Page 232 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Grindmill Songs 207

those involved. Processes of psycho-cultural transformation ought to
emerge from within as the offshoot of internal dynamics. Failing this,
cultural action runs the risk of becoming an exogenous manipulation
or brain-washing, and cannot adequately result in drives and social
practices capable of affecting the overall environment. Facilitation by
outside agents differs from external ideological control. In this respect,
cultural action means three things. First, it is for those directly con-
cerned with an introspective effort of self-reassessment resulting in a
renewed self-consciousness: a self-generating process of knowledge;
second, this reflexive self-investigation is possible only collectively,
through interaction within study groups of women reappropriating
their own memory and building up anew together their own identity.
Finally, this knowledge cannot but directly lead on to appropriate
action.

Cooperative Research Action

The mere collection of songs is itself a difficult task. It requires a
scholar capable of going from village to village to meet those elders
who remember the songs, and write down their songs in their own
words. But how can one single scholar complete such an immense
task when the quantitative extent of the tradition is tremendous? 3
We cannot expect village women to carry out a systematic collection
either, let alone classification, and further embark on a valorization
drive following preliminary analytical tasks required to that effect.
Then, besides difficulties of time and material limitations of all sorts,
cultural and linguistic differences immediately crop up as serious
qualitative obstacles. The meaning of the words and the motives of
the short couplets have often to be ascertained from singers as well as
the contexts of their composition. Moreover, singers have developed
attitudes of secrecy. They have their doubts in front of a person coming
from a milieu alien to theirs: how will information and words collected
be used? Taking over people’s living heritage for purposes alien to
the latter and its endogenous valorization is ethically objectionable.
A sincere and familiar relation of companionship and fruitful coopera-
tion ought to be built up. Still how, on what basis, and on account of
what sort of legitimacy?