Folk Culture Analysis

Culture, of any given society, can be defined as its living reality, “a description of a particular way of life, which expresses certain meanings and values…” (Williams 1998: 48) . It can be seen as a site of multiple voices, conflicting meanings, values and a focal point of various kinds of struggle. And from this perspective, the constitution of subjectivity in culture becomes a crucial question. Cultural studies has opened up the field of literary studies to include non-written texts and cultural phenomenon of various kinds, including various aspects of indigenous culture and multiple voices emerging within it to probe into questions of subjectivity, identity, social meanings value and power. Focus of this chapter is on the folk culture,

Oral literature constitutes verbal or expressive literature which are spoken, sung and voiced forms of utterances includeing folk tales, folksongs, epics, ballads, myths, jokes etcetera. Folksongs exist in the “memories and voices of living individuals and represent the oldest, richest and liveliest traditions of poetry in India and introduce the modern reader to many non literate women poets of the country.”(Tharu, S. and Lalita 1991: 126).Like most folklore forms, they evolve through a process of oral transmission within community, learned, shared and transmitted within small groups. Women play a major role in any oral tradition. As is common in agricultural communities, women are the principal makers and users of these songs which form an integral part of community’s culture. Anthropologists, sociologists use folksongs as resources to understand the community, the socio-cultural space and to cull out important details about the community. It is worthwhile to note that women’s folk songs emerge in private space, forming a participatory genre, with no clear line between the singer and the audience, where one or two women start and others blend in. There is a certain kind of open-endedness that marks the textual body of these songs, which evolves through a process of oral transmission, intervention and interpolation. A reading of women’s folk songs provides an insight into women’s consciousness, reflecting women’s hopes, perceptions, ideas and desires. Women’s voice finds a distinct space in women’s folk tradition and can very well be understood as forming a