Singing and Retelling the Past

Bāuls in Conversation: Cultivating Oppositional Ideology

“…Those perspective tend either to emphasize women as politically, economically, and religiously devalued and powerless or "to consider subversive speech, however contextually constrained, as possessing actual acute potency in particular situations and the further potential to alter existing power structures" (2002: 179). See also Narayan (2008), Gold (1992), Grima (1992), and Kelting (2001) for a few other examples.…”

“…What we can learn from such a study is the ways in which particular ideologies are brought to life and how individuals apply and adjust those ideologies in creative ways. I draw on insights from scholarship on the contextualization of narratives and songs (Bauman 1977;Bauman and Briggs 1990;Narayan 1997Narayan , 2008, everyday narratives (Ochs and Capps 2001), and the self-creating aspects of life story (Lamb 2001) and discuss the intersections of philosophy, songs, and life events of two individuals who identify themselves as Båuls in order to highlight how the philosophy and songs resonate with and shape their own lives and choices. I draw particularly on the work of Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps who suggest that "everyday conversational narrative [is] a site for working through who we are and how we should be acting, thinking, and feeling as we live our lives" (2001: 16-17) and that "central to the narrative perspective is the moral stance assumed by tellers and protagonists… about what is good or valuable and how one ought to live in the world" (45; emphasis in original).…”