Page 233 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

208 Hema Rairkar

As a matter of fact, the collection, study and scientific processing of
the songs could be carried only as an exercise of cultural action. The
joint collaboration of women village animators in the whole process
only made the latter significantly effective. These rural women, since
the beginning, are the female animators of local action- groups that call
themselves the Poor of the Mountain (sponsored by the VCDA in Pune
district). Later on, male animators from VCDA and several other rural
action groups, youth involved in social work, students and teachers
from different parts of Maharashtra (as we shall see later) extended
their cooperation as the project expanded in various directions. But the
intermediary role of a core team of village women otherwise involved
in social activities of a ‘conscientization’ nature remains essential on
two accounts. Such collaborators (mainly but not only women—it is
even essential that both men and women take part together, and that
male youth too be actively involved) who have the confidence of the
singers and speak absolutely the same language are needed for the
collection not to be casual nor restricted to those formal songs which
used to be easily given to visitors for reasons of external constraints,
prestige, self-image or family pressure. Besides this, only those who
grew up and have been nurtured in the same tradition and acquainted
with the connotations and contexts of the songs can properly assess
their meaning.
In fact, the participation of female and male social animators prove
more than a practical necessity required for ensuring the authenticity,
comprehensiveness and reliability of the data collected. It satisfies
deeper and more congenital expectations shared by the methods of
social action of the rural animators involved and the methodological
profile of the project of collection of songs as well. Anthropological
research becomes more relevant once those whose action is the focus
of its investigation are not simply the objects of the knowledge that is
sought, but become a party to the research itself. Far from being the
matter (as informants remembering songs) or middle terms (as as-
sistants collecting more relevant songs from other informants) of an
exercise of construction of ethnographic knowledge, they intervene as
a party to the research itself in one way or the other, from collection to
analysis and later on to realizing audio-visual anthropological docu-
ments. Reciprocally, the elementary research procedures themselves
facilitate and lead immediately to a sort of cultural awakening of the