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Performance, Self-Definition, and Social Experience in the Oral Poetry of Sotho Migrant Mineworkers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

David Coplan
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Extract

Attempts to further the study of popular culture in Africa face the difficulty of defining “popular” as distinct from traditional or folk culture on the one hand, and elite or dominant culture on the other. The features that emerge most often from the discussion of these distinctions center on the relative degree of separation between performers and audiences, and on change from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft as a basis for social interaction (Bigsby, 1976: 18). These contrasts have frequently been identified with movement from a rural to an urban social world, where communal, multidimensional relationships give way to associative forms characterized by a segmentation of roles, divided loyalties, and the primacy of hypothetical or contractual relations over categorical and personal ones. Thus we value traditional or rural folk culture for its idealized capacity to give integrated expression to all aspects of human life, and symbolic representation to the essence of the human condition. In contrast, the sociology of urban art forms focuses on the relations between class and culture, the artist and his work, market organization and cultural production (Barbu, 1976: 47, 55). As anyone familiar with its urban scene should recognize, these distinctions are not workable for Southern Africa. Yet their very inapplicability highlights the importance of both the struggle for cultural integration and the flow of people and communication between urban and rural areas in contemporary Africa.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , March 1986 , pp. 29 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1986

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