Page 132 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Introduction 107

Autonomous Self-Insight’, Hema Rairkar emphasizes the importance
of this tradition as an authoritative reference for peasant women to
ascertain their statements and the authenticity of their testimonies. The
challenge of research-action is to establish the continuity between an
inherited collective self-memory and a modern critical self-assessment.
As a self-generating process of knowledge leading to appropriate ac-
tion, this reflexive self-investigation needs to be carried out collectively.
This reappropriation and re-activation, namely, deconstruction and
reconstruction of the tradition of grindmill songs is accomplished by
its very heirs. From its outset it worked as a potent communication
vehicle among peasant women (Poitevin and Raikar 1996) and it further
conquered a legitimacy and authenticity that make it an effective con-
tribution towards maintaining and reinforcing community bonds.
The actors’ point of view is reflected by Tara Ubhe in ‘From Grindmill
Songs to Cultural Action’. She shows how the performance and recol-
lection of grindmill songs in the course of village meetings and discus-
sions helped the participants, especially older women, open up their
mind and express their feelings. Further, she advocates the sharing
and critical reassessment of this genuine anthropological knowledge
with professors and scholars concerned with women studies, folk cul-
ture, popular literature, oral social history, subaltern studies, cultural
anthropology, and so on.
In ‘A Reactivated Performance Capacity’, Kusum Sonavne shows
how the tradition of songs can be reactivated as a congenial medium
of exchange and creation of knowledge among deserted women. It
indeed enables those who composed and carried them down the ages
to meet the challenges of the present. This personal and direct ac-
count brings concepts of valorization, reassessment, reinterpretation,
cultural action, revitalization, and so on, to the centre of the debate.
Here is an instance of systematic reappropriation of an immense and
immemorial heritage of symbolic communication to build up anew a
collective women’s assertion in continuity with the past. This is car-
ried out through efforts of critical self-investigation and re-evaluation
by the direct and legitimate heirs of that tradition at the intersec-
tion of normative systems of symbolic communication which provides
an explaination for their condition of desertion, and autonomous ar-
ticulation of spontaneous urges, feelings and representations.