Page 234 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Grindmill Songs 209

informants as much as of the assistants when both of them develop
an increasing cultural interest in the remembered, analysed, recorded
or visualized material.
Let us insist on the mutual benefit that research and action draw
from such mode of cooperation—a real communicative interaction
between scientists and social practitioners. It meets, first of all, the
methodology of action of the social actors. Their effort is one of analy-
sis of the social and cultural realities of those whom they are bringing
together for facilitating on their part a collective exercise of self-
learning in any domain relevant to them, this self-learning further lead-
ing on to concrete social intervention. It was indeed during the course
of one such effort that the idea of the collection of songs was born, as
stated earlier. It is as partial contribution to the same process of self-
investigation, ground of further collective social actions, that the
interest for the songs as asset of cultural action gradually became an
expanding scientific project. Right from the start, women animators
realized the benefit that they would draw from their collaboration to
the collection and study of songs.
On the contrary, one understands how the involvement of rural
social actors turned out to be one of the best assurance of the scientific
quality of the research work itself, from collection to classification,
from analysis to anthropological intelligence, from social critique to
cultural action and from singing to realizing the importance of the
musical component of a communication process.
I may sum up by stating a third directive principle that experience
taught us: effective cultural action cannot dispense with one form or
the other of research action.

Analytical Reappropriation
We cannot expect peasant women social animators to acquire overnight
the expertise to avail of their ancient tradition of songs on the sole as-
sumption that this tradition is theirs and carries hidden thoughts and
emotions. Grindmill songs may enshrine perceptive views on women’s
life, but a proper and efficient reappropriation cannot be carried out
without some systematic study once hitherto silent women have been
called and enabled to openly speak out. Volunteers of the organiza-
tion called The Poor of the Mountain ought to be trained to capitalize
on them on the basis of their initial experience and use of songs in