TOWARDS ETHNOGRAPHY OF RESISTANCE POETICS: METHODS

Critical Readings into 

Franz Boas

Marcel Mauss

and

Malinowski's 

Ethnographic Search

(and two other readings)

Asafa Tafarra Dibaba

Indiana University

Spring / May 2012 

I. Background  

The aim of the present paper is to examine the nature, goal, and method of Ethnography in three readings of early Ethnographic and Ethnological works for the course Readings in Ethnographies (F525): Boas’ Tsimshain Mythology, Mauss’ The Gift, and Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific. In addition, I read two other most recent Ethnographic works which focus on Resistance Research: Lesly Brown and Susan Strega (2005), and Ted Chamberlin’s If this is Your Land, Where are your Stories (2003), with the aim of practicing Ethnography of Resistance Poetics in Folkoristics and in my PhD research. The Gift, as Evans Pritchard rightly observes, is the junction between Mauss’ social and scientific preoccupations and Ethnology and politics (a1966:vii), and I paid a special attention to it.

Poetics is the making of meanings through language, through songs, stories, and myth as if the world is made of stories and not of atoms. The Salale Oromo in Ethiopia historicize into their collective life experience the social injustice and historical resistance, root it deeply in their local history, sustain it through singing and telling and handing it over to the succeeding generation to contemplate. The Oromo in Ethiopia like the oppressed people elsewhere join in social movements and raise their voices demanding justice, land, democracy, and freedom as part of the arrested decolonization process, the reality generally ignored in postcolonial discourses. The “post” is not per se a “post” independence, “post” colonial reality for most world nations still kept in bondage.  There were/are “things” taken by force, and not reciprocated nor returned and that the oppressed demand “now” and that ethnography of resistance poetics explores. That is what my PhD project does among the Salale Oromo in Ethiopia. Hence, in this paper, first I examine the course readings one after another and proceed to analyzing those works on resistance poetics vis-à-vis the course readings and then discuss the ethnography of my PhD research project.

II. Franz Boas' Distance "Ethnography": Tsimshian Mythology (1916)

Boas’ Tsimshian Mythology (1916) is a typical example of a practical limitation of doing ethnography at a distance.  That is, doing data collection through someone, though the collector knows the culture and the language, there could be still some holes and shortcomings that the ethnographer could have filled in the field.  Lack of documenting the data in the native language to be transformed (translated) later is a major deficiency to an ethnographic research and doing it over through another informant cannot help it to resuscitate as nothing can be like the original. In spite of the limitations, however, Franz Boas’ Tsimshian Mythology is considered as a single most influential piece of American Indian folklore scholarship, in which Boas presents a corpus of Tsimshian myths and tales collected by a Tsimshian, Mr Henry Tate from 1903 to 1914.

For the volume of Tsimshian Mythology (1916) Boas worked on Henry Tate’s English version, while still making some changes. For example, in story 6, “The Deluge,” the word “Eyes” is used instead of “Ice” as it is commonsensical to see the word to follow, “hail” (“At last the Living Eyes came in. It was the hail” (TM, p347). In the section entitled “Description of the Tsimshian, based on their mythology” (pp. 393-477) Boas gives “a description of the mode of life, customs, and ideas of the Tsimshian” (p393) which are expressed in the myths contained in the first part of the work, and, as he claims, “in the Nass River tales collected by me (Boas 7)”, to mean that the present work is not collected by him. Rumors are that Boas was said to have spent a total of 33.5 months during the thirteen field trips he made, not including his trip to Baffinland, 1883, he undertook primarily as a geographer. Thus, methodologically survey approach was a significant feature of his fieldwork as he travelled from location to location only for a brief visit, which can have a direct impact on the authenticity of the data.

The collection, recording and publishing of oral data is believed to demand certain responsibility from the collector. Methodologically speaking, Boas’ Tsimshian Mythology, in this regard, seems inadequate. That is, the documentation of more than two thousand pages by a single informant, and editing and changing of words adds to the unreliability of the data and would violate the principles of ethnography and folklore collection, namely, “being there”.  Not “being there” and doing ethnographic fieldwork among the community where data come from can cause such irreparable shortcomings.

In his voluminous TM collection Boas did not grasp some of the elementary aspects of the tribal social organization, a project later taken up by his PhD student, Viola Garfield, published as Tsimshian Clan and Society, 1939, though an ethnographer cannot cover every aspect of a society. With such abundant data indirectly collected, it would be difficult also to demonstrate historical dynamics. If changes are to be inferred from indirect evidence, it is even more difficult to make significant reconstructions, and TM is the case in point. When the collection was made, Boas was working as an honorary philologist in the Bureau of American Ethnology (p17).

The first part of the TM comprises myths (and tales) without the original texts because it was impossible, as Boas notes, to revise phonetics and grammar of the texts as there was also no immediate prospect of carrying through the revision (p32). The stories include myths and tales. In the myths animals appear as actors in the form of human beings, whereas, the tales are historical in character but also have elements of the supernatural. The Raven myths and the Transformer myth being the most important ones in the collection, the Raven myths comprise origin tales, Raven’s voraciousness, and his amorous and other adventures. The descriptions of social organization of the people and their religious ideas and practices based on their mythology, ethical concepts (p443) and disseminations of the myths are presented in the second part. The comparative study of the Tsimshian myths with other native Indians’ myths also comprises the collection which begins by origin stories and concludes by war tales. In the stories, patience, perseverance, and abstemious behaviors are thought rewarding, particularly eating little and speaking little are qualities of decorum, while children are given what they ask for and restraint is seldom demanded of them (p444). Hunter’s taboos, seasons taboos among others, and sacrifices offered because they are “supposed to go to the home of the supernatural beings” (p451) make the religious beliefs and practices of the Tsimshian community.

This is the world where, mythically speaking, human eyes, snakes, or frogs are the regular food for the in habitants and visitors are offered the same; it is the world where the idea of “vagina dentata” most worries the young man (p809). When all these happened, i.e. stories told, rituals performed, magic conjured, sacrifices offered, decorum and ethics practiced in a world “supported by a man named Am’ala” (p453), I am not of the view that Boas was not there in the world of American Indians but particularly not to this world of the Tsimshian myths. In his prefatory notes Boas makes it clear that the collection was recorded by Henry Tate, in Tsimshian, his native language during the last twelve years, and the translation of the tales was made by Boas based on free interlinear renderings given by Henry Tate (p31), though it is said that the recording was first made in English. I would say that to develop relationships with the people, learn from them and conduct a systematic study of their culture, “being there” is an indispensable ethnographic principle as practiced mostly by Brownislaw Malinowski among the Trobriand natives. At the heart of traditional performances including magic among the Tsimshian or the Trobriand Islanders or the Melanesians, the idea of “the gift” is an overarching principle as sit is in rituals where the victim is a scapegoat and intermediary between the profane and the sacred. 

III. Malinowski's Ethnographic Credo: The Argonauts (1922) 

 Of the interdisciplinary nature of ethnographic research processes, Malinowski believes that an act has no meaning unless the ethnographer knows and infers the thoughts and emotions of the informant about it. That is, describing a series of acts would not answer the purpose of ethnography without any reference to the state of mind of the agent. Malinowski knew well that the aim of ethnographer is not merely to collect and analyze data, which is the case with Boas’ Tsimshian Mythology, but by “being there” to experience and understand human actions in society. Unless the ethnographer lives, according to Malinowski, as the natives do, no ethnography can be successful and no pure sociology can fulfill its task without calling in at every turn the aid of other fields, for example, psychology (p. ix). This practice of science at the start consisted in collecting concrete data of evidence and drawing general conclusion which seemed obvious on the surface but was not of some practical effect in ethnography until fieldwork was taken up. From his field experience, Malinowski tells us that it was necessary to devise concrete applications of ethnographic method to carry out social research “systematically and consistently” and in so doing to appeal also to the feelings and emotions of the human agent (1922:12).

A belief in magic is, for example, one of the main psychological forces which allow for organization and systematization of economic effort among the Trobrianders, one case of the complexity of human nature untenable by a single research method or model. Magic, for example, is a human attempt to govern the forces of nature through a special lore and is “all-pervading” among the Trobrianders in the many industrial and communal activities. All the data disclose the extreme importance of magic in the Kula.

Hence, speaking of his methods, Malinowski states, “each phenomenon ought to be studied through the broadest range possible of its concrete manifestations” by an exhaustive survey of detailed examples, and of the research product, he comments, “if possible, the results ought to be embodied into some sort of synoptic chart” (1922:17). The result thus organized and carefully documented is to be used as an instrument of study and presented as an ethnological document, which facilitates the study of actualities and clear outline of the natives' culture, the constitution of the society as concrete evidence. The importance of observation to supplement objective documents is paramount. It is observation of the manner in which a given custom is carried out, observation of the behavior of the natives in obeying the rules as formulated by the ethnographer. As to the actual method of observing and recording in fieldwork, the imponderabilia of actual life represent facts difficult to document, such as the agent’s routine daily life, and to capture as a typical behavior in the collection of crystalized and ethnographic data (p18). 

Malinowski’s the economic man is more than one who always cares about where his material interests lie. That is the materialistic conception of history that everything man devises and pursues is all about “material advantage of a purely utilitarian type at heart” (p516), and hence, the economic man. Beyond the ethnological presumptions whatsoever, by the general science of culture (?ethnography/anthropology), now the meaning of the Kula “will consist in being instrumental to dispel such crude, rationalistic conceptions of primitive mankind… and to deepen the analysis of economic facts” (p516). With these findings about the Kula, gift exchange, (gift economy), which is more all-pervasive than the commodity economy, the erroneous conceptions about primitive values and the whole objects of value as “money” or “currency” need to be revised. In this regard, Malinowski’s notion (exact use) of the terms “ethnology,” the “general science of culture,” and “ethnography” is blurred.

Ethnology or Ethnography?

Malinowski’s use of the term Ethnology related to Ethnography is less explicit also in his conclusive remark. Acknowledging Sir James Frazer for the Preface Frazer wrote, Malinowski declares that it is not only honor and advantage for him but also a special pleasure sine Malinowski’s first love for Ethnology was inspired by the reading of the Frazer’s Golden Bough.  He states that Ethnology is often mistaken for “an idle hunting after curios for a ramble among the savage and fantastic shapes of ‘barbarous customs and crude superstitions’” (p518). Hence as he took it beyond what was traditionally viewed as unsystematic search for ‘barbarous customs’ but, as he says, “the time is short for Ethnology” before the truth of its “real meaning and importance” is realized (ibid). Why is the time short for Ethnology? Towards the end, we are told once again that the custom, beliefs and practices of the Kula and mythological assumptions spun around it have been examined and as something not met before in ethnological studies (p509), and ethnology, and not ethnography, seems to be the trademark of the day.

To Malinowski, “Kula seems to be…a novel type of ethnological fact” (p510), its novelty being in its “surpassing size and complexity” and the sociological and geographical extent it covers.  Ethnologically, the Kula valuables can be classed among the “ceremonial objects of wealth” which includes carved and decorated weapons, stone implements, articles of domestic and industrial nature, and the “word seems to cover a great number of meanings and much that has no meaning at all” (p89). Hence, “ethnology” covers a wider range of Malinowski’s methodological creed than “ethnography” if that can mean a difference of both model and method. To the school of comparative cultural history, certain phenomena might have immigrated to where they are today and there is also the possibility that a cultural element might have originated just where it is now, since no culture is void of ‘civilization’! Mauss’ idea of “the gift” best illustrates this latter fact next. 

IV. Marcel Mauss and His Ethnology (1923; 1966)

Mauss’ The Gift appeared a year after Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific, which made Mauss’ work timely in relation to Malinowski’s. However, The Gift is said rather a wider contribution to the study of economic behavior based on archival studies of ethnographies tracing the pattern over a much wider area than Malinowski’s single Trobriand case. Needless to say, since both had distinct research goals, they employed different research methods. Mauss’ writings were not the products of ethnographic fieldwork, however. The economic exchange among those societies Mauss discusses is governed largely by values other than utility, and particularly connected to religion. It is important to note that to Mauss intangibles such as politeness, dances, songs and stories, feasts and services were exchanged so much as material goods, which did not take place just between individuals but between families, and/or clans as he called it total prestation or total social fact imbued with "spiritual mechanisms", engaging the honor of both giver and receiver into social reciprocity.

Mauss’ notion of “totality” is the Durkheimian creed that social phenomena should be seen in their totality. As Mauss also presents in his work a new view of Durkheim's theory of social cohesion, The Gift is the junction between Mauss’ social and scientific preoccupations and Ethnology and politics, as one can presumably tell in the title l’ethnologie et la politique: le don (Ethnology and Politics: The Gift). In the introductory note, Evans-Pritchard presents Mauss to have the background of analytic tradition of concepts than of facts which are reached at by deductive formulations (1966:vii).

The “gift exchange” in archaic societies that Mauss examined are “total social movements or activities” and at the same time, economic, juridical, moral, aesthetic, religious, mythological and socio-morphological phenomena (ibid.) which operate within the web of the existing social structure. The ethnographer’s purpose is to understand those social facts from both outside and inside as an anthropologist (from outside/etic) and also as an insider/emic by living with and like the members of the society he is studying as Malinowski did, a matching ethnological mission that Mauss accomplished based on archival research into ethnographic and linguistic materials without leaving Paris. An anthropologist can “observe” and “experience” a social phenomenon and thus he is one of those social anthropologists in the field doing “long distance ethnography” through archival research. While connecting the two methods of both archival and filed research, it is of a great intrinsic value that a detailed archival research such as Mauss’ makes the work of understanding “social phenomena” more detailed and the analysis of it comprehensive when archival and ethnographic enquiries merge. The combination between the two also helps to fully grasp the nature and the significance or function of the custom in relation to the social order we study.

The opening statement of Mauss' lecture dated 1902 was that “there are no uncivilized peoples, only peoples with different civilizations” (p4), which can be referred to as the underlying basic idea of his philosophy rooted within an evolutionary framework. Mauss is said to have never used the word “primitive” in his works outside of quotation marks. He believed that there are more simple societies than others and still at an earliest stage of development than those more complex ones. To Mauss, and other Durkheim's students of the time, the study of one specific society would make it possible to explain more complex societies. However, the degree of variation between simpler societies was not well understood (or overlooked) by Mauss and his colleagues. In this regard, the study by Durkheimian French sociologists in “primitive” societies was considered as an ethnological theory by American Boasian anthropologists, and not as ethnography.  But Mauss’ critique is loud. At one point he comments in The Gift that “The Tsimshian Myth. (cf. pp154, 192) is incomplete…Although Boas did not notice the identity it is clear. The Tsimshain goddess wears a ‘garment of wealth’” (1966:110, en.184), which is an evidence for Mauss’ detailed archival research and systematic ethnological method.

The Gift is an example of Mauss’ ethnological theory, which was the basic tenet in the early days of Durkheimian sociology.  Durkheim’s students’, including Mauss, are said to have added nothing but applied their Master’s ideas to social problems, i.e. finding a universal social law.  An example of the search for a universal law such as in The Gift is a power that causes the recipient to pay it back, which was/is an attempt at the search for a universal social law. However, the irony behind the search is that, Marcel Mauss never engaged himself in fieldwork of any kind though his The Gift focused on gift exchange among archaic societies much like Malinowski did among the Trobriand before him. Speaking of the Melanesians, “In this economy,” Mauss asserts, much like a filed-worker (an ethnographer) would, “and …in these societies groups cannot analyze themselves or their actions…however comprehending they may be, do not realize that they have to oppose each other …and individuals feel themselves to act only in one way” (p30), although their economic activities cross geographical and linguistic borders wider than the Polynesians. With regard to using ethnographic report and explaining facts extracted from those reports, Mauss suggested, for example, explaining religious phenomena in terms of the social phenomena as opposed to E.B. Tylor's view of general psychological phenomena to do the same. Mauss' suggestion was also an example of Durkheim's influence pertaining to ethnography of religious forms among simpler societies.

The Malinowskian concept of “gift exchange” came about during the WWI, when the shades of the war of aggression were hovering around. Hence, Mauss’ purpose was initially to establish grounds for the reparation, now the gift, French government claimed from the Germans after the war. Where there is no reciprocity, the war can be war of arms or war of words but war is war as long as it is no peace!

  

As in Maori the gift is the toonga one receives, and the hau of the toonga one also receives and is obliged to return or one chooses to die, for such is a hau of personal property, the hau of the forest  that kills (p9)! In such a case, the gift is inalienably connected to the giver beyond the limit of time and place, while the accompanying behavior is a formal pretense and social deception of the receiver. What is more, the transaction is based on self-interest on the side of the receiver and survival for the giver and, therefore, transcends the division between the spiritual and the material in a way that is, also according to Mauss, a “magical” contract as in Maori.

By the totemic language, the devotee is bound to the deity through totem, ritual and praises but in exchange if, for some reason, the intended goal (child, health, abundance, generally, prestige, power, success) is not reciprocated, the devotee cuts the relationship and turns to another god (or goddess). In this case the service (sacrifice) is not intended to divinity but to reciprocity, which fails its goal of divine warship. Pertaining to gifts to god(s), Mauss states that “sacrificial destruction implies giving something that is to be repaid” (p14). Systematically citing Malinowski about Trobriand’s sacrifice to gods in exchange for wealth Mauss adds that “the ‘owner’ can ‘buy’ from the spirits the right to do certain things with his or rather ‘their’ property. Before he cuts his wood or digs his garden or stakes out his house “he must make a payment to the gods….away to the country of the dead; there the spirits rival each other in wealth as men do in return from a solemn kula” (p14).

In gift exchange, and in its ancient form of total prestation, based on Malinowski’s experience among the Polynesians and Melanesians, Mauss’ argues, “the principles of rivalry and antagonism are basic” and rank of every kind are determined by the war of property, by armed hostilities, by chance, inheritance or marriage but “everything is conceived as if it were a war of wealth” (Mauss, p35). This argument may be on an antithesis position to what we have previously read Mauss as saying “these societies groups… do not realize that they have to oppose each other …and individuals feel themselves to act only in one way” (p30), as if social cohesion is achieved through the gift exchange as an absolute means of homogenization. Of the Polynesian mana, honor/prestige, for example, Mauss sounds like one who gives an eye-witness account as if skipped unsaid by Malinowski that mana symbolizes the man’s honor and his magical power and he also adds the translations of the word (mana) as “authority” and “wealth,” citing a certain Tregar (en. 128, Ch. II, Mauss, p36).

Speaking of the Tsimshian and the Kwakiutl of British Colombia and the Tlingit and the Haida of Alaska, Mauss acknowledges them to have a high standard of material culture: pipes, clubs and sticks which are “the pride of our ethnological collections” (p32). In Mauss’ perspective the system of gift exchange, however, unlike the western perspective, is not primarily material or economic transaction, but moral. It is a system of “total service” such as the “Kwakiutl spirit song” (from winter ceremony shamanism) ‘You send us all things from the other world, O spirits / You heard that we were hungry / We shall receive many things from you’ (Mauss, p90) where each gift is part of a system of reciprocity, a debt to be split among the tribe payable through sacrifices. It is even more than what Mauss refers to as “potlatch,” the word derives from the Tsinuk, meaning “feed,” “consume,” the system of gift which involves the principle of rivalry and disputes as among the Argonauts, or resistance against giving their land as among Ted Chamberlin’s  Gitksan  community of the British Colombia (pls. see next, #V).

“The Gift” as a Principle of Resistance

Social reciprocity or lack of it can affect relationship. When we see through the prism of heuristic principle of reciprocity politicians giving speeches and kissing babies and winning (receiving) votes, we can understand how social reciprocity can be used as a social influence strategy in a more complex way than we could ever imagine, and the ad campaigns that overwhelmingly turn us into a tame animal for consumerism, i.e., McDonaldization of society. Hence, I would take up Mauss’ notion of The Gift earnestly. I strongly believe that the gift is not always generously given, but taken when the giver has it but as one last resort to survive by giving, and when in no way a social reciprocity is expected under an unequal power relation. “Inalienability” of “the gift” is a characteristic feature of such a “social contract” between the powerful and the powerless that suspends “ownership” only temporarily until the table turns and the power relationship strikes the balance or in favor of once the powerless.

The gift can be one’s right, one’s pride/prestige/mana, one’s property, one’s land, one’s child, one’s wife, one’s language, one’s culture, one’s identity, one’s country in exchange for ‘new’ religion, ‘new’ language, ‘new’ way of life and thought principles called “modernity”/“civilization” as a driving force toward a “nation building” tenet.  But when the time came, better later than never, of necessity there should be some binding rules that govern the giver and the receiver, in which case, social reciprocity was the fundamental binding principle governed by the nature of social history, theoretical sociology, moral and political economy and the old problems which constantly turn up under new guises.

The influences of such transactions in gift exchange, and the discussion of it are usually taken for granted as a gift generously offered. To the contrary, when the giver has no choice but to give unwillingly and survive willingly, the gift turns itself into a poison if not returned or reciprocated. That is to mean, either the giver puts a spell on the gift, motivated by an unequal power relationship and never revokes it for generations, and/or brews another war ritual to take back by war what was grudgingly given/taken by war in the past!  In this case, for the giver, time never is; time was!  For the receiver, past is too fast driven by guilt! And for both the future is a forward movement into the past until the ‘paradise lost’ turns into ‘paradise regained’!  

There are such unpaid social debts long overdue that imbue grudges and instill resistance among nations today. The oppressed tell/urge the oppressor (the receiver) to return “the gift,” the ancestral gift taken by force. They tell through stories, songs, and every possible nonviolent or violent means until their voices are silenced.  Thus, the spiritual implications of disregarding reciprocity are worse. It can mean to lose honor (mana) and status or even freedom. Based on the reciprocal gift exchange under normal circumstances, according to Mauss, there are three obligations: giving, the necessary initial step for the creation and maintenance of social relationships; receiving, to refuse to receive is to reject the social bond; and reciprocating, which is, to Mauss, to demonstrate one’s own liberality, honor and wealth. However, in the latter form of obligation, i.e. reciprocity, unlike Mauss’ precept, where there is no ‘free exchange’ (of power) due to unequal relationship, the obligation is, I posit, not of liberality or permissiveness but of morality and duty. The notion of “inalienability” is important in Mauss’ conceptualization of gift exchange. In “gift economy,” as in Mauss’ ‘archaic’ societies, the gift is ‘inalienated’ from the giver(s) — it is “loaned rather than sold and ceded” as the case in commodity economy. In “gift economy” the identity of the giver is invariably bound up with the gift and compels social/moral reciprocity which creates a gift-debt that has to be repaid.

From my vantage point, given the premise that gift can be material or non-material, the notion of the gift-debt, long overdue as social debt, creates relationship overtime (unjust or just historical relationship) between the two sides. According to Mauss, solidarity is achieved through the social bonds created by reciprocated gift exchange, which is a Durkheimian notion of understanding social cohesion through the concept of solidarity. However, what is missing in Mauss’ argument is that where social cohesion and solidarity are disrupted by unequal power relations, gift presides only over “exchange” for the giver in order to survive, and self-interest of the receiver superimposes mutual interdependence between the giver and the receiver. Such are “social debts” long overdue that many generations are born to contemplate, to repay or to be paid.

Resistance is obvious when the gift (donation/charity/aid—some argue donation is not a gift) is a tool used by the giver (influence agent) as a request made to the receiver (influence target/the oppressed) to comply to the political or economic unequal relations that gradually unfolds as suppressive/exploitative.  Resistance against such social influence strategies through gift is often hampered by divisions, by the divide and rule policy of the influence agent, among the influence targets. It is a disintegration that the oppressed suffer but resist through subversive expressive culture. Doing ethnography may involve “locating” the ethnographic self in that contesting terrain, “giving” oneself, in relationship to land, language, and spiritual, cosmological, political, economic, environmental, and social elements in one’s life. One can see how the spatial location of houses, rivers, towns, prairies, tributaries and confluences are important in Boas’ stories to describe the people by the myths and stories they make (Boas 1916: 394-395). The politics of location between researchers and the communities they wish to study, and how the context of history, colonization, research, and academic institutions shape those relationships is the concern of critical ethnography and anti-oppressive/resistance research as is my PhD research project.

V. Conclusion: Toward Ethnography of Resistance Poetics

Is resistance research possible in Folkloristics?  I theorize it as possible but can be difficult. It is difficult because it is a struggle against hegemony, against domination deep-rooted thorough time. The oppressed have ways of "world-making" and also making history, however. One such way of coping with oppressive state structure and challenging hegemony is through creative resistance. Through songs and stories, the oppressed extend the sociocultural consequence of resistance acts both spatially and temporally into their own social reality and the resistance acts/words eventually become part of the local historical experience, part of a stream of sociocultural knowledge. When culture is transformed into emancipatory acts, I argue, creative resistance becomes emancipatory because it is not a response to one incident of temporal oppression but resistance grounded in a belief in fundamental human freedom. This interdisciplinary nature of folklore and resistance culture makes my PhD Project involve folkloric, anthropological, and historical inquiries focusing on the Salale Oromo, Oromia/Ethiopia.

Thus, when the Native Indian elder challenged the Canadian government officials who were among the First Nations to evict them from their land in the early 2000s, the community elder confronted them by giving a story (may be a hospitality second to nothing among the oppressed) in Gitksan language about the land and their connectedness to their land, and then, in English, he demanded, If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories? This came to be the title of the book by Edward Chamberlin (2003).  What did the storyteller demand if not reciprocity (“gift exchange”) through justification, authenticity, and justice referring to tradition? Chamberlin says, “We tell stories about evolution…, we sing songs about justice and freedom or chaos and order. And we make up new stories and songs. We call the old ones teaching and the new ones research” (234).  Hence, resistance research can be difficult, but possible. 

Anti-oppressive research or research as resistance also has become one form of engaged ethnography as a critical examination of ontological and epistemological basis of social sciences (Brown and Strega 2005; Chamberlin 2003) and of folkloristics. The objective of resistance research is offering accessible description and explanation of its potential as an emancipatory research methodology. Storytelling is one such example for resistance research methodology used to subvert historical and contemporary oppressive system, as a Native Indian ethnographer, Qwul’sih’ yah’maht (Robina Ann Thomas) demonstrated it (Brown and Strega 2005:15, 237). Authority demands complete obedience (a giving away of one’s power) and people resist against it in any possible way and against coercion, which stands against the egalitarian order of persuasion. Both to the people and to the ethnographer, this social fact is of historical importance to reboot the faulty reciprocity by every possible means. That combatant ethnographic context invites resistance research(er) or what can be called Research Activism. Ethnography, as an activist researcher re-examines the continuing polarization of theory and practice, is an expression of unequal power relations in the modern world (Brown and Strega 2005).

Hence, in folklore research, Hence, 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, 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” as “modernity” overhauled “tradition” and humanity.  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 the “persons” are excluded and rather debased as 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 itself. This is another predicament of “modernity,” I believe, engaging “nationalism” in its every multifaceted form of resistances at the grassroots level, one among which is the role of folklore used 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”. What the Patum does in Berga (Catalan) Nationalism, so the Irreecha does in Oromo. The recent “Songs of Millennium” by Salale Oromo Women is another 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.  Central to the study is theorizing contemporary Oromo narratives as resistance poetics focusing on the Salale Oromo and enquiring 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, I collected my data in Salale from September 2009 to July 2010 centring on the following themes and topics:

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. to banditry in the area and to the principle of waadaa/covenant as a binding force against internal disintegration will be closely examined. The two aspects of resistance culture have broader implications, implicitly touching every aspect of human conditions. 

3) the moral components of narratives of rebellion i.e., if “emancipatory resistance” or simply resistance to change, is investigated vis-à-vis the ethical waadaa/covenant principle. 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 used to shape social changes from below and enhance transformations, promote those values and boost their political, social, and economic well-being in line with the pan-Oromo reality 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 both social/political banditry and the waadaa/covenant as the two binding principles used in Salale resistance culture to fight against domination and maintain social cohesion, respectively. Using ethnographic methods (interviews, discussions and observations), the aim is also to outline the responses, attitudes and views of the people about justice, legitimacy, and human agency, and explore what meanings they make and why about unequal power relations and discontents in their immediate milieu in particular and the pan-Oromo reality in general.

The Salale Oromo sing songs of war and peace, tell tales of bandits and pundits, of heroes and heretics, of spirits and deities to appease secure peace and ensure genuine human freedom. Digging into the poetics of Salale folklore and resistance culture is, I believe, a valid and valuable ethnographic undertaking.

Works Cited: 
Boas, Franz. (1916). Tsimshian Mythology. 31st Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington: Government Printing Office. 
http://ia700306.us.archive.org/21/items/tsimshianmytholo00boas/tsimshianmytholo00boas.pdf 

Brown, Lesly and Strega, Susan. (2005).  Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous, and Anti-Oppressive Approaches. Canadian Scholars Press. 

Chamberlain, Edward (Ted). (2003). If this is your Land, where are your Stories? Finding Common Ground. Knopf Canada. 

Malinowski, Branislaw (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge and Kegan.
http://ia700300.us.archive.org/19/items/argonautsofweste00mali/argonautsofweste00mali.pdf

 
Mauss, Marcel. (1923, 2000). The Gift: the Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies.  France University Press.

http://ia600300.us.archive.org/21/items/giftformsfunctio00maus/giftformsfunctio00maus.pdf 

 Spurr, David. (1993). The Rhetoric of Empire. Duke University Press.