Asafa
Tafarra Dibaba
Indiana
University
Indiana
Dec 07/2011
In folklore research, operationalizing the
“community” we study is imperative. That is, in approaching folklore as
“artistic communication,” the “folk/group,” “tradition,” and “common factor”
are significant, and that “significance” is what the society value most at a
given time in history. It could be a concept of nationalism and
nation-building, an “ideal type” to which people conform. And verbal art is the
sum total of creation of a whole community overtime,1 each genre of
which has some unique didactic function at some point in time. As our general concept
of genre tends to overemphasize certain qualities of it and omit others, and
one genre valued over another, we may resort to select generic ideal type as a
reflection of reality but not a mirror image of it, rather a “reflexivity”/(refraction)
of reality.
To study the nationalist root of folkloristics in
a given society, we may need to construct an ideal type of resistance
poetics based on the facts of unjust historical (power)
relationships. This “social invisibility” of the “oppressed” is part of “the
disenchantment of the world”2 as “modernity”
overhauled “tradition” and humanity. Thus, this historical root of
resistance against injustice and nationalism in the genealogy of folkloristics,
I posit, necessitates a theoretical model capable of responding to
socio-political changes in the society and the academy in a form of ethnography
of resistance poetics against the general apolitical disciplinary project.
Ethnography of resistance poetics attempts to offer the
analysis of the neocolonial imagination of Euro-American empires tended to tame
locality (provincialism) through such rhetorical and narrative strategies as surveillance,
aestheticization, classification, debasement, negation, and idealization
focused on nation-states used as allies. Third world nations are classified,
analyzed, judged and admonished in negative patterns like “endemic poverty,”
and actual biographied selves are excluded and rather debased as an individual
savage troubled by dishonesty, suspicion, superstition, lack of self-discipline
in the society also characterized by corruption, xenophobia, tribalism, and the
inability to govern themselves.3 This is another predicament of “modernity,”
I believe, engaging “nationalism” in its every multifaceted form of
resistances, one among which is the role of folklore as a “creative
resistance,” not simply resistance to change but a “critical” one, an
“emancipatory resistance” which prompts change from “below.”
The “oppressed,” such as the Salale Oromo in Ethiopia deconstruct
such hegemonic oppressive state ideology through counter-texts and performance
forms such as laments, work songs, anecdotes, praise and historical songs of
bandits/banditry. Here also in Salale, “folk” and “folklore” develop in
parallel to “primitive” and “anthropology,” thus, “forms of culture” are
connected with “kinds of people”.4 What the Patum does in
Berga (Catalan) Nationalism, so the Irreecha does in Oromo, Ethiopia.
The recent “Songs of Millennium” by Salale Oromo Women5 is such a case
in point for ethnography of resistance poetics suitable for a scholarly
appreciation and folkloristic research into the resistance culture of the
people often undervalued by successive Ethiopian ruling class as mere social
banditry.
My PhD research focuses on this concept of “creative
resistance” articulated through protest songs and narratives. It is about
the legitimacy of non-violent tenets (and actions) enacted through waadaa
(covenant) and held to reverse socio-political and economic domination, and
in effect, challenge violations of human rights. It draws on
(un)institutionalized acts and opinions articulated through narratives and
songs that spring from a deeply felt denial of legitimacy of the dominating
power and mainstream culture.
The purpose of the study is to explore the role of
Salale Oromo protest songs and narratives in line with the pan-Oromo resistance
culture as a non-violent means of reversing unlawful practices and rules that
violate human rights and menace natural environment.6
Central to the study is theorizing contemporary
Oromo narratives as resistance poetics focusing on the Salale Oromo and
inquiring into what narratives do in the society and how they relate to and
engage with the social base in which they develop.
Hence, using
ethnographic method(s) of folkloric, anthropological and historical enquiries,
in my PhD research,
1) the
social basis and political scope of the Salale Oromo protest narratives and
resistance culture are to be pinpointed as
thoughts and verbal expressions and as modes of communication where the
technology of literacy, especially writing and print, are unfamiliar to most of
the population.
2) how folk narratives are closely allied to resistance culture,
i.e. social/political banditry in the area and the principle of waadaa/covenant
as a binding force will be closely examined, and what other possible human
agencies are practiced to articulate power relations are identified. This
problem has broader implications, implicitly touching every aspect of the
economic, political, institutional and human development of the oral society in
focus.
3) the moral components of
narratives of rebellion related to the nature of resistance (ethical,
political, socio-cultural and economic aspects), i.e., if “emancipatory
resistance” or simply resistance to change, is investigated. It is to
critically scrutinize what resistance (sub-)cultures impede or
enhance development and help to maintain common good, peace, human rights,
equity, social justice and democratic trends.
4) in Salale local history, the nature of indigenous forces
the Salale Oromo use to shape social changes from below and enhance
transformations, and in so doing, promote those values and boost their
political, social, and economic well-being, in line with the pan-Oromo reality
in history under the successive regimes in Ethiopia will be explored.
On the whole, the aim is to critically study the Salale Oromo folk
narratives used to valorize social/political banditry and the waadaa/covenant
peace-making binding principle as part of resistance culture of the people. It
is also to outline the responses, attitudes and views of the people to local
officials and to the state about socioeconomic, political and administrative
discontents in particular and examine Salale Oromo folklore in general as a
“peace-by-peaceful-means” to challenge domination.
ENDNOTES
1. Americo Paredes and Richafrd Bauman
(1972). Toward New Perspective in Folklore. University of Texas Press.
2. Max Weber describes the “disenchantment of the
world” as it results from the intersection of the Protestant Reformation
and the scientific revolution in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries… According
to Weber, God, magic, and myth are now replaced with logic and knowledge (1946;
also Bauman and Briggs, Voices of Modernity, 2003).
In Marcel Gauchet’s The Disenchantment
of the World (1999) development of human political and psychological autonomy
must be understood against the backdrop of this double movement in religious
consciousness--the growth of divine power and its increasing distance from
human activity. The main argument of Gauchet is that secularization of society
(the word "désenchantement" directly refers to Max Weber's
Entzauberaung) is both rooted in Christianity and a process against
Christianity. The Christian religion, by laying down the ground for it, made it
possible for modern societies (say, after 1789 in France and continental
Europe) to abandon heteronomia (government of the society and of the self by
an external authority, be it God, tradition, etc...) and to switch to autonomia
(in the Kantian sense, this is the self-government of the individual and of
society).
3. David Spurr (1996) explores how Western writers
(journalists, travel writers, and government bureaucrats) represent the
non-Western world. Discourse has been promoted from being an adjunct of power
to being its source and principal manifestation, so Spurr pushes this mode of
inquiry beyond its usual zone of security and as empire administrators are
primarily engaged in managing their tropes.
4. Dorothy Noyes. “Folklore.”
In The Social Science Encyclopedia. 3rd edition. Adam Kuper and
Jessica Kuper, eds. pp. 375-378. New York: Routledge, 2004.
5. See my “Salale Oromo Women Songs of Resistance:”
(OROMOIA, ETHIOPIA)
6. In Finnish folklore scholarship, of its two major
goals one is that “the end of folklore research was service of the
fatherland. This was a belief found support in the teachings of Herder. He
argued that an individual could fully develop only as an integral part of his
particular nation (Oinas 1978:53).
References
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___________(1992). Domination and the Art of
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Salale is locate North of Addis Ababa. Salale is home for many educated people scattered all over the country and world, serving different organizations with their Expertise. There is a call from the motherland, who is depirived of many privileges, for help, as she helped Us to be where we are now.
ReplyDeleteIsiin Yaamitti Harmeen, Isiin Yaamitti Harmeen yaa Ilimaan koo nadhaaqaba issinin jeeti