Page 21 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

xx Communication, Culture and Confrontation

word of mouth only; the folk and its lore as opposed to the dominant
classes of literati. People’s cultural forms do not appear nor stand as
theoretical statements, abstract representations and value judgements
per se. They enact and represent.
Such is the case with all the cultural forms represented in this vol-
ume as much as the previous ones. A song, a tune, a drama, an image
at home, a poster on the street, a narrative, a film, a ritual, a deity, a
domestic health practice, a traditional agricultural technique, a craft, an
occupational skill, a village festival, a pilgrimage to a holy places, a car-
nival, folk art, bazaar art, street drama and the like perform: they carry
out something by procedures. People’s cultural forms are practices that
do not dissociate a form, meaning, human rapport and social status.
They do not incorporate a concept; they directly act out an insight. They
are an event that members of a human collective identify with or belong
in. This may be the secret of their power: their competence to create a
community, a class, a group or, in other terms, their communicative
efficiency. This gives each cultural form the status of a symbolic device
binding people. Culture is communication in the sense that the com-
municative efficiency of a cultural form is what distinguishes a cultural
form as performative of a collective from a means of communication,
which is nothing more than a carrier of information.
Third, we may analytically identify seven levels or cultural forms of
expression and communication and consider, at first sight, that their
tight semantic interlinking and determinant correspondence is specific
to lively and resilient popular—whether ‘old’ or ‘new’—traditions. This
is what the minute studies in this volume will show as they often sim-
ultaneously touch upon the following various modes and strategies of
communicative interaction:

1. practical know-how: occupational skill such as birthing
practices, handicraft and farming methods;
2. physical forms: material culture such as artefacts, traditions
of performing arts, customs and lifestyles;
3. networks of relation: links and interactions binding individ-
uals into particular social configurations, such as a body of laws
applied in a given community or at a given period in the life of
that community;
4. representations: mental forms and immaterial images associ-
ated with various kinds of practices;