ABSTRACT
Antonio Gramsci's inventory of 'intellectuals of the rural type', described by him as mostly 'traditional', does not include the group of rural intellectuals he mentioned, namely, the folk artists who are socially designated to mediate status-quoist ideological trends, but who have a highly ambivalent position in being themselves part of the rural masses by virtue of their social status. The 'traditional intellectuals', the folk artists do not merely work as mediators of information, values, beliefs and programmes transmitted from above, they also record a passive resistance to the dominant hegemony that lies at the heart of the apparent traditionality of the people. The phenomenon of the continuity of folk forms and the folk artists as their proponents in own country is concerned, there can be no doubt that their persistent presence is linked to the continuation of the hegemony of the feudal and the pre-feudal in our society side by side with aggressive capitalist development.
