SAC holds National Seminar on ‘Folk Culture: Local Traditions and Global Challenges’

Mangaluru: The Department of English of our College in association with the UGC STRIDE Scheme, hosted a National Seminar on “Folk Culture: Local Traditions and Global Challenges” on the 26th of November 2022 in Robert Sequeira Hall of LCRI Block. Dr Vincent Alva, Associate Professor and Principal, Milagres College, Kallianpur was the Chief Guest for the above programme. Rev. Dr Praveen Martis, SJ, Principal presided over the programme. Dr Alwyn D’Sa, Registrar & Controller of Examinations, SAC, Ms Severine Pinto, Organising Secretary, and Dr Charles V Furtado, Associate Professor and Director, Admin Block were present on the dais. Briefing on the concept, Dr Alwyn D’Sa, the Registrar of SAC said, ” Every society expresses itself through its folklore, which is often called ‘mother wit’. The beliefs, fantasies, hopes, and anxieties of a community are distilled through myths, archetypes, proverbs, riddles, lullabies, games, wedding songs, folktales and other manifestations of that group. Rites of passage often take the form of fertility cults, harvest celebrations, dances, and more. Folk culture has material, religious, cultural, and ideological components that find expression in the objects used by a group as a way of life, as rituals, impersonation of deities, as taboos, totems, and are also indicative of social control”. ” The intense interest evoked in this area in the nineteenth century is seen in Folkloristic Studies, Anthropology, and Ethnographic Studies that endeavoured to study the ’primitive’ mind. However, in a Poststructuralist context, Folk-Culture is also appropriated by Semiotics and Literature, since every act can be read as a ‘text’ in a dense field of multiple significations. It gives ample scope for scrutiny and analyses under Structuralism, Feminism, Gender Studies, Psychoanalysis, and other disciplines. Apart from the symbolic level at which folk culture is seen it has been studied for underlying structures as if there were a grammar to it, and also for variants, inversions, and analogous practices” added Dr D’Sa, He further said, “The very term ‘Folk’ and therefore the practices attached to it are problematic. Who for instance is ‘folk’? Alan Dundes reassures us that any group of people that share some common interests can comprise ‘folk’. This then immediately brings even contemporary groups for instance those at the workplace, and within families under the purview of folk. In that sense, even the jokes that are intrinsic to that group become a part of folk culture. Is ‘Folk’ restricted to rural societies in the past? How can we understand the overlapping of the ‘great’.
and the ‘little’ traditions in our culture – what G.N. Devy calls the Marga and the Desi? Is the absorption of the low-caste practices into those of dominant groups co-option, and appropriation that is becoming more pervasive? Does folk culture regulate societies through beliefs, institutions, and rituals, or does it provide an escape from a hierarchical and repressive social order?