The body as a figurative code in luo popular culture,vernacular literature, and systems of thought.

Abstract

"Popular culture is commonly viewed as a process of producing meanings from social experience as well as the way such meanings are expressed by respective groups of people in their daily lives. Popular culture (as opposed to “high culture”) may be viewed as folk culture that is favored by many people. This notion of popular culture encompasses a people's systems of thought and also embraces the cultural meanings that are woven into their language. Popular culture may also be conceptualized, in terms of Antonio Gramsci's concept of “hegemony”, as a site of struggle over the meanings of social experience. This position views popular culture as a site of struggle between the forces of resistance of subordinate groups and the forces of incorporation of hegemonic groups in society. In this regard, popular culture emerges as a culture of conflict that constructs oppositional meanings under conditions of social subordination. Whatever definition employed, popular culture is always contrasted to something else. The notion of “otherness” is always present. But what happens when this “otherness” consists of oppositional cultural meanings of a group of people framed and “marginalized” as subordinate by the ideology of a hegemonic foreign political power? What kinds of meanings are produced when popular notions and texts (sources out of which they produce meanings) of such a subordinate group are en-coded into the “master narrative” of the dominant group? What kinds of conceptual problems and negotiations come into play when creative artists of such a subordinate group are caught between the need to capture the codes of their popular culture and the need to be understood by an audience outside their cultural and lingual contexts? These are some of the issues I wish to explore by examining and analyzing popular notions and representations of the body of the Luo people of Kenya."(pg 1)