Page 131 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

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of submission and resistance is the mirror of an identification process
enacted by the opposition between collective and individual values.
Submission to the conventional pattern brings about a sense of com-
munity cohesiveness, a social heritage; in other words, an invariant of
collective values and memories that prove the existence of the perfor-
mer as a member of the group. At the opposite (and simultaneously),
the performer needs to depart from convention and express individual
values as the carriers of his/her emotions. It is typically the ‘space of
variability’ in speech and singing.

Assets of Dissent

Among populations who are not conversant with books and writing,
oral traditions operate as references for building up communities of
thought, conduct and action. When these communities happen to be
maintained in a state of subalternity, their oral traditions may be ex-
pected to reflect in ways specific to each of them the uneasy, ambivalent,
ambiguous, confused or possibly contrasted and even conflictual rap-
ports that cannot but prevail between internalized dominant systems
of representations and autonomous symbolic reconstructions.
The chapters in this section present the secular and exclusively femi-
nine tradition of grindmill songs on the basis of a reference corpus of
60,000 distichs established in western Maharashtra. The practice of
singing while grinding at dawn is widely observed all over the Indian
subcontinent. Songs of the grindmill have been extensively collected
and used for activities of cultural action and community organization in
rural Maharahstra since 1983 by the peasant women animators of the
Village Community Development Association (VCDA). Let us stress the
1
fact that we are provided with a model for research and action, which
hardly leaves room to processes of dominance of a research expert
with scholarly competence over common folk deprived of academic
authority. The validity and relevance of the research in this model is
a function of the quality, equality and intensity of the communication
processes, which take place in the research design and research pro-
cedures themselves.
The three contributors discuss their experience of research and ac-
tion from an insider’s perspective. In ‘Grindmill Songs: A Reference of