Thursday, March 10, 2005

Tu jat di pasand



A rough translation of Bindrakhia's Punjabi song title is the farmers' choice (or the Jat's own choice) which makes you think the Bhangra lyric might be advertising butter, rather than celebrating beauty! Surjit Bindrakhia, a traditional Bhangra singer, died in 2003 but he's still deservedly popular to a folksy kind of audience.

For the folksy academic audience there's Citeulike which is very interesting, since you upload your own work and tag it with key words. It stores academic work like Flickr stores images. And so it develops its own folksonomy with interesting possibilities. Places like this have the potential to undermine academic power bases (although I doubt if they will). As Bourdieu points out, the education system carefully regulates academic capital, which is partly why there's not a lot of Bhangra beats in the classroom!

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