Saturday, July 21, 2012

ACTIVIST SCHOLARSHIP IN FOLKLORISTICS



THEORIES AND METHODS
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 (Challenges and the Way Forward)



Asafa T Dibaba
Indiana University 

Summer/July 2012

Folklore/Anthropology
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I. Introduction

The main purpose of the present paper is to outline and discuss a theoretical and methodological framework to advance ‘research as resistance’ in folklore and practice ‘activist scholarship’ by relocating the activist researcher and the ‘researched’ on the margin back into the ‘social base’ so that the people studied can have a major role as stakeholders and control knowledge production in the research process. Towards that end, the major foci of the paper include discussing the theoretical basis to critical and anti-oppressive scholarship in contemporary folklore practice, identifying the methodological strengths/weaknesses/obstacles to activist ethnography, discussing potential challenges to pursuing activist scholarship (in folklore) by pinpointing what folklore can provide activist scholarship but other fields cannot and how folklorists can advance a critical and anti-oppressive approach in expressive, material, and performative cultures. The issue of some methodological and theoretical differences between ethnography of resistance movements and ethnography as resistance is equally crucial and, in this paper, attention is also given to identifying and discussing those nuances. 

Hence, with this academic and humanist guiding principle in mind, it has been the goal of the course, the “Poetics of Resistance in Ethnographic Research: Theories and Methods” this summer to sketch out some possible theoretical and methodological stances to practice folklore “research as resistance” or ethnography of “activist scholarship”. The course, as Ethnography of Resistance Poetics, is hopefully a brand new academic practice which is an extension of my PhD project on “Salale Oromo Folklore and Resistance Culture: Ethiopia” in the academic center of Folklore and Ethnomusicology Department, IU. In what follows, the rationale for “ethnography of resistance poetics” or “activist scholarship” is discussed. The polarization between “pure” academic research and “engaged” research is also problematized along the trajectories of research activism as a way forward to solving social problems.

II. What is “Activist Scholarship” and why?

Activist scholarship is humanist and emancipatory (not just oppositional), and engaged research practice aimed at introducing new ways of knowing, thinking and being. In so doing, through some liberatory actions, activist scholarship involves the people ‘researched’ on the margin in the research process, in knowledge production and dissemination practices and, eventually, comes up with some social action that can influence policies and structures of knowledge and power. Traditionally, in academia where the focus has been on “research in academic sense,” doing research for resistance purposes or research activism is seen mostly as unacademic, political, subjective, and, therefore, activist scholarship is unlikely. However, resistance research as an activist scholarship is an ethical stance, not just an oppositional stance, about the researcher and the researched, about relational issues between the “oppressor” and the “oppressed,” and also between the “oppressed,” about the experience, expertise, and concerns of those marginalized in the research process, about widely held beliefs regarding what counts as knowledge. 1

In doing folklore activism/ethnography of resistance poetics, the activist researcher comes to the present with the past in the research practices so much as the people studied on the margin. The researcher and the community need to understand it well that to regurgitate the past instead of focusing on the present and building bridges towards the future may do more damage than good. By “engaging contradictions,” redefining power relationship, in the research process, who creates knowledge, who has access to it, who controls its production and dissemination, activist scholarship has a paramount importance for identity, collective rights and social change to emerge out of a collective memory of struggle and to recover the lost past and reclaim sovereignty (Hale 2008). In the mainstream academia, especially in the Third World institutions, it is not without difficulties to do engaged research into the social problems of the lack of just and non-exploitative power relationships, common social and economic values, human dignity, responsible and active participation, diversity and equity, democratic decision-making, and control of capital and sustainability to continue to grow and change.

Activist scholarship has a practical value as a new way of having research reflect the experience, expertise and concern of those involved in ‘research as resistance’. Such an engaged research transcends the border between the “academic” and the “oppressive realm” to the “critical, indigenous, and anti-oppressive” one, to the realm of learning and practicing resistance, and transforming the grim human condition, which is not without methodological/theoretical, and professional challenges (Brown and Strega, 2005:255; Hale, 2008:341).  Next, I discuss those theoretical and methodological orientations of activist scholarship, epistemological (the ‘how’) and ontological (the ‘what’) in activist research processes.


III. Activist Scholarship: Theories and Methods

In this part of the paper, it is not to spend time reviewing the history of haughty theories and methods in but to provoke some practical questions.  What is the use of theories/methods if still the oppressed are in poverty, in prison, displacement and if indigenous peoples continue to live as “the wretched of the earth,” experience oppression and its implications? Thus, it is to think of alternatives to forge a model that can shape shifts in the form of theory, methods and ethics and help the oppressed to emerge out of the margins. It is also to echo the call for those “who have pursued academic study and dipped toes into the murky pool of research” and to have obligations to use their expertise to improve the dire human condition (Brown and Strega, p32)  by situating anti-oppressive analysis in the daily life practice of the people relation to other social theories.

As a new form of scholarship ‘research as resistance’ (Brown & Strega, 2005)  and/or ‘activist scholarship’ (Hale, 2008) originates in a rich and complex intersection of feminist, postmodern, postcolonial, and critical race theories and necessitates a new form of epistemology that catalyzes institutional transformation to fundamentally challenge the existing systems of recognizing, knowing, and legitimizing knowledge production. The institutional transformation would lead towards a prolonged and difficult “epistemological battle” that can have a deep pervasive implication for sustainable social change. The basis of the “epistemological battle” is the obstacles in the mainstream academia against the need to advance “engaging contradictions” and doing activist folkloristics, or activist research in general, that involves and empowers the community. Thus, the implication of that epistemological battle is about democracy and activist scholarship as it is about higher education. The project of activist scholarship, therefore, aims at exploring the role of academics in the generation of new knowledge and in providing a supportive environment for new ways of generating knowledge. 2

In activist research process, the major task is to describe in detail not as a “how to” guide but as a way to trace how activist scholarship can involve the community as knowledge producers. It is equally essential to find out an open and free space, a habitat for activist community centered research, political activism, and intelligent repositioning.  Thus, the major aim of activist researcher and activist community-centered epistemology is developing tools for self-representation and self-advocacy to inform and support healthy and just community development grounded in the direct experience and insights of community members. The aim is also to characterize as critical those theories that view knowledge in social constructionist terms and as rooted in subjective experiences and power relations and those in a universalist and positivist tenets, as mainstream in their orientation (Brown and Strega, p68).

Theoretical Orientations
Activist scholarship originates out of feminist, postmodern, postcolonial, and critical race theories. Owing to its orientation to different schools of thought, disciplinary approaches and methodological practices it is referred to by various terms.  Among others, such terms as (participatory) action research, collaborative research, grounded theory, public intellectual work, critically/publicly/politically engaged research describe the theoretical and methodological orientations of engaged research as ethnography of resistance poetics.

The common element being research methods pertaining to social construction of knowledge, and self-representation and self-advocacy of the society, activist scholarship is also designated as community-engaged/based research and public scholarship (Hale 2008:238). That is, the people traditionally marginalized as objects, data sources, or informants are now central to the study and active participants of the research process in a dialogic stance and not just a question and answer or one-way interview. Activist scholarship is thus a “people-centered research methodology” that upholds people’s agency and ensures people’s voices are heard by overcoming the theory/practice dichotomy and engaging the community in a productive and reflective learning through action (Hale, p63). In so doing, “activist scholarship” sustains the politics of knowledge as extremely important to social action, hence “activism” of scholarship. In the view of “activist scholarship,” knowledge is constructed by a direct involvement with practical problems and efforts to create a better world; hence, a “scholarship” of “activism”. Its “scholarship” is also delineated by the collective participation of the people (the sources of data) as stakeholders in the research process and interpretation as they contribute much into what we learn from the research and only thus the research results are ‘valid’ as the researcher and the ‘subjects’ are engaged directly in the transformation of the phenomenon under study.

Theoretically speaking, activist scholarship challenges the dominant institutional epistemology driven by expert knowledge and positions scholars against their discipline, department, and (mainstream) institution in favor of collaborative, relational, contextual, and localized epistemological framework. As anti-oppressive research, activist scholarship is not contingent on physical or political location and can be done anywhere by anyone to pursue “oppositional scholarship and politics” / “organic praxis” (Hale, 2008:342), “more than critique, as something do-able” (Brown and Strega, 2005:258).3 Below, I turn to briefly discussing anti-oppressive epistemological orientations of activist scholarship.

In folklore activism and in activist scholarship in general, there are difference-centered theorizations as anti-oppressive critical theories unlike the homogenizing positivist normative theorization. Marxist theory grounds its analysis in the socio-economic lives of the people and situates itself in oppositional social movements. In its critical orientation, in Marxism, there is a close relationship between knowledge creators and the power elite in society and by its notion of praxis “the notion of social institutions reflects the values and assumptions of society” (Brown and Strega, 2005:49).

From anti-oppressive and post-modern research theories, the production and transference of knowledge is central in the fight for social justice. Activist researchers deconstruct dominant mainstream constructions of knowledge and monolithic reality using different theoretical orientations, critical theories. Marxist theorization critiques social “praxis” as the tension between theorizing and practicing/acting, and the status quo, and its method of analysis is grounded in critiquing and creating oppositional knowledge and social change (ibid, p50).

In anti-oppressive theories, knowledge is directly related to practice, hence, to “praxis,” and the basic assumption of Marxist theorization is that one can be free from false consciousness by acquiring alternative and true knowledge of things (ibid). Unlike liberalism which grounds itself in a positivist tenet and views the researcher and the research as neutral, Marxism and structuralism use participatory methods of engaged research. In Marxists’ view some social change and material realities are expected as outcome of the committed research.  However, as Brown and Strega argue, Marxists do not distinguish between ontological and epistemological claims and between knowledge claims and value claims of society (p48).

Feminism is another anti-oppressive theory rooted within oppositional grounding to contest gendered and dominant construction of gender, i.e. womanhood. The “first wave feminism” was the gender-oriented movement about women’s marginalized place in society. It was to center gender in its feminist analysis by men and later mainly by women based on their own lived experience and writings to add their voices in anti-oppressive movements (Brown and Strega, p52). To the White feminist thought, social injustices were caused by patriarchal conventions and assumptions at ideological and institutional levels in the society. As an anti-oppressive principle, feminism theorizes social justice that opposes patriarchy and gendered unjust social relations. Feminism, like Marxism, theorizes on the specific and the contextual instead of the transcendental and the universal. The problem of White feminism was its singling out gender and focusing on difference (race, sexuality, color, or any other basis of difference) in its theorization and analysis. Feminists provide concepts, models and methods to translate and transform experience but participants are considered ‘subjects’ of the research project (ibid).

In postmodern theorization there is no one “truth” or singular ‘reality’ but multiple representations and interpretations of it. It is understood as practicing acts of justice to deconstruct a mainstream singular representation of a monolithic “truth” and there is no singular claim of social justice to be made. In Marxism power exists in binary terms with the ‘oppressed’ and the ‘oppressor,’ and the former having no power whatever as victims of ‘false consciousness,’ whereas, in postmodernist theories, power exists in its various forms and multiple relationships. By a post-modern theorizing emphasis is to deconstruct, and not to explain, predict, or emancipate, nor to make any normative assumptions4 (ibid, p58).

Social identity theories are organized around social identity-based oppositional movements such as race, Aboriginal, disability, sex(uality), class, gender, grounded in oppositional movements, and go beyond singular analysis of experience of  oppression to multiple and intersectionality of identity locations (ibid, p61). Like other anti-oppressive theories, they offer analysis of social reality and a vision of social justice, and unlike Marxism, social injustices are defined not in materialistic terms but rather in relational and cultural terms.

To theorize activist scholarship at the local level, activist community has “tools” for critical analysis of social relations and theoretical explorations of the daily life practices and works in collaboration with scholar activists. The community can ‘folklorize’/”theorize” the daily life experiences, social and historical events transformed into social praxis to produce the poetics of new forms of knowledge and devise new ways of knowledge production and dissemination. Among the Chiapas in Mexico, for instance, folkloristic activist poetics was practiced to “share/tell stories” and the research dialogue in the Zapatista movement created opportunities for the community to draw on their own lived experience, generate new knowledge and facilitate for social action using dialogue and story-sharing practices5.

Methodological Encounters

As a method, activist scholarship is guided by the principle of participant-centered approach to engaged research and responsible for the validity of the results of the research which have a direct applicability on the lives of those the researcher is in dialogue with.  Methodologically speaking, activist research as participatory or action research is more valid than the conventional social sciences because it provides epistemic and empirical justification and “‘engaged’” directly in transformations of the phenomena they study” (Hale, 2008:320).


Some of the critical questions to ask in a community-centered activist research would focus on a shared understanding about the purpose, scope, and methods of the research, and the questions may focus on the context and background of the study, who might involve in the research, what research methods can fully involve the participants in the project, who is interested in the results of the study, why they need the study, what they might do with the results, and what perspectives the participants offer the researcher (Hale, p249). Thus, a grassroots knowledge produced through collaborative, community-based research projects, essentially for understanding community problems in its complexity, provides important data, community-centered research methods and practices, and a vital knowledge and possibilities for theory building, and also change-oriented relational practices. Such an activist research process can be used creatively for building or reconstructing community to integrate holistically their personal and professional commitments to build long-term community development.  

For an activist folklorist and scholar the challenge is how to negotiate academic career and political engagement to successfully effect social change and community development through participatory activist folklore research not just theory production or methodology but social praxis that describes well the marginalized, the commitment which most oppositional scholarships omit, a serious omission in activist scholarship. The question may be both theoretical and methodological (but not straightforward) and includes practical topics of how to balance the competing demands of academia and more abstract/theoretical issues of negotiating the ethics of ethnography and the ethnographer’s “situatedness” and “trust”.  Added to the research experience and publications, a strong sense of self, clarity of purpose, and knowledge of priorities, sense of purpose and identity translated into particular behavior help to minimize experience of institutional conflict and methodological handicaps.

Story-telling/-sharing can be one of the effective ways of involving the community on the margin in activist folklore research, particularly personal narratives. The stories are “essential core” as cultural, political, spiritual, social, and educational experience of the researcher’s being” (Brown and Strega, 2005:237). What is in a name is a history of the Ancestors who shared that name where they were from and songs and dances and masks with other important messages passed on to the bearers of the names. Some teachings are about conservation (of Mother Earth, the Oromo call Dachii) and historical and mythological stories to teach moral guidelines by which one can live, to situate the individual in the community and in the natural world, and to provide sense of belongingness and identity. As Robina Thomas convincingly argues, storytelling also serves as a tool of resistance against colonialism and assimilation using counter narrative to deconstruct the mainstream documented stories (ibid, p241). And meaning is formed through dialogue, through interactive conversations than through formal interview or question and answer. Methodologically speaking, in using storytelling as a research method, speaking in the voice of the storytellers, and how to perceive the stories, document, edit and decide what to exclude or include, and to maintain the authenticity of the storied through the voices of the storytellers is a challenge to the activist folklorist.

Citing Cruickshank’s (1990) premise that “life-history” investigation can serve as a model for research (cf. Life Lived Like a Story), Robina rightly states that  the storytellers tell using their own voices the tales of land dispossessions and other resistance stories of social injustices which validate the lives and times of their people, unlike those stories inaccurately documented. Thus, storytelling is used as a supplementary material for other forms of research, means of recording histories or counter-histories, against colonial legislations (e.g. Indian Act) though it is deemed illegitimate, subjective, and biased by the mainstream social sciences.

Methodologically speaking, the “body” as a source of knowledge is also used to discuss issues of representation through a critical autobiographical narrative methodology, while as a principle of Aboriginal research methodology, positionality is a call from indigenous voices to Indigenous researchers and students who have a dream to engage anti-oppressively. Other researchers in Research as Resistance (2005) and Engaging Contradictions (2008) share critical reflections from experience conducting participatory action research (PAR), as Susan Strega views from the margins the critique of ontological and epistemological foundation of traditional social science (Brown and Strega, p199).

The practices of activist scholarship need to be treated as part of political strategy while working on the dilemmas and contradictions embedded in projects (Hale, p156). To do research as “activism of scholarship” or as “scholarship of activism” the most demanding question would be if activist scholars can find alternative “home(s)” in the world of dominant academy to pursue/practice activist scholarship under more hospitable conditions (Hale, p19), which may not necessarily mean leaving the academy, but thriving their research agendas in the marginalized units of the institution. A positive response to the question could mean a signal to the importance of valuing diversity and diversifying the academy, to effect institutional change, create more supportive space for the particular kind of research (Hale, p14). The “engagement” of activist research as in ethnography as resistance” is considered by the mainstream academia and positivist approach as unscientific, personal, and unprofessional though it is a meaningful, ethical and human response to life (Hale, p325).

“Ethnography of Resistance Movement” and “Ethnography as Resistance”6
“Ethnography as resistance” is a “transformative,” “innovative” research practice which focuses on investigating closely ways of using narrative enquiries for transformation. It is a new way of thinking and catering for different realities of the “oppressed” and offer possibilities for new ways of knowing and being for the activist researcher and those researched on the margin. “Ethnography as resistance” assumes an emancipatory role of resistance research, both for the ‘oppressed,’ i.e. the researched, and the marginalized researcher. As activist “ethnography” it is research into “irresistible stories” of oppression and resistance against injustices through participation of the community, and transforms academy/ia and influences sustainable change. Thus, “ethnography as resistance” engages politics of memory and constitutes a collective myth of resistance in a memorable way to ground the social praxis in such a collective shared experience of the oppressed as in the case of the Chiapas in Southeast Mexico.

Though storytelling by itself does not guarantee ethnography of resistance as an emancipaptory action, but “story-sharing” is part of the indigenous communities’ commitment to reclaim traditional ways of knowing and practicing daily life events in a “subjective” way. From critical researchers’ perspective, value-free science cannot be effective by rejecting to view reality as both objective and subjective. That is, the objective reality that impinges on the lives of groups and individuals as real forces is experienced and interpreted as subjective reality to constitute group/individual’s consciousness.

Those many “ways of knowing” which Foucault calls “subjugated knowledge” of the marginalized, narrative discourses/storytellings, as part of histories, cultures, experiences and languages of those on the margins, have historically been devalued, misinterpreted, excluded or trivialized since only certain conceptualizations of information are counted as objective, scientific, authoritative, and therefore “valid” knowledge (Brown and Strega 2005).

To dismantle “the master’s house by the master’s tools” (ibid. p199), the stories of oppression retold and constituted into a new way of knowing and being are used to eliminate the false consciousness of the oppressed and expose the “fear of freedom”.  Ethnography as resistance is a new way of knowledge construction from “below,” knowledge as “never disintegrated or neutral,” in Foucault’s terms, “but both produced by and productive of power: …power and knowledge directly imply oneanother” (ibid, p266).

The narratives, through systematic enquiries, describe the status quo and critique oblivion by revisiting ethics of the way things are and question why things are the way they are. “Ethnography as resistance” unsettles the powerful and the power and also challenges the oppressed to question how they govern themselves. In so doing, it curves out some new and “transgressive possibilities” and shows ways to liberate both the researched and the researcher through systematic narrative enquiries, closely investigating into the warp and weft of the stories (of oppression and resistance) told within stories. Thus the methodological and theoretical orientation of “ethnography as resistance” is anti-oppressive and participatory since it is an engaged and community-centered research approach.

On the other hand, the epistemological and ontological nature of ethnography of resistance movement is different. The ethnographic journey of the Chiapas popular movement led and recorded by Subcommandante Marcos, who studied and documented the communique of the Zapatista published as Our Words are Our Weapons, is an example of “ethnography of resistance movement”.  It is ethnography of the day to day progresses and dynamics of the rebellion and grassroots resistance recorded from a lived experience of the rebel leader from its inception through the 1994 NAFTA summit, the USA-Mexico bilateral agreement, and the Zapatista insurgency the same night. Such ethnography of resistance movement is methodologically and theoretically less formal and relatively free from temporal and spatial limitations and can be conducted during or after the movement through historical and archival data collections and interviews, story tellings and personal experience methods. It does not guarantee an anti-oppressive tenet! It can be pursued for the purpose of “resistance against resistance,” that is, the oppressor can use ethnography to infiltrate the movement and to forge a counter insurgency. “Ethnography as resistance” can apply those methods but both its ontological and epistemological stances are constrained by institutional and academic power ploys against anti-oppressive research. Ethnography as resistance is the poetics of resistance itself, i.e., a guiding principle of an action, of “dismantling the master’s house”. Or as in James Scott’s studies, “one cannot get far by arguing narrowly along social structuralist lines just by describing the ideas of peasants as arising neatly from their class position” (Guttmann, 1993: 78; Abu-Lughod, 1998/2003). Such a study of resistance movement where the people are mere sources of data is an example of ethnography of resistance movement.

Ethically speaking, in doing ethnography as resistance, configuring research “subjects” in some limited ways and procedures can conflict with the researcher’s ethical questions of voice, representation, and collaboration, which constrain the creation of knowledge and participation. Hence, in activist scholarship as ethnography as resistance, orientation of the political nature of research and the duty to decolonize the oppressed are the principles of “anti-oppressive practices” that highlight the relationship between the “researcher” and the “researched”. It also determines the “emancipatory goals” of the research through participatory research or ethnography as resistance.

Activist scholarship as ethnography of resistance poetics questions the purpose and process of social sciences from a postmodernist perspective.  That is, concern about the relationship between the researcher and the researched, and challenges to the notion of epistemological guarantees: who the knowledge is created for, how it is created/constructed, and for what purpose. Hence, ethnography of resistance was produced at the time of “positivist resurgence” with the major aim of providing theoretical and practical explanations of critical, indigenous, anti-oppressive research. The discourse of positivism (objectivism) obscured the questions of how knowledge is socially constructed, who controls how it is used, and whose interest knowledge serves (Brown and Strega, p6). 

Hence, research activism as ethnography of resistance is a research “from the margins,” i.e. which involves the marginalized and unsettles the connections between how knowledge is created, what knowledge is produced, and who controls the process. It examines the narratives of “talking back and making space,” voice of the marginalized, what it has to say about its own lives and the lives of others and about how those lives are transformed. Unlike the positivistic creed of the natural science, in social sciences “reality” is socially constructed and not necessarily to be empirically discovered by same means as “objective”  “facts” in the natural world.

Ethnography of resistance poetics aims to serve those engaged in social justice and redress suppression, and to work on activist methodological and epistemological practices, not just to catalogue distinct theoretical and practical ensembles. Anti-oppressive theories are critical in their orientation and clarify how the ontological and epistemological orientations of those theories are distinguished from other (academic) theories. 7


IV. Activist Scholarship in Folkloristics

In folklore activism, the politics of memory and the need for reconstituting a collective myth of independence/sovereignty is part of the struggle often detracted by the mainstream politics. The origin story of resistance, or the land struggle, such as that of the Zapatista or of the Nicolas Ruiz (who emphasize change and continuity in the reconstruction of their identity) (Hale 2008:228), fighting for national liberation is part of the founding of the “nation” within “nation-state” and to revitalize the culturally, linguistically, and historically situated significant difference. The role of activist folklore research in such a sociopolitical context is paramount and the challenge is equally demanding. Thus, activist scholarship engages contradictions and people and places on the margin acknowledge their historical construction of their identity through their resistance poetics (activist folkloric discourses, i.e.  songs, stories, dances, ritual performances and material cultures as among the Chiapas) about the ongoing land struggle and certain political and social practices as they also recognize shifting identities (Hale, p228).

 The challenge to practice ‘activist folkloristics’ and to relocate folklore activism (and oral tradition) in the local politics/history can be exemplified by   the “Dar es Salalm School”. The study shows that based on oral tradition, African historians attempted to interpret African history form African perspective and not from the viewpoint of the mainstream history of the colonizers. However, it was singled out as not based on “universal” principles of history writing by Western historians, and African historians undermined the mainstream approaches to the writings of African history (Hale, p68). They questioned the significance of Western writing and understanding of history to writing and interpreting African history from African perspective (cf. also Jan Vansina’s Oral Tradition: a study in historical methodology, 1985). Thus, folklore activism as part of activist scholarship can best disseminate traditional and tacit indigenous knowledge through joint endeavors of dedicated scholars working within the communities. Such African philosophy as Ubuntu (Humanness) or the Oromo Safuu (moral/social order) is the view that calls for a “communicative action,” i.e. without others one cannot exist to the fullest as a human being.

The other challenge, from my experience, to doing activist folklore research is a discriminatory political agenda that emanates from the unruly dominative ideological stance. In the country such as Ethiopia where a single ruling party is a head of state for two decades there is no room for activist scholarship or doing ethnography of folkloric resistance is no less offense than a terrorist act (cf. my articles on this topic)8. In folklore activism, the issue of peace/security can be addressed as central to the indigenous knowledge of the people pertaining to the availability of resources to sustain lives and wellbeing, and “insecurity” as “ill-being,” as inability to meet physical, economic, social and psychological needs. Folklore activism, based on the folk-life of the community, can draw up the program of action around cooperative works, festivals, rituals, funerals, and address some obstacles to the wellbeing of the community, which requires further research aimed at communities’ self-empowerment.

Folklore activism as part of activist scholarship is not just about singing or narrating of breaking the bondage and setting ourselves free but about “steering the ship,” i.e. about educating ourselves how we govern ourselves, about understanding how schooling, literacy, and intellectual work function, about changing ourselves, creating institutions, practices, beliefs, and social relations capable of generating more just world (Hale 2008:98). Ethnography of resistance poetics is not just “oppositional” but an attempt to seek alternative ways of thinking, knowing, doing, and being. Hence, “resistance” as an emancipatory act!

The challenge is research is “dominative” when guided by the researcher’s priorities in a way that makes no sense to the people being studied. Thus, for activist folklore research to happen the power to determine what is important to study and what is not important, how it shall be studied, to whom and in what forms the results of the research will be distributed should in part be vested upon the people being studied as it is to the researcher. Hence, a way forward for activist (folklore) research to continue as emancipatory is to involve the community in research and in research-design dialogue, and clues about what research questions should be and what actions can be identified through dialogue. In the dialogic relationship between the “subjects” and the researcher, “trust” and “situatedness” (where one is coming from than where one stands) are equally important. That is, the establishment of a relationship of “trust” develops over months or years, especially, if the study takes on highly politically sensitive topic, and trust grows where the visitor volunteers to work more as activist than as a researcher (Hale, p204; Abu-lughod, 1998/2003).

V. Conclusion9

Folklore Activism and Grassroots Planning: Localized Struggle
In this paper, our aim has been to discuss “activist scholarship and folkloristics” on ontological and epistemological basis. Anti-oppressive theorists connect knowing with doing, and research as “praxis”. Thus, knowledge cannot be conceived of as neutral and abstract but as having the potential for “libearatory” practice at the grassroots level of “knowing” and “being”. Since “knowing things differently results in acting differently” (Brown and Strega, p67 citing Freire 1967) knowledge enhances localized social struggle and empowers those on the margin for social change through action.  Here the question is “what happens when hegemonic academic folklore theory and practice are transformed into a cultural product and professional activity of a different instance,” to ask as Gerard Warshaver (1991:219). Regarding the “softness” of postmodernism, while I share the view, I do not intend to schematize an “unproblematic theoretical model of reality” but to make a modest contribution by suggesting a possibility for folklore activism as “grassroots planning” and as part of “localized struggle” to control social change and knowledge creation processes.

As it has been argued, analysis of theoretical orientations and methods of research activism show that knowledge and power are two indispensable human qualities scarcely and unevenly shared. As the fight for those two scarce human elements can be sought and fought for in different ways, the study of the resistance movement under anti-oppressive approach can be also pursued in many different ways.  In folkloristics, as I discuss next, and also in other social sciences (e.g. anthropology), doing activist folklore research is not limited by place or status but by a good will of the activist scholar to involve those on the margin in the research process, knowledge production and control. In this section, I conclude by outlining some of the challenges and indicating the way forward. 

It has been discussed that we can practice folklore activism not by mere technical expertise but by some opportunity to creatively and critically think to find promising continuities, despite forceful changes, and productive breaks in the mix of peoples, histories, political and economic forces that make up conflicting terrains and forgotten places. It is also a challenge whether we can make a difference and make change just by studying the margins because we are folklorists or social science researchers but by involving the people we study within the research process, interpretation, and evaluating the outcome (Abu-Lughod, 1998/2003). The participation of “marginal people on marginal lands” can affect new ways of knowledge production as the community exercise power and control knowledge production and dissemination processes through performance and continuous dialogue with the researcher.  The marginalized people in those marginalized locales, i.e., institutions such as families, grassroots community welfare associations, cultural performances (weddings, funerals, festivals and rituals) can be the center of “grassroots planning” and “localized struggle” to liberate humanity from being exhausted by the structured daily violence of racism, unemployment, shrinking wages, environmental degradation, displacement and consequent disappearance of whole ways of life which the people sing, tell stories and perform and refuse to give up hope to reclaim agency. Thus, an activist folklore research can save humanity from consumerism!10

Those contested sensibilities and feelings constituted through performances are the basis of political struggle (of knowledge production and agency) to make life better than the present when the social identities are jeopardized and no patterns (theories) for action. The lack of resource as if a lack of “resourcefulness” brutalizes people in forgotten/marginalized places. And in effect people raise and use what is available to make a place in the world and also act within the institutionalized and individualized constraints defined by racialization, gender hierarchy, and nationality. Those identity differentials produced academic specialties to deal with disabling and undoing the social constraints.

Activist scholarship inspired by a vision of progressive social change, addressing inequalities and working towards a common good can also maintain authenticity and authority while folklore activism is at work by reinvigorating public interests of folklore at grassroots and community-based levels. Folklore activism works through indigenous knowledge theorized, developed, communicated and utilized by means of different techniques of oral (folkloric) communication. Nonetheless, African norms and value systems were excluded by the Western knowledge system since its ideologies did not understand the African ways of “knowing” and most Western educated Africans also became hostile to local knowledge and regarded it as “primitive/backward,” the alienation which obstructed African development (Hale 2008).

Engaged folklore research aims at dealing with such questions of social consequences, unequal relationships and works on processes involving progressive traditions and values to contribute to community-based social change efforts; the purpose of interpreting the world is to change it (Hale, p62). In sum, the continuing polarization of theory and practice in the expression of power relations affects the role of social science research, particularly folkloristics, to problematize and study the unequal power relations.  To overcome the theory/practice dichotomy, involving communities in productive and reflective activities of learning through action can be a panacea. However, modern politics created among the oppressed a “fear of freedom” where theories about freedom and democracy and their practice did not coincide. Such polarizations can be treated through socially constructing knowledge and then gaps reduced by theorizing and critiquing locally the social injustices that modern politics masquerades through instilling a “fear of freedom,” and, consequently, breeding false consciousness.

ENDNOTES

1. Knowledge, from difference-centered theories, is viewed as something gained by the interaction of the subject and the participant observer. Both the subject and the observer are understood as having agency and involved in defining difference. And “difference” is understood as a fluid concept, and knowledge is inter-subjective and dialogical (Brown and Strega, 2005:67 citing Hall, 1996) (Cf. also Brown and Strega, 2005:66).

2. Publically engaged epistemology necessitates stressing the importance of linking one’s inner reflection and vision with social, political and lived experiences to generate subversive knowledge and action following the path of new ways of knowing, “inner work, public acts,” that is, “urging to act on the knowledge gained” (Hale, p238). Lila Abu-Lughod’s “Writing Against Culture” such a seminal work in this regard. In her second book, Writing Women’s Worlds, (1998/2003) , Lilaa Abulughod framed a feminist ethnography using  individual stories to make a larger argument about “writing against culture”. She deconstructs the mainsteeam typifications of social structure and cultural form by attending to internal argument, individual lives, and complex social dynamics) as a means of intervening in vexed discourses about a maligned region as well as challenging transnational feminist representations of women in Arab societies. 

3. This constitutes an ‘epistemological battle’ against the dominant, positivist, and technocratic position of division between knowledge producers (institutes) and knowledge consumers (community) and values more community-based knowledge than academic knowledge and facilitates for the outflow of knowledge across the institutional boundaries to meet the needs of the community. Such an epistemological stance is a move away from a knowledge generation contained within the mainstream ‘academic agendas’ and career structures towards the new ways of knowledge production and judging the outcomes not by the degree of the problems solved but by the degree of agreement among the participants in the knowledge production process (Hale, p331).

4. To give historical explanations of scientists’ decisions to prefer one theory over another, Gregory Currie (1987:456) argues, such explanations ought to contain only statements about the beliefs and preferences of the agents involved. In particular, Currie stress, it ought not to include evaluative premises about the theories themselves.  And theorization based on a universalist assumptions pertaining to color, race, gender, class and by downplaying “difference,” specificities of those social identities eventually traps social theories into the “dominative” mainstream orientation against anti-oppressive tenets (Cf. also Brown and Strega, 2005:64).

5. Cf. Subcomandante Marcos’ (2001), Our Words are Our Weapon. What is in a name? He writes, Chiapas is a name of pain and hope, and cites Chrales Luis-de Secondate asking “Persians? But how is it possible for someone to be Persian? Thus, it is the purpose of ethnography as resistance to pose the same question to the research “subjects” and empower them to reclaim agency to answer “how is it possible for someone to be…and to become…? The question is part of a challenge to the mainstream academia feeding into the oppressive system, and question, Why things are the way they are?

6. Here I presented this summary of Research as Resistance (Lesley Brown and Susan Strega (2005:259) from the last chapter where the authors insistently stress some guiding principles of doing ethnography as resistance to assess our research topic, methods, our relationships, analysis, and action. First, anti-oppressive research is social justice and resistance in process and in outcome, since research can be a powerful tool for social change. As research can be used to respect, empower, and liberate, it can be used also to suppress ideas, people, and social justice. To do ethnography as resistance, good intention is not enough, but it takes personal commitment as social justice activists and purposefully working towards making change for in individuals, communities, and institutions, the first target of change being ourselves.

Second, all knowledge is socially constructed and political. That is, from anti-oppressive perspective, knowledge exists in relation to the “knower(s)”, produced through interactions of peoples who are socially located (in gender, race, class, and ability) with biases, prejudice, and difference of power relations, so much as knowledge is socially constructed, and located.   Thus, there is no one “truth” but multiple truths, and in anti-oppressive research, we look for meanings, understandings, and for the power to change.

Third, anti-oppressive research is all about power and relationships. In positivist perspective, the relationship is exploitative/paternalistic and the research process is controlled by the researcher. But relationships and power involve the knower and the known, groups of knowers outside researchers, and researchers and external institutions and ideological paradigms.  The shift of power is, thus, towards the people on the margin, towards those with epistemic privilege or lived experience of the issue under study from the paternalistic exploitative realm of “Othering,” building life-long relationship instead of a throw-away time-specific relationship. Finally, the anti-oppressive researching practice and process of inquiry is an enterprise that has challenged anti-oppressive researchers to reflect upon own sense of self, history, context(s), and actions with others, through thinking critically, listening carefully, and analyzing power relations, and unearth patterns of thinking and acting, and recognize their effects.  

7. Equally demanding questions but remained unresolved in activist scholarship are whether or not to imagine ‘peer’ reviews of the works also by the research participants in the local communities so much as by academic experts (Hale, p187) and whether or not to fight an epistemological battle within the dominant academic institution or struggle to find a hospitable home outside of the academy. These are some of the changes which would involve rethinking the mission, purpose, and politics of the academy and strategizing to reach such objectives enables scholar activism to achieve social justice, generate new ways of knowing and create a wider public culture of democracy, i.e. a “new public sphere” (ibid, p157). Thus, activist scholarship as “engaged research” involves a participation of key community stakeholders, that is, research users, clients, sponsors, and practioners with scholars in the co-production of knowledge and to address complex social issues or phenomenon. By engaging contradictions and “engaged research,” the aim is to build relationship that involves collaboration and negotiation between researcher and practitioner that requires shared authority at all levels of research process: defining the research problem, choosing methodological and theoretical approaches, developing the final products, and participating in peer evaluation of the research outcome(s). 

8. See my “ ETHNOGRAPHIC MYSTIQUE: THE SELF IN FOLKLORIC FIELD RESEARCH:  The Poetics and Politics of Salale Oromo Folklore Research [Oromia, Ethiopia]”


9. Though there are quite intriguing journal articles and references for this course, I chose only some of them. My purposes to choose out of those references and book chapters include: an initial mission directly into resistance research methods through some readings with theoretical overtone, relevance to my daily academic practices on the front line of ethnography of resistance poetics, the bound of delivery in a given period of time to constrain the need to read the whole book(s) and journal articles, and, for a novice learner of resistance research and folklore activism like me, I think those references and books would do a great introductory groundwork. 

10. Let us draws attention to Gerard Warshaver’s three aspects of postmodern folklore:  first that folklore is changed from an object of knowledge into an object of consumption. That is, postmodern folklore is folklore commodified (cf, “folklorization”). Second, that instead of committing oneself in folklore as a modern disposition to make social difference, one consumes folklore to achieve self-fulfillment in postmodern culture (cf. Jean Baudrilard’s (1988:12) “philosophy of self-fulfillment as postmodern ideology of competition).  The philosophy of “self-fulfillment by competition is actualization of self by consumption “each on his own” signaling the transformation of second into third level folklore.  That is, when the first level folklore is transformed from an object of knowledge to a commodity it transforms itself into the language of consumption. In effect, second level folklore evaluates first level folklore by referring to it as an affect, style, worldview and materiality of social labor. On the other hand, third level folklore values folklore of the first instance as a text whose utility (consummativity) rests on its ability to create new experience and meaning—self-fulfillment of third level re/producers and their customers (Warshaver, p223).


REFERENCES
Abu-Lughod, Lila. Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1993/2008. 

Brown, Lesley and Susan Strega (ed.). Research as Resistance: critical, indigenous, and anti-oppressive approaches. Canadian Scholars’ Press/Woman’s Press. Toronto, Ontario. 2005.

Currie, Gregory. “The Role of Normative Assumptions in Historical Explanation.” Philosophy of Sciences 47 (1980):456-473

Hale, Richard. Engaging contradictions: Theory, politics, and methods of activist scholarship (Book Review).  Hale, C. Richard. (Ed.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 2008. Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 14, 1 (2010): 103

Marcos, Subcomandante. (2001). Our Words are Our Weapon. New York. Seven Stories Press.

O'Connell, Anne. Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous, and Anti-Oppressive Approaches (Book Review). 2006. Leslie Brown and Susan Strega, eds. Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 2005; 303 pp. 2006

Saltmarsh, John. Engaging contradictions: Theory, politics, and methods of activist scholarship (Book Review).  Hale, C. Richard. (Ed.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 2008. Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 14, 1 (2010): 103

Warshaver, Gerard. “On Postmodern Folklore.” Western Folklore 50 (1991):219-229




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