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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