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).
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