Page 68 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

From the Popular to the People 43

all the individuals inhabiting a given geographical or administrative area;
for others, the word ‘people’ refers to such social strata as the workers, the
peasant, the repressed classes. With the term ‘subaltern studies’, several
Indian historians would locate themselves in this tendency. See Jules-
Rosette and Martin (1997: 10–11), with references to Grignon (1991), and
Mukerji and Schudson (1991).
10. The concept of development as such makes sense only with reference to
organic processes where a living being evolves gradually by a natural process,
unfolds its potentialities, opens out, expands, brings progressively innate
capabilities to a fuller, greater or better state. In biology ‘develop’ means
to (a) progress from earlier to later stages of individual maturation and
(b) ‘progress from earlier to later or from simpler to more complex stages
of evolution. (French Développer, from Old French developer: des-, from
Latin dis- [reversal] + voloper, to wrap up, perhaps from Celtic vol- [unat-
tested], to roll, [indo-european wel-3, to turn, roll with derivatives referring
to curved, enclosing objects])’ (Morris 1980). Development is, therefore,
a change happening essentially on the strength of genetic programming or,
once we extrapolate to non-organic domains, in conformity with predeter-
mined patterns. There cannot be development but as expansion of originally
given seminal forms. Development is thus antithetic to transformation, in
particular to any concept of and will to social restructuring which places
the human free will at the origin of any social order and denies any prede-
termined or given programme. The terms of cultural, social or economic
development make sense only with reference to essentialist or dogmatic
predefinitions of what is culture, society or economy, and accordingly to
what should be cultural, social or economic promotion.
11. No wonder then that empirical cultural studies do often record testimonies
of the ‘common man’—particularly common women, for that matter—in
which the subordinate understand by culture nothing else than instru-
ments of domination and repression. See Poitevin (1992) and Verhelst
(1994: 10).
12. The author refers in this respect to Austin (1962: 148–49) and Greimas
(1979: 179–80).
13. The author quotes as typical example the reappropriation of the epic fig-
ure of Sita in the tradition of the grindmill songs in Poitevin and Rairkar
(1996).

References

Affergan, Francis. 1987. Exotisme et Altérité: Essai sur les Fondements
d’une Critique de l’Anthropologie (Exotism and Alterity: An Essay on the
Foundations of a Critique of Anthropology). Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France.