Page 38 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

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From the PoPular to the PeoPle

Guy Poitevin

The field of ‘popular cultures’ is strewn with confuse and often
questionable terminological assumptions. Many studies of ‘popular’
cultures (Dominic 1995) or ‘traditions’ either by insiders or outsiders
of the cultures under study, are often—knowingly or unknowingly—
loaded with problematic conceptual biases, let alone social, ethnic or
political prejudices. The latter may arise from the very motivations of
the scholars. Generally, they are to be ascribed to the epistemological
assumptions of the socio-cultural environment and socio-political
context of the speakers, writers, consumers of cultural goods and
social scientists, all of them—though to different degrees—caught up
unawares. To what extent can we distance ourselves from such assump-
tions? The following notes state a few elementary points of semantics
regarding terms pertaining or related to the field of popular cultures
with a view to suggest a conceptual framework of reference and secure
scientific clarity.
Apart from historiographical writing, through larger economies
and techniques of writing, the political and cultural elite in Michel de
Certeau’s (1975) account have the capacity to manage the intellectual
resources of society (Ahearne 1995: 53–59). The way people’s cultural
traditions are transcribed, classified and preserved is a case in point.
Operations of recording, registering, stocking and standardizing have
achieved a dubious hierarchical organization of meaning in modern
times. As a rule, the modern imperative to ‘make’ society prompts
‘productive and efficacious modes of rationality to be privileged over