austraLasia 1037
Is it a Salesian word? If not then it ought to be!
TURIN/DELHI: 11th February 2005 -- When you first see it you might, if that was your upbringing, think of Rudyard Kipling's short story Only a Subaltern. This will at least place you in India. We will return there, but only after a detour to Turin, where you just cannot wander around the city without coming across, in almost equal measure, a Via(le) Gramsci and a Via(le) Don Bosco, a primary or middle school Gramsci and a primary or middle school Don Bosco, a Gramsci Library, a Don Bosco Library....
But is it a Salesian word, I ask? What word? Subaltern!
In terms of its frequency of use in Salesian discourse, possibly not. Several recorded hits, all from the same tome, a compilation by BOSCOM-India (there, I've brought you back to India) titled 'Shepherds' for an Information Age, an excellent manual on Media and Social Communications edited by Fr Peter Gonsalves, currently Web Coordinator of www.sdb.org in Rome.
Time, then, to tie together the weird linkages between Turin, a certain Gramsci, Don Bosco and India and hoist subaltern a little higher in the Salesian lexical can(n)on - there's a pun in there if you check out the meaning of petard, which hoist normally calls for!
At the beginnings of the 20th Century, Antonio Gramsci, a Sardinian, won a scholarship to the University of Turin. Leaving everything else aside, he was a rabid left-leaning socialist who bent many of the dispossessed FIAT workers in the direction of Moscow rather than Rome, where more right-wing moves were afoot. But his international claim to fame centres on the Italian word subalterno which he re-appropriated from military use (a rank below that of Captain) to apply to workers - he had FIAT workers in mind originally - who belonged, he said, to the subaltern classes, those who could not speak, could not organise themselves, who were economically dispossessed and just plainly marginalised. Since many would have been ex-Oratorians, the Salesian connection is not as tenuous as it seems.
It was not until the 1980's that this re-appropriated meaning really took off in English, and the University of Delhi was where it happened. It came along at just the right time to express Indian post-colonial social historiography and was made famous (again) by an outsider, a third world woman, in her own understanding, but with academic privilege - Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who wrote Can the Subaltern Speak?
It is from that point that Subaltern Studies spread, and spread wide and fast and respectably, to Ireland, to Latin America, further North still to Canada, and throughout South Asia. Communications theory took it up, so did linguistics and subaltern communication (subaltern discourse contrasting with dominant discourse) is on any decent linguistics and/or communications programme at tertiary level these days.
Somehow, I think that the appropriation of subaltern into Salesian discourse is excellent, and a possible way of re-reading Don Bosco's conversation with the dispossessed young lower classes of Turin, and subsequent Salesian communication with subaltern groups anywhere; maybe subaltern is as good as you'll get for a 21st century gloss of poor and abandoned.
You will find this, and much more, in a revised second update of Salesian Thesaurus and Translator's Glossary on the homepage of www.bosconet.aust.com , just under Don Bosco himself! Download it now in zip form.
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AustraLasia is an email service for the Salesian Family of Asia Pacific. It also functions as an agency for ANS based in Rome. Try also www.bosconet.aust.com and Lexisdb
