Page 130 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Introduction 105

preserve the memory of their hero, a strategic asset of their sur-
vival. The process is projected with reference to the category of social
memory construed as agency of collective identity.
Obviously, the potentialities of traditional and ethnic memory hap-
pen to be harnessed to serve objectives of dominance as well as defiance.
Memory equally proves to be an asset of subjection and rebellion. The
relationship between power and memory is not univocal at all. Ambiva-
lence and ambiguity are deeply imbedded in the agendas. Establish-
ment and mainstream anxiously use people’s memories for their ends,
possibly prompted by a wish to ‘nip in the bud’ the resistance potential
of people’s memory perceived as a frightening force. But people may
as well harness their collective symbolic heritage against attempts
of control and hegemony. The narrative, in the eye of the storm, is
intensely contested. Its subversive potential is subject to opposite drives,
which sometimes erases its record from people’s memory, sometimes
transplants distorted memories which smother its adverse propen-
sities, sometimes simply reconstruct and conveniently reinterpret
memorial heritages according to alien objectives and aesthetic senses.
The third chapter, ‘Say it in Singing! Prosodic Patterns and Rhetorics
in the Performance of Grindmill Songs’ by Bernard Bel, Geneviève
Caelen-Haumont and Hema Rairkar, provides new insights into the
‘act of singing’ and its likeness to the ‘act of speaking’ in terms of
the reappropriation of a discourse and the communication of its
emotional content. Their study is based on detailed analyses of impro-
visational performances in two remote cultural-linguistic contexts:
spontaneous dialogues in French on a preset canvas of discourse, and
singing at the grindmill in Marathi language. The authors’ contention
is that the capture of meaning at multiple levels demands a personal
emotional involvement on the part of the speaker/singer. The concern
of the performers is that the message conveyed in the performance
needs to be heard, understood and believed. To achieve this, they need
to reappropriate the original text and reshape it, syntactically and
semantically, so that it reflects implicit personal and collective values.
The tools for this reappropriation are found in the prosodic struc-
tures (time and pitch) underlying the performance of either speech or
singing. The subjective dimension is found in the way a performer will
sometimes adhere to, other times contradict, the intonative pattern
imposed by the pragmatic and linguistic structures of speech produc-
tion, or the tonal structure of a tune. The study suggests that this game