The Strains of Strife: Understanding Conflict through Irish Songs (Europe) and Assamese Folk Songs (Asia)
The Strains of Strife: Understanding Conflict through Irish Songs (Europe) and Assamese Folk Songs (Asia)

Summary/Abstract: Folk songs encapsulate contemporary society’s cultural life. Folk songs have been used by many historians to better comprehend the culture and traditional consciousness of people who left just a few written records of their lives. As a result, folk songs can reveal a lot about their history, culture, values, and societal advancement. Folklore is a body of expressive culture that encompasses folktales, folk music, superstitions, beliefs, and other cultural expressions exclusive to a community. A folk song, on the other hand, is a song that belongs to a community’s or region’s folk music, and can have a variety of regional features. Folklore has been classified in a variety of ways, with Dorson (1972) dividing it into four categories: i) oral tradition, (ii) material culture, (iii) social folk customs, and (iv) traditional folk arts. This paper tries to explore the changing sensibilities in popular culture, particularly in the field of folk music, and the forms in which it is expressed and used as a tool to resist the status quo. This manuscript focuses on the folk traditions of traditional Irish music and Ulster Orange music in Northern Ireland and the co-existing folk music of the Koch Rajbonshis in the Assam region of North-Eastern India, trying to highlight the attached identity of the groups/community in both regions.

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