Page 63 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

38 Guy Poitevin

group and operating at various levels of their everyday life through
emblems, symbols, narratives, images, tunes, festivals, records and
memories, rituals, and so on, owned and vindicated as one’s own par-
ticular property. These sets are symbolic. They transmit correlated
systems of meaning. But these systems are always temporary memo-
randa of (self and mutual) understanding negotiated and conspicuously
carried by a community to know itself by concomitantly differentiating
and discriminating itself from others. This means that two drives are
constitutive of collective identities in a given socio-cultural constella-
tion: negotiation and heterogeneity.
Denis-Constant Martin finds an extraordinary example of this in the
New Year festivals celebrated at Cape in South Africa by the ‘coloureds’
experiencing the regime of apartheid:

The Carnival (Le Roy Ladurie 1979; Pereira de Queiroz 1992)
is a particularly fascinating event in this respect because it allows
everybody to be simultaneously oneself and another, as it prompts
towards changes and confusions of roles. The performances presented
during these feasts […] outline the paradoxical limits of a culture of
heterogeneity in which indigenous innovations and innumerable
references to external worlds (Europe, America and Asia) appear
side by side […] One observes there how hardly transformed ‘alien’
cultural components can be merged into different versions, possibly
contrary to one another, of the identity discourse of a group [...]
Identity discourses are virtual discourses conjugated in the future
tense. They look like exhortations to act, they are rather still no less
claims and wishes […] Once isolated from their native social and
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cultural context, these discourses find themselves distorted or can
even serve commercial purposes. This is the way the ‘African Art’
and ‘The World Music’ have been invented. As a consequence, dis-
tortion, politicization, vindication and re-appropriation of identity
discourses may take place at various moments in the circuit from
production to consumption and, instead of transfers, a re-labelling
of forms of popular culture takes place. The Pygmies of Ituri forest
once transported on the stage of the Casino theatre in Paris, did not
present a form of popular or for that matter traditional art, but some
hybrid thing which could be classified as ‘exotic neo-primitivism’
[…] The same thing happened with the popular art from Zaïre which
was baptized ‘crude art’ or ‘naive art’ for reasons of export. In such
cases, commercial categories supersede those originating from the
processes of production of popular art and totally erase the complex