Page 64 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

From the Popular to the People 39

processes and the reality of the places where it develops. (Jules-
Rosette and Martin 1997: 30–33)

In this context, it is moreover difficult to simply equate popular cul-
ture with revolt against and subversion of dominant cultures. People’s
culture may overtly or covertly do so and in various forms testify to the
dominance to which people are subject. But this does not necessarily
mean a clear denunciation or resistance (Scott 1990). Ambivalences and
contradictions are rather characteristic features of popular cultures in
this regard. Besides utopias of instant reversal or transcendent judge-
ment, painful surrender and expression of suffering, irony and laugh,
attraction for dominant figures and bonds of dependent loyalty, passive
expectation of generosity, and so on, may ambiguously go along with
hidden wishes of revolt. The internalization of patterns of oppression
is not exclusive of emotional verbal outbreaks and flights of liberated
imagination.
Four general types of ‘political shaping’ are tentatively envisaged
by Jules-Rosette and Martin (1997: 26–27, 34–38) to account for
the different ways in which the bonded consumers of a culture of
dominance may have to ‘politically’ express their dissatisfaction and
opposition to cultural productions perceived as oppressive:

1. Reappropriation and re-investment of internalized dominant
patterns with new meanings by subaltern groups, within limited
margins of freedom of expression and only in dreams or at the
level of discourse and with no impact on the actual historical
context of repression. 13
2. The New Year festival observed by Denis-Constant Martin in
Cape Town, South Africa (see contribution in this volume),
insists on one’s singular collective identity and on the strategies
of preservation of one’s social and cultural autonomy. The
political power is a factor clearly spotted; still, it can be modified,
and strategies are devised to bypass, avoid or put up with it.
3. Popular feasts particular to the subordinated are manipulated,
transformed, revitalized, invented even (for instance, in the
nineteenth century in France, see Corbin et al. 1994), in the
name of national or regional identity, to curb antagonisms and
project a façade of harmony. The diversity remains dangerously
alive as a splinter in the social body.