Page 22 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Introduction xxi

5. rituals and symbolic conducts: corresponding to the pre-
vious levels;
6. narratives and discourses: that carry theoretical and
ideological framework and account for the different types of
conducts, systems of social regulations, legal codifications and
jurisprudence and
7. means of preservation, transmission and circulation:
such as songs, proverbs and sayings that specifically encapsulate
and carry knowledge.

All these cultural forms act in unison as communication vehicles, each
of them in its specific capacity to build and maintain cohesive col-
lectives, binding individuals into distinct communities, and also the
various communities into an integrated social fabric.
Eventually all these considerations may suggest a complex—that is
to say, anything but linear—model likely to emerge from the studies in
this volume with regard to processes of culture substantively construed
as a matter of communicational transitivity against all essentialist
approaches. The eighteen case studies bring an abundant and purpos-
ively varied material for a broad and open-ended framework to be
furthermore systematically chalked out, on the one hand, as the secret
of any vigorous or/and overpowering cultural constellation, whether
traditional or modern, and, on the other, as a key to apprehend the com-
municational efficiency of any such constellation of cultural forms.

Conflicting Stakes: Power and Ambivalence

A second serious handicap of a theoretical nature stands in our way
once we set to go beyond the cultural forms in themselves: that of
communicational efficiency, that is, the way these forms are instru-
mentalized to shape a social fabric. All our case studies point in this
respect to the importance of two characteristics that are particularly
significant and run across all of them as golden threads, those of power
and ambivalence, if not even ambiguity.
From a communicational point of view, ‘the fundamental form of
power is the power to define, allocate, and display’ reality, that is, to
construct it in expressive forms—cultural artefacts and communicative