Page 229 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation
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204  Hema Rairkar

                of knowledge. A traditional capacity of self-introspection sanctions
                and confirms one’s permanent right to speak for oneself. A tradition
                of sharing between miller-womenfolk calling one another to witness
                together, as women, what they have to say in common links up directly
                to present practices of collective reappraisal and practices of social
                action. A new consciousness emerges on the ground of an age-old
                awareness of one’s identity.
                  We discovered that the first constitutive characteristics of a pat-
                tern of valid cultural action that takes as its base an ancient cultural
                material, alien to the context and idiom of those who later on do try to
                avail of it (dramatists, filmmakers, social activists, musical composers,
                and so on) is the congenital affinity which prevails across the variety
                of idioms or circumstances, and transcends contrasting ideological
                backgrounds, contexts of civilization, systems and forms of commu-
                nication. A genuine cultural action can exist only in continuation of in-
                built homologous urges, drives or representations, acknowledged and
                re-processed as endogenous stepping-stones. Failing this, the exercise
                will prove to be one of exogenous semantic over-imposition, external
                manipulation, allegorical use, academic utilization; in brief, appropria-
                tion by alien agencies for alien messages and alien purposes, and as a
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                result reduction to a mere instrumental status.  This may be anything
                but cultural action.
                  Further questions to be raised in this respect relate to the nature
                and extent of this affinity; to the practical procedures and methods of
                collection, archiving and preservation capable of revealing and foster-
                ing this affinity; to the drives along which this homogeneity develops
                or thanks to which it reveals itself; to the cognitive modalities condu-
                cive to semantic reinterpretation of old representations. Here I try to
                address these queries.



                A Shared Self-insight

                A few examples dealing with gender issues will give a hint, first, of the
                deep affinity that links the feminine tradition of the grindmill songs to
                modern critical discourses. Second, they stress, with regard to processes
                of communication, the specific strength that concrete, poetic and sym-
                bolic images and direct speech give women’s songs. The latter display
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