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Working class and Folk Culture:From ‘History of Class Struggle’ to ‘History of Struggle to produce Class’
Y.A.Sudhakar ReddyCentre for Folk Culture Studies
School of Social SciencsUniversity of Hyderabad
I. Folk Culture and working class – A Historical Overview:
The term folk culture is a synonym usage for ‘folklore’ and ‘folklife’. Even before
the term ‘Folklore’ was coined by William John Thomas in 1846, there was a serious
study of folklore forms at the turn of the 18th century in Germany. Romantic
Nationalistic impulse directed the Grimm brothers to collect the volklieder (folk songs),
tales, games, sayings, names, and idiomatic phrases still to be found among the German
peasantry. They considered the above-mentioned forms as the remnants or survivals of
the past. The work of the Grimm brothers was highly influential in England. There was
a long tradition of analyzing the antiquities like old buildings, old legal documents, old
artifacts, old tales, old songs, old customs etc. These forms were labeled as ‘Popular
antiquities’. In 1846 Thomas replaced ‘popular antiquities’ by the Anglo-Saxon
compound word ‘folklore’ (Thomos:1846). Since he has modeled his programme for the
study of folklore directly upon the work of the Grimms, the term ‘folklore’ came into
being to designate materials believed to survive primarily among the rural peasantry and
to reflect life of the distant past.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century English folklore studies were further,
influenced by cultural Anthropology and the evolutionary perspective of E.B.Tylor and
his disciples. Tylor thought that the history of humankind reflected a development from
simple ‘savage’ stage through ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilization’. For this kind of development
among the peasantry the survivals of the past were shown as ‘Tylor’s evolutionism” and
it provided a new and more encompassing theoretical framework for the kind of folklore
studies initiated by theorems. The study of folklore came to be defined as a historical
science. Tylor’s researches were neither romantic nor nationalistic, but concerned with
the development of mankind as a whole not just one particular nation or race. Folklore
was considered not as a relic of the national spirit but rather as a relic of the systems of
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primitive thought and belief. In 1965 the famous American folklorist Alan Dundes came
out with a definition. By breaking the compound word ‘folklore’ into ‘folk’ and ‘lore’, he
tried to define it in the following manner; According to Dundes, “The term ‘folk’ can
refer to any group of people whatsoever who share at least one common factor. It does
not matter what the linking factor is - it could be a common occupation, language, or
religion - but what is important is that a group formed for whatever reason still have
some traditions which it call its own” (Dundes: 1965) . This definition had also to face
severe criticism. Elliot Oring says: “Since Dundes argues that ‘folk’ can refer to any
group based on any factor (rather than a specific group formed on the basis of select
factors), it would seem that term ‘folk’ does not contribute significantly to the definition
of folklore as a whole (other than suggesting that it characterises human rather than non
human population)” (Oring: 1976). Ben-Amos emphasizes the necessity of changing the
existing perspective we have of the subject. The majority of definitions of folklore
consider it as a collection of things. The folklorists are of the opinion that folklore is the
collection of abstracted things. “To define folklore, it is necessary to examine the
phenomena as they exist. In its cultural context, folklore is not an aggregate of things,
but a process - a communicative process to be exact” (Ben- Amos: 1971). Ben-Amos
insists on defining folklore in its context. In this approach there is no dichotomy between
process and product. Ben-Amos distinguishes folklore from other modes of
communication. “Folklore is the action that happens at that time. It is an artistic action.
It involves creativity and esthetic response, both of which converge in the art forms
themselves. Folklore in that sense is a social interaction via the art media and differs
from other modes of speaking and gesturing” (Ben- Amos: 1971).
In order to distinguish folklore from other phenomena of the same kind, the
scholars have qualified folklore material in terms of their social context, time depth, and
medium of transmission (Sudhakar Reddy: 2004). From the above discussion the
following characteristics to folk culture can be surmised; the ethos of folk culture
basically lies in voracy (a neolog used for ‘orality’). Voracy wholly depends on the word
of mouth i.e., sound produced though utterance. As sound travels in cycles, analogously
the concept of time and space in voracy functions in cyclical nature. As such, voracy
depends on two organizing principles; sruti (laterally means sound but metaphorically it
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means recitation) and smriti (memory), and hence the oral texts when performed oscillate
between the past and present. The experiences of the community and the performers get
textualised and presented in narratives along with the story lines of the oral texts. In the
cultures, which are primarily construed on ‘literacy’, the concept of time and space is
unilinear and hence periodisation apparently becomes possible. Literacy completely
depends on writing i.e., ‘word’ as a linguistic sign. The organizing principle of writing in
any culture is syntagmatic and hence unilinear progression is innate in its presentation.
The time and space scales differ drastically between the two. The literate relay on
physical temporality based on calendrical phenomenon and measured in terms of lunar or
solar time frames whereas, the folk stand on metaphysical (cosmic) temporality based on
their narratives. Since the folk culture exists primarily in voracy the time and space
within the narrative becomes cyclical and hence the story oscillates between the past and
the present with no much-marked references by the narrator (or the author), which is
otherwise the case with the narrative of the literacy. For the marked references devices
such as ‘flashback’ or ‘soliloquy’ etc., are used by the narrator/author in the literate
narratives. Folk culture is shared and owned by a group and hence it is a collective
enterprise. Since folk culture is a collective device it is anonymous. The anonymity
makes the folk culture to live beyond one’s own life time and hence inherited as
tradition. In India, the folk groups whose survival is on the usage of oral traditions in
everyday life forced them to remain ‘traditional’ to safeguard their own identity with the
help of their expressive traditions. Tradition refers to two way process of phenomena i.e.,
intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsically it refers to the group, which looks at its own tradition
as if it is in continuity with the past and therefore authenticates it by recurrence.
Extrinsically, tradition means the groups of communities looking at their inter-
relationships for mutual co-existence (Amos: 1982). As folk group is geo- culture specific
having a tendency to adopt changes in time and space, it innately acquires two traits
namely, version and variation. Versions are repeated retelling of prior narrative texts in
translated, transformed and modified forms in different cultural contexts. These
differential retellings would create variations in texts though not in motifs thereby
reflecting the milieu under which those particular versions are shaped and transmitted.
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Folklore/Folk life/Folk Culture studies at the initial phases are hosted by the
disciplines of literature or anthropology and therefore approached the subject from ‘lore’
and ‘folk’ perspective respectively. The Literary perspective emphasized ‘text’ as the
prima-facie and therefore relied on framing ‘genres’ to typologise the subject matter of
folklore. Those who approached folklore from Anthropological perspective brought
forth ‘folk’ to the forefront of the study as the makers of the ‘lore’ and stressed on the
material culture. These two perspectives sought the tools, which could lead to
comparisons or specificities in a given set of cultures. Likewise they also looked for
collective consciousness and individual creativity in expressive tradition of the folk. In
either case, the data presented is to demonstrate how paradigms are constructed to reveal
holistically the cultural life styles. All along in these two disciplines folklore is viewed as
an ‘objective reality’ which exists in either ‘archaic’ ‘pure’ or’ original’ form and
untouched by dominant culture which hegemonises it. This idiosyncratic and ideological
standpoint of the scholars made folklore as the cultural trait of survivals, barbarians and
uncivilized or less civilized. From this premise, the Evolutionists and Diffusionists
operated defining folklore at a later date as what which ’represent’ the rural, non-urban,
non-literate and peasant groups. Later, the definition of folk included urban proletariat
who actually migrated from the rural to seek jobs in industry etc. Till the early 20 th
century, this notion pervaded the folkloristics.
During the second half of 20th century, with the pervasion of “new ethnography”
in the field of social sciences and humanities the barriers between the ‘folk” and the
folklorists began to shatter and the power relation hither to, hierarchically designed
between the informant and the researcher, or the interviewee and the interviewer were
totally altered. James Clifford defended new ethnography as a “dialogical enterprise in
which both researcher and natives are active creators. or… authors of cultural
representations” (Clifford 1988: p.84). This new environment gave a fillip to public
folklore as not only an academic discipline but also as a tool to represent properly the
cultures, which are marginalized by the invasion of modernity. The ethical and moral
basis of the entire folklore studies rested on the fundamental maxim of “give back to the
people what we have taken from them and what rightfully belong to them” (Botkin 1939:
10). This self-consciousness of folklore opened the gates of modernity to various folk
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groups who are often been stereotyped as illiterate, backward, and marginalized. The
forces of modernity as represented in the new-socio-economic formations which are
regulated by the global capitalist market, de-codified and re-codified the existing
language system and semiotics through computer technology and electronic media and
eclipsed the communities, which were based on orality in the west. The changing trends
in the education system gave more power to ‘written word’ than to to ‘orality’. Even the
modern legal system passes its verdicts mostly based on written traditions and
contemplates for accepting “oral traditions” as basis for judgments. The oral evidences
are being interpreted in the light of written evidences and hence, undermine the strength
and validates of oral traditions of a given community and its values. This changing socio-
economic scenario posed new challenges to the folk and their lore on one hand and on the
other, to the study of folklore itself as an academic discipline.
The challenge is twofold: Primarily, folklore is private when intimately shared
by groups in informal setting, but it is also most public of activities when used by
groups to symbolize their identity to themselves and others. (Baron and spitzer 1992:
1-2). While modernization advocates for universalization of life styles through market
economy, folklore reacts to it by increasing the use of oral traditions by groups to
represent themselves beyond their immediate communities. The sense of sharing
“group identity” if wide spread and strong it may lead to nationalism or if it is to be
shared by various groups in a multi cultural setup, it may generate polyphonic and
pluralistic identities, which eventually resort to an hierarchal but symbiotic
relationships for mutual co-existence. In this situation folklore exists not only in its
context (primary existence) but also out side its context (i.e. Secondary existence)
Thus, folklore as defined by Robert Baron and Nicholas Spitzer, “is the representation
and application of folk traditions in new contours and contexts within and beyond the
communities in which they originated, often through the collaborative efforts of
tradition bearers and folklorists or other cultural specialists.”
The Marxists perceptions on folk culture and working class:
The Marxists did believe in a type of ‘whole man’ living in primitive communism
who progresses in terms of acquiring complete control over forces of production and
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relations of production till he reaches the style of communism where he again becomes a
‘whole man’. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx argued that it was the destiny of the
working class to displace the capitalist system, with the dictatorship abolishing the social
relationships underpinning the class system and then developing into a future communist
society in which "the free development of each is the condition for the free development
of all." In Capital, Marx dissected the ways in which capital can forestall such a
revolutionary extension of the Enlightenment.
In the process the folklore and all his expressive traditions undergo decay or
degeneration. Ortuatay is the most prominent of the Marxist folklorists who stressed the
decay of folktale due to industrialization and capitalism. According to Marxists, each
culture goes into the devolutionary process in some of its traits by itself as culture in
general advances. The folk culture has its own inherent 'dialectical negation' which acts
for its devolution rather than it being stimulated by the elite or 'popular culture'. Marxists
explained the whole phenomenon by applying the concept of dialectical negation'.
"Dialectical negation is objective. It is the negation of one qualitative state and the
formation of a new one. It seems from the development of the internal contradictions of
a phenomenon and results from the 'struggle' between internal opposite forces and
tendencies; it is a connecting link between the lower and higher". It performs the function
because it is not simply the destruction of a certain qualitative entity, but also the creation
of something new. It is a negation in the course of which only that which has over lived
itself, which contradicts the new conditions of existence, is destroyed.
A specific feature of the law of negation of negation is thus the repetition of the
past on a new basis, a return as it were, to the old. "The negation of negation" according
to Lenin “is a development that repeats, as it were, stages that have already been passed
but repeats them in a difficult way, on a higher basis”. Thus the Marxist devolutionary
theory accepts the degeneration of all types of political, religious, social, ideologies or in
a word, social consciousness which is at the superstructure level, whenever there is a
change in the basis or in the production relations. The negation occurs continuously and
the negated state repeats or comes back exactly the same but of higher level. For
example, the belief system and associated practices that are prevalent in hunter-gather
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(primitive) economy is negated and new forms of belief dogmas take place in the feudal
economy by incorporating some elements of the old but in new ideology.
It can be surmised from the above discussion that the Marxist folklorists believed
in two aspects of folklore. Firstly, folklore is a collective behaviour and its fundamental
character is in some way inherently opposed to be dominant social order of state
capitalism; Secondly, it has a "decline" element within it and more so explicit in
advanced capitalism where folklore itself is victimized and rendered largely important.
The Western Marxists represented by the Frankfurt tradition (members include-
Aronowitz, Benjamin, Jameson, Zipes and Williams) view the nature of folklore as
potentially oppositional to the dominant culture and define folklore as a cultural domain
that is itself under constant and competent attack from the hegemonic socio-cultural
social order. Following this premise, they think of folklore as a largely historical
phenomenon associated with pre-capitalist modes of production, hence, socially
marginalised and at the verge of decline.
In Marxist theory and Socialist literature, working class is often used
synonymously with the term proletariat, and includes all those who expend either mental
or physical labor to produce economic value, or wealth. It thus includes both lower-class
workers and middle class workers, including knowledge workers and white-collar
workers who work for a salary. This definition differs from the popular conception,
because it excludes the extremely poor and unemployed, which are called the
lumpenproletariat. Karl Marx defined the working class or proletariat as individuals who
sell their labor power for wages and do not own the means of production. He argued that
they were responsible for creating the wealth of a society. He asserted that the working
class physically builds bridges, craft furniture, grow food, and nurse children, but do not
own land, or factories. A sub-section of the proletariat, the lumpenproletariat (rag-
proletariat), are the extremely poor and unemployed, such as day laborers and homeless
people. The term, lumpenproletariat, was originally coined by Marx to describe that layer
of the working class, unlikely to ever achieve class consciousness, lost to socially useful
production, and therefore of no use in revolutionary struggle or an actual impediment to
the realization of a classless society. In Marxist theory, the borders between the proletariat
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and some layers of the petite bourgeoisie, who rely primarily but not exclusively on self-
employment at an income no different from an ordinary wage or below it – and the
lumpenproletariat, who are not in legal employment – are not necessarily well defined.
Intermediate positions are possible, where some wage-labour for an employer combines
with self-employment. While the class to which each individual person belongs is often
hard to determine, from the standpoint of society as a whole, taken in its movement (i.e.
history), the class divisions are incontestable; the easiest proof of their existence is the
class struggle – strikes, for instance. While an employee may be subjectively unsure of
his class belonging, when his workmates come out on strike he is objectively forced to
follow one class (his workmates, i.e. the proletariat) over the other (management, i.e. the
bourgeoisie). Marx makes a clear distinction between proletariat as salaried workers,
which he sees a progressive class, and Lumpenproletariat, “rag-proletariat”, the poorest
and outcasts of the society, such as beggars, tricksters, entertainers, buskers, criminals
and prostitutes, which he considers a retrograde class.
To demonstrate the oppositional character of folklore, Stanely Aronowitz (1973)
took the children's games. According to Aronowitz, children's games constitute a
potential counter-hegemonic practice because “most child's play has embedded within it
elements of non-hierarchical and non-authoritarian relationships”. As in “ring around a
rosy” for example, there are no leaders and there are no followers. The participants join
hands and move in a circle, a form of sheer equality. The circle is broken when all fall
down. There are no winners and no losers, Jack Zipes studied folktales to demonstrate
folklore process from Marxist point of view. In Zipes view folktale is a major source of
ideological perception in pre-industrial period for the rural folk. With the onset of early
industrialization and the spread of literacy and printing, the folktales began to decline and
most of them were converted into fairy tales in the ideological service of dominant
classes. Gramsci, another notable Western Marxist argued that folklore represents the
collective consciousness of peasantry and basically an orbital for progress. Gramsci, in his
essay “On Education”, Gramsci argues for a system of common schooling that would
teach children "scientific ideas" which would "conflict with the magical conception of the
world and nature which [children] absorbed from an environment steeped in folklore."
Gramsci points to three forms of social expression: language, common and good sense,
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and popular religion and folklore. Language, common sense, and folklore are all alike in
that they contain the "fossilized" remains of past conceptions of the world, along with the
potential for innovation in the generative process of culture. Folklore and common sense
are similar, but folklore is less dynamic and more localized, while common sense finds its
origins in the intellectual strata of the dominant class. In turn, "good sense" is elaborated
when the ‘healthy nucleus’ of common sense is developed to the level of class-
consciousness in the masses. Inculcating good sense should be the goal of the system of
education and the party. But how do we raise the individual from the provincialized
paradigm characteristic of folklore to the realm of ‘good sense?’ Gramsci believes that
the various fragmentary and episodic conceptions of the world contained in folklore must
be ‘criticized’ so as to ‘make it a coherent unity.’ He continues, “The starting-point of
critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as
a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces,
without leaving an inventory.” Hence, he proposes a social theory on cultural domination
popularly known as ‘cultural hegemony’. It proposes that the prevailing cultural norms
of a society, which are imposed by the ruling class (bourgeois cultural hegemony), must
not be perceived as natural and inevitable, but must be recognized as artificial social
constructs (institutions, practices, beliefs, et cetera) that must be investigated to discover
their philosophic roots as instruments of social-class domination. That such praxis of
knowledge is indispensable for the intellectual and political liberation of the proletariat,
so that workers and peasants, the people of town and country, can create their own
working-class culture, which specifically addresses their social and economic needs as
social classes.
Another notable Italian Marxist Sociologist Luigi Lombardi-Satriani (1974)
criticized Gramsti for associating folklore only with the peasant sectors of society,
explicitly arguing for the thriving existence of urban folklore. Further, while accepting
Gramsi’s concept of cultural hegemony, he assigns a far more active and vital role to
folklore as counter hegemonic activity, although he associates folklore almost exclusively
with the subordinate classes of society. Folklore, according to Satriani, actively contests
the hegemony of dominant social context into two modes: Firstly, folklore has the
capacity for direct contestation, i.e., it can directly symbolize and 'name’ the class enemy
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in the manner of political jokes and protest songs. Secondly, folklore can also offer
indirect contestation ‘by its very presence’ i.e. subordinate classes produce a number of
autonomous behaviors largely in the generic realms of ritual and material culture whose
very existence limits the total hegemony of political products from the dominant social
order. Thus for Lombardi-Satriani, the very existence of folk food or folk religious
practices seem to constitute a ‘defeat’ for the capitalist food industry and the official and
bourgeois Catholic Church, respectively.
Similarly, Paul Willis in his work, Learning to Labour points out at working class
culture as the ‘oppositional culture’ that working class males create in school. His
ethnography is replete with references to other locales in which his subjects live, such as
the home, street, and dance hall, but he chooses the school environment because this is
where class conflict has a day to day manifestation, and it is where the critical
development of class consciousness occurs among nonconformist youths, a
consciousness and set of orientations they take to the s h o p floor after leaving school.
Willis’s key argument resides in the irony that a cultural form created from resistance to
dominant class indoctrination in the school becomes the adaptive means of
accommodation to factory life. Centrally he is concerned with a representation of the
oppositional culture among his twelve lads, and with some shifting to shop floor and
home environments (discussions with parents) to show how the focally represented
oppositional culture created from school experience resonates in these other critical
locales (the home locale and parental perspective show that the culture is generationally
reproduced, but also that the school, not the home, is its site of formation; the shop floor
locale shows the continuity of oppositional culture in the work context and its very
different consequences). There he presents verbatim dialogue depicting the boys’ reaction
to their reading o f his book. They can relate to their own words, but not to Willis's
interpretive elaborations of their worldview. Appropriately, he argues that this failure of
recognition is itself a validation of their rejection of ‘mental’ labor, which scholarly
products embody, in favor of ‘manual’ labor and immediate experience, an opposition at
the heart of working class culture.
Thus, traditional readings of Gramsci and other Western Marxists have interpreted
their attitudes towards folklore and mass culture as fundamentally dismissive. It is
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thought that these scholars wrote off folklore as limited and fragmentary collections of
views derived from past epochs that are inherently opposed to the project of Marxist
critical theory.
II. Folk culture of working class since 1980s:
Orality being the driving force and expressive traditions of everyday life
being the chief characteristic feature of the subject of folklore, one is confronted at
‘public space’ level with the notions of relevance, acceptance and appropriateness in
situating ‘folk’ on one hand and on the other, categorisation of their lore into genres with
the preknowledge of literate stratum. Often this create conflictual realm within the
subject of folklore and gets mediated through the coinage of terms like ‘ethnic genres’
and ‘analytical categories’. In the process of doing so, the literate sections of the society
represent the ‘other’, i.e., the oral society in ‘Orientalist fashion’ that oscillates between
image of folk as ‘pure, innocent, untouched etc.,’ and ‘barbaric, uncivilized, rustic’, so
on and so forth. So what is being ‘represented’ is not what ‘existed’ in the oral society,
but exists within the literate society. This forms the basis for ‘public sphere activity’ of
‘bureaucratic state’ or ‘welfare state’. Conception of folklore in this premise may not lead
to democratisation process which Hebermas envisaged as the ‘core’ of ‘public sphere’,
but may lead to the very hegemonic construction of ‘literate’ over ‘oral societies’ at
‘public space level’.
Primarily, folklore is private when intimately shared by groups in informal
setting as artistic communication. But it is also most public of activities when used by
groups to symbolise their identity to others. While modernisation advocates for
universalisation of life styles through market economy, folklore reacts to it by
increasing the use of oral traditions by groups to represent themselves beyond their
immediate communities. The sense of sharing “group identity” if wide spread and
strong it may lead to nationalism or if it is to be shared by various groups in a multi
cultural setup, it may generate polyphonic and pluralistic identities, which eventually
resort to an hierarchal but symbiotic relationships for mutual co-existence. In this
situation folklore exists not only in its context (primary existence) but also outside its
context (i.e. secondary existence) Thus, public space of folklore is the representation
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and application of folk traditions in new contours and contexts within and beyond the
communities in which they originated, often through the collaborative efforts of
tradition bearers, folklorists or other agencies involved in promoting folk and their
lore.
Thus, as modernist enterprise folklore in public sphere rested on the maxim of
difference which privileged elite over folk and literacy over orality. The literate (or
the elite) claim the right to represent folk and there by present the lore as they wish
and not as what it ought to be. In other words, folklore for modernist exists not with
the folk but in their own minds. It exist more so as their perception than as reality
experienced by folk.
Global economic, political, social, environmental and cultural interdependence is
not a new phenomenon. But it is certainly increasing dramatically at this point in history.
Decisions taken by people and their agencies in one part of the world influence people,
companies and governments in other parts of the world overnight – sometimes positively,
too often negatively. Broadly speaking these changes are referred to as the phenomenon
of globalisation.
Globalisation is the process by which existing political, cultural and economic
boundaries are being superseded and the world is becoming more and more like village
where cultures are getting interconnected through contact. Globalisation also encouraged
recognition of relativism, reflexivity, and referentiality (Smith 2001:230).
Economic globalisation is associated with the rise of world finance markets and free
trade zones resulting in the global exchange of goods and services and inturn the rapid
growth of transnational corporations. Two basic concepts are intrinsic to the process of
economic globalisation: 1) Post-Fordism and 2) McDonaldism.
David Harvey (1989), a neo-Marxist, analysed Capitalism and proposed a
periodisation of phases in capitalist development. The era of capitalism stared with
‘primitive accumulation’ as the principle of capitalism and entered through it to
industrialisation. During most of the twentieth century industrialisation passed through
the era of Fordism, which is named after the automobile manufacturer Henry Ford. The
concept of Fordism refers to the industrial mass production of standardised goods based
on automated assembly-line production system, which churned out millions of identical
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cars. Fordism emphasised the 'dehumanisation of the workforce'. All autonomy taken
away from the workforce and is put into machinery and management. Harvey suggests
that we have entered an era with a different logic of production. This was in response to
crisis in capitalism that emerged during the early 1970s. Markets were saturated with
goods. Tax revenues were down and inflation was out of control. Capitalists responded
to this with a system, which Harvey calls as ‘flexible accumulation’. The term is broadly
analogous to the concept of ‘post-Fordism’ used by other scholars. The key to flexible
accumulation is ability to rapidly change product lines and to manufacture small batches
for niche markets. In order to do this, manufacturers make use of smaller number of
adoptable multi-skilled workers, information technology and computerised production
systems. They also deploy advertising and other strategies in order to continually
generate shifts in demand for new and trendy products. By increasingly changing
product lines and encouraging fads and fashions, the wheels of consumerism and
capitalism are kept turning.
George Ritzer (1996:14-22), a post-modern Sociologist, devolved the concept of
McDonaldisation based on the general premise of Marxian and Weberian concepts. Ritzer
defines McDonaldisation as "the process by which the principles of the fast food
restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as
the world". This domination involves rationalization of the fast food industry where the
process involved become more efficient, calculable, predictable and controllable.
These four factors, which Weber also saw as determining the domination of bureaucracy
in modern society, has two effects. Firstly, it creates a society that is highly rational and
routinised and secondly, helps to create multi-million dollar industries such as
McDonalds.
A McDonaldised society is based on four value-loaded factors, which influences
the make-up of modern society. The first factor, the dominant one, is efficiency. Ritzer
defines this as "the best possible means to innumerable ends that have been
institutionalised in a variety of social settings". As in Weber's work, bureaucracies were
to dominate modern society, as they were the best possible solution to the growing
problem of inefficiency in a more complex and unorderly society. Ritzer, in his work,
sees McDonalds as the paradigm of efficiency as consumers become more rational and
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expect more efficient behavior from the social settings they encounter. McDonalds excels
in efficiency by firstly, creating an assembly line work setting, which quenches non-
rational behavior, and secondly, by producing finger food, drive-through windows and
limited menus which allow for efficient ordering of supplies and food delivery.
Efficiency in a McDonaldised world leads to higher profits and sales. However,
McDonalds is creating a situation in which consumers are getting turned into 'involuntary
unpaid labour' where they must queue for their food; clear away their own rubbish etc.,
and consumers must socialise themselves to become part of the routinsed world service-
workers. The other three factors that contribute to a McDonaldised society are
calculability, predictability and control. Ritzer defines calculability as "the tendency to
use quantity as a measure of quality". This idea is understood in McDonald's terminology
such as Big Mac, Large Fries etc., which emphasize size rather than taste. Predictability
is the idea "that people prefer to know what to expect in all settings at all times". For
both consumers and employees alike, there is a comforting feeling in the knowledge that
McDonalds are the same around the world and those McDonalds ingredients, tools for
food preparation and cooking etc. are uniform and unpredictable in any McDonalds,
which one may walk in. Control, like efficiency, has immense importance for
McDonaldised organizations in the sense that rationalisation imposes greater control over
the workforce than non-rationality. Rationalisation subordinate and de-skill the workforce
and increase standardization. Therefore, a McDonaldised society may lead to an unskilled
or increasingly deskilled labour force, which will have many implications for society as a
whole (Leidner 1993). Ritzier points to sites like universities, funerals, tract housing
development and motels as current areas of McDonald buzz activities. While he sees
some benefits in terms of service delivery and affordability, there is also negative side i.e.
the ruthless application of market principles and the erosion of authenticity and meaning
in social life. The concepts of Post-Fordism and McDonoldism can be applied to a wide
range of human activity, which comes under the influence of high-tech enterprise.
This resulted in globalising culture and Cultural globalisation is connected with
post-industrial economy getting organised around culture and cultural consumption, the
media and information technology. In other words, it is about the flow of information,
signs and symbols around the world and reactions to that flow. Culture and mass media
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have become more and more important in social life than before. Both economic and
social lives revolve round consumption of symbols and life styles rather than the
production of goods through the industrial labour. Image and space have replaced
narrative and history as organising principles of cultural production. According to Scott
Lash global society is ‘confined to the realm of culture’ (Scott: 1990:4); it is a cultural
paradigm, a ‘regime of signification’ in which ‘only cultural objects are produced’ (Scott:
1990: 5). Lash argued that cultural modernisation was ‘a process of cultural
differentiation and cultural globalisation is a process of cultural: de-differentiation’; and
‘while modernism is a discursive cultural formation, postmodernism is a “figural”
cultural formation’. Habermas calls this phenomenon as ‘refeudalization’ of the public
sphere. The transformation involved private interests assuming direct political functions, as
powerful corporations come to control and manipulate the media and state. On the other
hand, the state began to play a more fundamental role in the private realm and everyday life,
thus eroding the difference between state and civil society, between the public and private
sphere. As the public sphere declined, citizens became consumers, dedicating themselves
more to passive consumption and private concerns than to issues of the common good and
democratic participation.
While in the bourgeois public sphere public opinion, as per Habermas's analysis,
was formed by political debate and consensus, in the debased public sphere of welfare
state capitalism public opinion is administered by political, economic, and media elites
which manage public opinion as part of systems management and social control. In an
earlier stage of bourgeois development, public opinion was formed in open political
debate concerning interests of common concern that attempted to forge a consensus in
regard to general interests, in the contemporary stage of capitalism, public opinion was
formed by dominant elites and thus represented their own particular private interests. No
longer rational consensus among individuals and groups, in the name of common good,
forms the norm. Instead, struggle among groups to advance their own private interests
characterises the scene of contemporary politics. In this transformation, ‘public opinion’
shifts from rational consensus emerging from debate, discussion, and reflection to the
manufactured opinion of polls or media experts. Rational debate and consensus has thus
been replaced by managed discussion and manipulation by the machinations of advertising
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and political consulting agencies: ‘Publicity loses its critical function in favor of a staged
display; even arguments are transmuted into symbols to which again one can not respond by
arguing but only by identifying with them’.
For Habermas, the function of the media have thus been transformed from
facilitating rational discourse and debate within the public sphere into shaping, constructing,
and limiting public discourse to those themes validated and approved by media
corporations. Hence, the interconnection between a sphere of public debate and individual
participation has been fractured and transmuted into that of a realm of political information
and spectacle, in which citizen-consumers ingest and absorb passively entertainment and
information. "Citizens" thus become spectators of media presentations and discourse, which
mold public opinion, reducing consumer/citizens to objects of news, information, and public
affairs.
New Socio-economic Formations - Towards Struggle to produce Class:
Globalisation is bringing forth new social formations gradually replacing the
social stratification of the pre-modern and modern social order. As such, social structure
based on production relations and varna-jati paradigm is increasingly becoming
irrelevant due to the fact that occupation associated with caste is no longer reflective but
often remains symbolic per se for communities and groups. According to Scott Lash the
modernist class formation is at decline giving vent to new emergent classes based on
post-industrial relations. Fundamentally, two social formations are emerging, one
harvesting the fruits of globalisation, and the other, reaping the evils of globalisation.
Those who are getting benefited from globalisation is ‘newer, post-
industrialist middle classes with their bases in the media, higher education, finance,
advertising, merchandising and international exchanges’. Globalisation can thus be
seen ‘ in terms of a symbols and legitimisations which promote the ideal interest of
new, “Yuppified” post-industrial bourgeoisie’ (Bertens: 1995: 214). This bourgeoisie
is too massive to qualify as an elite yet it is one of the driving forces behind the
process of globalisation. The culture that these ‘post-industrial middle classes’ produce
and consume is based on the maxim of ‘de-differentiation’.
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However, globalization also created new problems. The economic forces are
becoming increasingly obdurate and marginalize weak groups. With the result inequality
is increasing, financial crises are being exacerbated, the cultural identity is being re-
shaped, community and family ties are being broken down and global crime is on the
increase. Many people are frightened by some of the visible signs of globalisation, such
as closure or privatisation of government undertakings and corporations resulting in large
scale retrenchment of the workforce; relocation of personnel in private companies;
instability in financial markets; worldwide enforcement of cultural changes through
effective marketing of cultural products. This fear is caused by the lack of faith in the
possibility of ordinary citizens to influence and alter the course of globalisation. Too
many citizens are becoming increasingly isolated from the global political debate,
because the international political elite has lost touch with the concerns and interests of
ordinary people. Therefore, Those who are getting affected by globalisation are forming
into imagined communities’ cutting across class/caste frontiers.
According to Zygmunt Bauman, “the inevitable and drastic individualisation of
what used to belong to the realm of the collective, leads directly to a post-modern politics
of communities. It is the post-modern ‘privatisation of fears’ that leads one to search for
‘communal shelters’ or ‘imagined communities’. Having no other anchors except the
affections of their ‘members’, imagined communities exist solely through their
manifestations through occasional spectacular outbursts of togetherness (demonstrations,
marches, festivals, riots) …. The right of an imagined community to arbitrate is
established (though for a time only; and always merely until further notice) in proportion
to the amount and intensity of public attention forced to focus on its presence’; ‘reality’
and hence also the power and authority of an imagined community, is the function of the
attention. Seeking an authority powerful enough to relieve them of their fears,
individuals have no other means of reaching their aim except by trying to make the
communities they imagine more authoritative than the communities imagined by others—
and this by heaving them into the centre of public attention” (Bauman 1992: XX-XXI).
In the contemporary Indian scenario, new folk formations based on communal or
otherwise are increasingly getting spurted out. The Hindu communal groups backed by
religious ideologies are formed using certain symbols and trying to legitimize their power
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through propagation of nationalism. The hinduttva identity linked with Ramajanmabhumi
and svadesi can be seen as an imaginary community’s reaction to the process of
globalisation. The symbolic actions such as rathayatra, padayatra and public display of
religious processions in the form of Ganesh nimajjanam, Dasera- navaratri celebrations
form the basis to enlarge membership of the community. Concomitant to this
development the so-called minorities be it Muslim or Christian were also forming into
larger imaginary communities to protect their own interests through propagation,
demonstration and ritualisation of their feasts and festivities in order to gain public
attention. The Iftar feasts and Eucharist feasts are being patronised by political and
apolitical celebrities for enrolling masses to form as fans. Similarly, social formations
based on socio-economic criterion are also found in the present day context. The dalit
movement can be cited as the best example for an ‘imaginary community’. It has
heterogeneous caste composition striving for the cause of egalitarianism. It primarily
focuses on one issue, bring together agents too heterogeneous in other respects to prevent
the dissolution of the formation once desired progress on the issue in question has been
achieved. This dissolution all the more inevitable since no single issue can demand the
total allegiance of postmodern agents, who diversity of interest effectively work against
complete identification with any single goal, political or otherwise. In Andhra Pradesh,
the Dalit movement especially with the goal of achieving reservation started in 1980s
with a remarkable force, but soon got split into madiga dandora and mala mahanadu
owing to the differences in the reservation policy formulations. Nevertheless, the dalit
movement used dappu (a percussion instrument) and folk art forms as symbols of
‘identity’. Proper names are progressively getting suffixed or prefixed with caste name
more so to figuratively ascribe the dalit status than to show off the actual status
associated with the jati paradigm. Similarly, most of the traditional expressive traditions
such as caste myths, legends, oral epics and rituals associated with rites of passage and
territorial rites are losing their functional and contextual nuances and becoming figural or
symbolic to express identities than their real rationale with which they are previously
associated. To establish their imaginary community status, the new folk formations are
resorting to popularise their symbolic cultural systems through the print and electronic
media. In the process, their lore is getting adjusted to the new media environments
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changing its text, content and performance styles. The post industrial bourgeoisie is
gaining more and more access to the traditional folk and presenting them to suit to their
own conveniences. Thus, the thin line drawn between popular and folk culture is being
faded away gradually in the wake of globalisation. These collisions have brought about
complexes and unpredictable results with major outcomes in public sphere.
One of the major outcomes is homogenisation. Social groups especially the
middle class worldwide tended follow the axiom developed on process of modernisation
which suggests that the “rest” catches up with the “west” and thereby eliminate or
minimise the contact with local cultures and life styles. This may then lead to a certain
process of cultural homogenisation, with different degrees of intensity according to the
economic circumstances pertaining in each particular case. In this way the capitalist
market economy may become uniquely exclusive one. Lifestyles and the relationship
with time and space might become uniform, in spite of certain partial adaptations, which,
because of their weakness, do not essentially question the prevailing homogenising
model. The other outcome is hybridisation. It can arise from the mixing of cultures and
lifestyles. This theme is exemplified in Lyotard’s (1984) image of urban cosmopolitan
or Homi Bhaba’s (1990) images of postcolonial migrants who share qualities of both core
and periphery. A major theme here can be the way that global forces and products are
adapted or modified by local conditions. Yet another outcome is de-difference. Through
globalisation the local cultures also reaffirm their identities. Ethnic revivals, and struggles
for indigenous rights; religious fundamentalism and racist backlashes can all be seen as
defensive reactions to globalisation. They have arisen from a desire to defend and
preserve valued ways of life against what are taken to be the pernicious effects of foreign
and global influences.
To surmise from the above discussion, folk and their lore is immensely being
affected by globalisation and changing its form and content day by day. As a result
even the verbal and non-verbal expressive traditions are struggling to produce identity
for which they stand. On one hand folklore as a whole is getting increasingly
marginalised, on the other it is getting popularised through mass media and entering
the realm of popular culture in the name of public sphere.
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