RESISTANCE THEORY & FOLKLORISTICS

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Asafa Tafarra Dibaba

 Folklore / Anthropology

Indiana University

INDIANA

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The concept of folklore as a “weapon of the weak” or resistance against domination can be theorized by the semantic notion of resistance embedded, though implicitly, within the word ‘folk’ as “marginal or subaltern peoples” (Klein 2001:5712). Klein insists that rather than a mere collection and ethnography, the purposes of folklore scholars today differs from those of their predecessors in that “the role of folklorists today is to assist people who lack political power in their quest to gain a public voice” (ibid). The Historical development of folkloristics also shows that folklore scholarship was rooted within nationalism and the idea of a nation. One can note in this connection the Grimm Brothers (1812) and the work of Eliyas Lonnrot, particularly the Finnish Kalevala (1835), an assemblage of songs about the Finnish people’s dire situation under 800 years of Swedish and Russian domination (Leach 1984).

In this view, resistance theory is a constructive schema to help folkloristics in redefining itself vis-à-vis those constitutive relationships emerging between folklore as a counterhegemonic postmodern culture (Warshaver 1991) and ever stifling postmodern social and economic systems. The task is not unproblematic, however. As part of the move from the "hegemonic academic folklore theory and practice” toward a challenging search of “cultural product and professional activity of a different instance” (ibid p219), the process involves theorizing on both paradigmatic (conceptual) and methodological levels.

Why resistance (theory)? On the general global scale we see examples of social, political and economic injustices and the resulting disruptions. Globalization seems to be stirring fears of domination and of an inability to exercise rights to self-determination by the less well-off nations.  On the lower glocal* scale, there are unheard muffled voices of marginal subaltern groups involved in wider social movements, meanwhile there still is an acute need for peace, democracy and justice to instill peace-by-peaceful-means from bottom-up, but sometimes seems all in vain.

The oppressed resists by transforming the oppressive events into songs and stories and spreading the collective pain as part of the local historical experience cunningly invalidating the hegemonic false consciousness.

Resistance, meaning literally, to stand against (Duncombe 2008: 207), is not just a leftist stance however. Politically speaking, the oppressive system is also alert about the necessity of resisting revolutionary “progress”. Gandhi’s indigenous peaceful political philosophy of Satyagraha, the doctrine of non-violent resistance, was not without counter résistance from the British rule. The Satyagraha or “insistence on the truth,” was also used to denote “civil resistance” to subvert the untruths of colonial rule—the power that must rest upon violence (ibid). Hence, theorizing folklore as a counter hegemonic culture involves recognizing the subversive communicative, performative, and structured patterns of the expressive culture of the dissident.

The oppressed are engaged in two forms of resistance: resistance to domination and emancipatory/critical resistance (Hoy 2004:2). Resistance to domination is manifest through the everyday subversive life practices of the oppressed striving for alternative choices within their own social context; whereas, critical/emancipatory resistance is the human agency aimed to achieve critical consciousness, a mental awakening, to interpret the surrounding hegemonic climate of surveillance.  These forms of resistance, both as an activity and as an attitude, can be social/cultural, political, or ethical.

Social (and cultural) resistance is opposition to institutions that shape the individual citizens while it may also manifest itself as opposition to policies that shape populations (ibid, p7). Sociocultural resistance can impact government behavior as it affects macroeconomic performances, and, ultimately, determines the chance of success of reforms and development. Politically speaking, when the various formal and informal interconnections between local and mainstream political processes are not transparent for local citizens to feel empowered and to actively participate in the processes that influence decisions and policies, resistance is inescapable. For example, the disengagement of a young people from conventional political process and structures is in itself a passive resistance against such top-down infringements. Ethical resistance is “nonresistance of the powerless even in the face of death” (Hoy 2004: 10), which may remind us of Maya Anjelou’s (1976) “Oh, the holiness of always being the injured party. The historically oppressed can find not only sanctity but also safety in the state of victimization.”  

David Hoy calls upon Emanuel Levinas who offers the idea of ethical resistance not as power resisting power but as the resistance of the completely powerless and he also maintains that when one acknowledges an obligation to something or someone greater than oneself, then resistance to domination is grounded in an ethical framework (ibid. p184). The powerless has a song or a story to sarcastically critique such indolence and theorize the social fraud.

To theorize folklore as human experience of survival in the face of modernity and cultural and political adversity is to engage folkoristics as a discipline in redefining its objectives, formulating its material or setting its own specific character as knowledge embodiment through reconstituting language and tradition. The task of theorizing folklore as resistance culture depends on the correct understanding of the essence and objective of folklore research as an interdisciplinary academic venture. It is appropriate for Vladimir Propp to state that since the solution to many diverse human problems is “hidden” in folklore, “none of the humanities can do without folklore” (Propp 1984:3). Hence, it is this social nature of folklore as “ideological discipline that its methods and aims are determined by and reflect the outlook of the age” (ibid) and the principles of scholarship that it has created are also interdependent.

Unlike the individual literary work of poetry or novel, folklore art is not just a fiction. It is rather a class phenomenon rooted in the cultural and social history of peoples and to rationalize its real existence in the present social reality is the basic objective of resistance theory. Using broad comparative material, the resistance theorist looks for the conditions that brought forth a plot or a theme as the literary historian draws on the author.  The people (the ‘folk’) do not passively ‘participate’ in and ‘reflect’ what is going on but play an active role to propel events that may cause history to veer off its course or to disrupt it. The folk do not reproduce history as impartial observer but express in it their historical will, aspirations and ideals (Propp 1984:163).

Folklore denies recognition to the old system by implicitly opposing the images created by it and transforming them into their opposites, though still some values loom into the new social order unnoticeably but peacefully. In such an ideological clash between two ages, the role of folklore as resistance theory is emancipatory one. That is, it subsumes the role of critical resistance to direct the attention of the folk towards the good, the empowering, the sublime, namely, fundamental human freedoms.  Thus, a working definition of resistance theory could be an activist but a scholarly approach to the close investigation of an ongoing process that occurs in the expressive culture of marginalized social group vis-à-vis the transition of new forms of social structure (diachronic) or set within the historical development in the existing ‘social matrix’ (synchronic).

By the neo-Marxist view held by Antonio Gramsci, hegemony is both a political and cultural process. Thus, part of the revolutionary project is to (re)create a counterhegemonic culture that can serve as resistance—a progressive view also hailed by folklore researchers in Latin America—as activist adaptations of traditional culture served peasants and workers in their struggle for autonomy (Noyes 2005:377).

One may argue that for the resistance theorist turning to folklore once again as a counter-hegemonic culture is not to work on and uphold an academic vengeance but to reconstruct a ‘useful,’ ‘right’ but lost past from contemporary practices and “seeking an epistemological vacation from the ugliness of modern rationality” (ibid p375).

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* Etymologically speaking the word “glocal” evolved rapidly. This portmanteau word of ‘globalization’ and ‘glocalization’ derives from the Japanese word “dochakuka” originally used to refer to ways of adapting farming techniques into local conditions. In 1980s it evolved into a marketing strategy by Japanese businesses to denote localization of merchandizing decisions. That is, third world markets were understood as less interested in “rich world products” but rather in “rich world quality” in local products. In 1990s and after, however, the word “glocal” came to be widely used by sociologists (e.g. the Canadian sociologists Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman) to refer to people, group or kinship, maintaining a wide ranging local and extensive (long distance) interpersonal social network. For our purpose the concept is used here to signify such an intertwined group interest.

References

Encyclopedias

Duncombe, Stephen

2008 Resistance In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, William Darity A ed. Pp.207-210. 2nd ed., Vol. 7. Detroit: Macmillan Reference.

Klein, B.

2001 Folklore In Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Neil  Smelser and Paul Baltes eds. Pp. 5711-5715. Vol. 8. UK: Cambridge University Press.

Dictionaries

Leach, Maria, and Jerome Fried, eds.
1984 Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend. NY: Harper & Row Press.

Noyes, Dorothy
2005 Folklore In The Social Science Encyclopedia, Adams Kuper and Jessica Kuper eds. Pp.375-378. Vol.1. Florence, KY: Rutledge.

Folklore Book

Propp, Vladimir 
1984 Theory and History of Folklore. Translated by A. Martin and Richard Martin.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Journal Article

Warsshaver, Gerald 
1991 On Postmodern Folklore, Theme Issue, Western Folklore (50): 219- 229.

Additional sources

Anjelou, Maya
1976 Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas. N.Y.: Random House, Inc.

Grimm Brothers (Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm).
1812 Children’s and Household Tales.  http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimmtales.html, accessed

October 3, 2011.

Hoy, David.
2004 Critical Resistance. From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique. Cambridge MA & London: The MIT Press.

Lonnrot, Eliyas.
1835 (1985) The Kalevala: or poems of the Kaleva District.  Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr. trans. Harvard University Press.  


Sccott, James
1992 Domination and the Art of Resistance. Yale University Press.