of
social consolidation, nowadays, in a deeply transformed socio-cultural
environment?
A comparable shift towards the resources of orality has already been
taking place for the past thirty years among historians. They used to