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CASAJUS Dominique
2nd head of research classifies (NATIONAL CENTRE FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH)
Member of the team of Ivry du Donatecarcenter.com
Anthropology / history of anthropology
tel: : 01 49 60 40 09
casajus@ivry.cnrs.fr
Research topics
Oralité, poem and writing, Frenchman and Touaregs in the Sahara Colonisation of the North Africa Comparative reflexion around the notion of courteous poem Homeric question
Fields
The Maghreb, Sahara
Research course
The tent in loneliness
The tent in loneliness. The society and the dead to Touaregs Kel-Ferwan, published in 1987 by the Home of the sciences of the man and Cambridge University Press, was dedicated to an evocation of stocks according to which is organised a touarègue Sahelian society. This book stayed for a long time over the fact that, in this nomads' society, tents belong to the women More details.... He also considered on the material reality of the tent. Its base is a curvilinear polygon which Touaregs sees as a circle. Four stakes of angle are respectively located in the southeast, in the southwest, in the northeast and in the northwest - exactly the disposition of four stars of Pegasus's Square when they are in zenith. Someone of my interlocutors said that God created this constellation, that they called " the roof " (Tafella), to learn to them to construct their tents. Four stars are retort of invisible themselves columns which support the celestial arch all over the world More details.
People of word
People of word. Language, poem and policy in touareg country was published in 2002. The title of work took note of the fact that the word of the interlocutors of the author had given with it the raw material. Touaregs is painted there in men of words, them who indicate precisely as « people of the language touarègue » (Kel-temacheq) or « people of word » (kel-awal). A word a very peculiar conception of which they make. They indeed favour a linguistic mode called tangält, term which the touareg-French Dictionary of Charles de Foucauld returns by : « words, under their visible sense, with another sense which is hidden ; words, besides their obvious and visible sense, of it with other one cryptic and hidden ». More details...
The tangält, as all linguistic manners described in the book, marks some abhorrence to hurl its word by the light of, to establish itself too abruptly as the author, to reveal across her something of one. The same abhorrence is in the poem, to which work dedicates two chapters (On poem, to see here and there ; on poetic diction, to see here...)
The catchword of the poem, in its elegiac mountainside, is esuf, term which indicates as well situation and feelings of the abandoning as places deserted by the men. To these acceptations which he shares with our "loneliness" , word adds a connotation which is peculiar to it : the one about whom Touaregs says that’« he is in the esuf », or that « the esuf is in him » (iha esuf or ih-é esuf), is accompanied in his loneliness by the memory of the instants run away when she did not live in it.
The esuf is the loneliness blended with lively feeling still by an abolished supporting presence. See frequently in dialogues as in poems, an expression which it is possible to translate by « he (or she) misses me » please let receive this connotation :« his esuf is in me »(ih-i esuf-nét). The esuf of the one who misses me is a loneliness full of its presence. The poets are supposed to compose their poetries when they are in loneliness, in esuf. There are even poems where the esuf is expressly introduced, in unison with " painful thought »(Emédran), as source of poetic inspiration.
The elegiac rooms which were gathered in touareg country on 1907 stage a solitary narrator, full of the memory of a left woman. In pictures probably inspired by the ancient Arab poem (for more details on this distant Arab influence...) it is seen wail on places today abandoned when she camped in the past, or to walk towards the distant tent where he hopes to find her. To endure loving passion, it is in the poetic language to have burning soul ; love is « burning as the summer wind », it is « more burning than from the earth on which is an inferno, more burning / that the bullets of the Turks accepted in full forehead » ; a burning thirst gnaws at the narrator, the heart is « similar in an ignited ember / on who breath the wind and that burns here and there ». There are many literary traditions for which loving passion is a fire which devours soul, but it is remarkable that this ardour, this thirst, from which the loving narrator suffers overlap here in the real thirst of which whoever risks suffering go the route in the desert. The esuf as desert as well as the esuf as loneliness make both be born a thirst, the one real, other one represented, who sometimes become confused. Witnesses these poetries of the great poet of Niger Kourman agg-Elselisu :
In my burning soul an inferno flashed / And I searched in vain the water of which to refresh myself...
The progression of this doleful narrator towards a distant tent where from will come to it perhaps the solace of its torment appears to me to be poetic transposition due to the fact that the men are always, all over their place in social game, moved away from the tent. The veil which they pull down on the forehead and on the mouth reminds every other minute of the loneliness from which they protect themselves, and where the most gifted draw the material of poems which comb them such as in its principle the society makes them be : far from tents.
The access to language is not with the eyes of Touaregs the same for all. Art of good - dialect is seen as the prerogative of the aristocrats, the only one whom leave them the miseries of time, while indelible one reputation of verbal rudeness becomes attached to the men of the common : the one to which you speak knows your place in social hierarchy and does not grant you the same listening depending on whether you are noble or vile. The book therefore had to bring back what Touaregs says about social hierarchy, that the purposes relate to the gift or to the past the memory of which little by little becomes blurred ; traces of this past in the warlike poems still gathered in 1907 by Charles de Foucauld are also found. Almost six thousand poetries of this old corpus show that, during wars between Touaregs, military hostilities were always accompanied by poetic hostilities, to the point where poems exchanged by the adversaries constituted a full element of war as much as one of his ornaments (More details).
Foreign wars gave rise on the other hand to poems, at least not of those who were exchanged with the adversaries. Unlike the wars of conquest where the aristocracy hunted glory, they were often lived as holy wars and sometimes driven by men of small birth.
North of Niger, these wars used an important role in the sultanate of Agadez, an institution which is known to us for the XVIIIth century thanks to local columns the last but one chapter of work of which offers a rereading. Reputed to go down from a black common law wife of the sultan of Istanbul, the sultan of Agadez is respected at the same time for his sanctity and despised because of his servile origin, ambivalence which marks its exteriority well in comparison with the hierarchy overlooking to the noblewomen the précellence the commoners and the slaves. Religious reformers as Jilani at the beginning of the XIXth century or Kaosen at the beginning of the XXth century shared the same ambivalence ; both drove holy wars on the occasion of which they tried to exceed internal cleavages in the touareg world, and both found it difficult to make forget in their contribules the mediocrity of their extraction.
If it is true that the touareg world is a linguistic group, they see therefore that this community of language has extensions at the level of policy. Indeed, the language which Touaregs shares is also the one which they employed in the poems that they contacted some others, in peace as in war, on this side as beyond borders which separated them some of others.
And these poems paradoxically show that the membership in the same community - linguistic and cultural - was perhaps more sensitive to them in these intestine wars weaved by connivance and bruissant of exchanged poems that in the silence of foreign wars.
Having spoken about everyday words, then about words which the poets put together according to the law of metre and of rhythm, work comes from it in its last chapter to those whom the Muslim men of letters murmur in low voice in an including language of themselves ; and these words are of a religion which makes Top of all, the aristocrat anxious about the nice - dialect as the man of the common in clumsy reputed word, equal in front of Very-. Because the Muslims whom are « people of the touarègue language » know well that the language of the Koran is not theirs : the ancient Greeks thought that the Gods spoke their language, them prostrate themselves five times a day before a God from whom the message was issued in Arabic. The language instal them in the specificity and compares them to all other men ;
the membership in the Bible-based religion makes them members of the community of the Believers and instal them in the universal. Double membership which is the lot of all Muslims, lived here with more acuteness due to the fact that one of these memberships is defined by the possession of a language. Muslims, Touaregs cannot be with impunity people of word.
Ongoing researches
Oralité, poem and writing
My job on the question of the oralité has as starting point a critical reflexion on jobs of Milman Parry and Albert lord. They remember how, in jobs become references for all specialists of oral literature, they showed that the Serbo-Croatian bards, far from memorising epic poems that they recite the evenings of Ramadan, recreate in every execution a new song. They have to for it develop in them mental mechanisms which allow them to fabricate poetries at request. Training consists less here in learning songs that learn to compose them in the emergency of execution. In a paradoxical way, although their songs are never the same from a benefit to the other one, they disclaim being the authors, and asserts contenting themselves with repeating word for word what delivered them tradition. It is because, allowed to guide in their improvisations by diagrammes deeply internalised forms, they have an impression, as said it almost one of them, because « song goes the route without their having too much to think of it ». Making Serbo-Croatian epic poem the paradigm of oral poem, Lord compared her as such to the poem written in a famous development of sound to Ape of Bruises :
For the composition oral poet the instant of simple percentage the performance. In the puts of literary poem there has simple percentage gap between has composition and reading and performance ; in the puts the oral poem this gap does not exist because, composition and performance are two aspects of the same instant. [] oral poem Year simple percentage not composed for drank in performance. [] to ape, performer, to compromise, and poet are one under different aspects drank the same time. Singing, performing, composing are facets of the same act.
This antithesis had a heuristic interest but they know today that it is wrong to think that only the writing is likely to show the gap (gap) about which speaks Lord. If disjunction between composition and performance is not necessarily affair of writing, it is difficult to disentangle what returns to it from what returns to the writing. It is what I undertook to make, by considering three literary traditions which loosen all composition of performance, and where the writing is present in increasing proportions : poem touarègue, who is almost completely unaware of the writing, although Touaregs has an alphabet (see here) ; the archaic Arab poem, which was perhaps unaware of it but is known to us only by written stories ; poem troubadouresque, who was not indeed unaware of it but still made his place in the oralité. (more details here and there)
Frenchman and Touaregs in the Sahara
I am interested moreover in conditions in which Frenchmen and Touaregs got into contact, in the course of the XIXth century and at the beginning of the XXth century. What led me to consider of enough near the destiny of two characters who played in this meeting a distinguished role : Henry Duveyrier and Charles de Foucauld. Two names which it is rather natural to link. On one hand because we owe them the first works of largeness on Touaregs. On the other hand because life linked them. Duveyrier was the reporter of the committee who, in 1884, allocated the gold medal of the Society of geography to the one who was still called the viscount Charles de Foucauld. Both men were later linked by a big affection, to the point where Duveyrier seems to have felt abandoned when Foucauld left in 1890 in the Hatch of Notre-Dame of Snows. Feeling of abandonment which could not be foreign at its tragic end in 1892.
Regarding Foucauld, it is first possible to wonder how this peculiar character had been accepted and received by Touaregs (more details). He did not convert them as he had had naivety to hope for it, but them in his obscure night worked without knowing it to make happen the light (more details). There was therefore, between Foucauld and its guests of Hoggar, complex reports, where from affection was not away, but where misunderstanding was always present. René Bazin, the author to whom we owe the first important biography of the character, did not receive this complexity (more details). He also underestimated the importance of his scientific work (more details on the scientific work of Foucauld) and on the poems which he gathered and translated).
Duveyrier was of 18 years the elder of Foucauld. From 1857, while he was only 17 years old, a short journey had driven him to Laghouat, excursion a recently reissued newspaper of which he drew : The newspaper of a trip in the province of Algiers. Then, on June 13th, 1859, he left the oasis of Biskra for a second Saharan trip which would end in Tripoli on September 2nd, 1861. Over about twenty-seven months of this trip, he had crossed more than seven among Touaregs Kel-Azgar, whose lands of course stretched between Fezzân and mountains of Hoggar (more details...) . In 1864, he published Touareg of the North, work which was worth it the gold medal of the Society of geography of Paris and made for the posterity the explorer of the country touareg - announces that it concerns the plate which the Society of geography affixed to the discreet and grey tomb where it rests in the graveyard of the father Lachaise. The end of its trip had been dramatic. Hit to his arrival in Algiers of an illness which left it several weeks without memo and without reason, he had no force to prevent his guest, the doctor Augustus Warnier, to hoard his notes and to begin writing the report which claimed the general Government of Algeria. It is this report which became Touareg of the North, so that question settles to know who is the true author of the book (more details).
Independently of the questions which ask the circumstances of its writing, this book marks an important date in the development of the stereotype in the light of which, today even, Frenchmen receive Touaregs. This stereotype has a rather particular architecture because, as Paul Pandolfi showed it, « the apprehension of Touaregs not [was never made] in a simple relation in two terms, in a relation of face to face between Us (= Europeans) and Others (= Touaregs). There is gift always, in an implicit or explicit way, a third term, a second other who allows to institute a relation not having duel but triangular ». Heuristiquement fertilises, this notion of« triangular relation »confers a founder character on the article where Paul Pandolfi brought it to light (see this article ; see also, by the same author, « The building of the touareg myth »). Second "other one" , in Touareg of the North, it is the Arab, depreciated where Touareg is rented ; in other writings of colonial epoch, it can be also the black stay-at-home. The stereotype could seem benevolent in relation to Touaregs ; but besides the fact that, as Paul Pandolfi underlines it, alone the desire to divide to reign inspired it, it had tragic effects in the recent past as Very Touaregs.
Later, the name of Duveyrier appears regarding two Saharan Utopias (where it set especially out to show the risk which their possible realisation would make run to the Saharan populations) : the transsaharienne train line ; and the realisation of an inland sea in the Sahara (for a recent work on the Utopia of the inland sea). Then he got lost little by little in the denunciation of a senoussiste danger then widely imaginary. Jean-Louis Triaud had already examined his role in the development of the « black legend » of Sanûsiyya, and I followed this job.
The case of Duveyrier also lights us on the role of the saint - simoniens in the colonisation of Algeria. Charles Duveyrier, the father of Henry, was, indeed, one of the fellows of Prosper Enfantin ; he had been even part of the apostles whom the supreme holy Father of the family - simonienne had gathered in April, 1832 in the property of Ménilmontant to lead with them a conventual life there (more details on the reports of Duveyrier with Childish). If Henry broke saint from his youth with the faith of the friends - simoniens of his father, it seems to have internalised some of their ideals, probably without receiving them as such. That's how he kept all his life the phantasm that colonial expansion could remain peaceful and fraternal firm about which had dreamt first saint - simoniens. It brings closer to him to Ismayl Urbain - another represents the Saint-Simonianism - with which he corresponded. Foucauld had managed to transmute the despair in what the believers call the aspiration for sanctity ; Duveyrier also knew despair, and dawn did not come to him. April 26th, 1892, a revolver at the hand, he devoted himself in night. All researches on Henry Duveyrier were synthetized in a biography appeared in 2007 : Henry Duveyrier. A saint - simonien in the desert.
Main collations and critical notes
1987. Éric Guignard, Touareg Udalen. Made and models of consanguinity, on 1984, in The Man, 103 : 144-145.
1989. Maurice Bloch, From Blessing to Violence. History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina of Madagascar, on 1986, in The Man 109 : 152.
1990. Edith Turner, The Spirit and the Drum. In Memoir of Africa, on 1987, in The Man 113 : 171-172.
1990. Philippe Descola, Gérard Lenclud, Carlo Severi, Ann-Christine Taylor, The ideas of anthropology, on 1988, in The Man 114 : 143-146.
1991. Ghabdouane Mohamed, touaregs Poems of Ayr., on 1989, in The Man 119 : 151-152.
1994. Is the hypercube good to think ? (Regarding Barbara Glowczewski, Regarding the Dream in law at the Aborigines. Myths, rituals and social organisation in Australia, on 1991.), in The Man 130 : 111-118.
1994. Wendy James and Douglas H. Johnson (éds)., Vernacular Christianity. Essays in the Social Anthropology of religion presented to Godfrey Lienhardt, on 1988, in The Man 129 : 206-208.
1994. Jean-Claude Passeron, sociological reasoning. The space not - poppérien of natural reasoning, in The Man 130 : 137-140.
1997. Marcel Griaule, Descent of the third Verb, on 1997, in Newspaper of the Africanists 67 (1) : 186-188.
1997. Jean Spruytte, ancient Libyan Harnessing : experimental Saharan archaeology, on 1996, in Newspaper of the Africanists 67 (1) : 199-200.
1997. Hassan Jouad, The unconscious calculation of improvisation, on 1996, in The Man 142 : 125-126.
2000. Jean Lambert, The medicine of soul. The song of Sanaa in the Yemeni society, on 1997, in The Man 156 : 280-282.
2000. Caterina Pasqualino, to Say song. The Gypsies flamencoes of Andalusia, on 1997, in The Man 156 : 299-301.
2002. Tal Tamari, The cliques of Western Africa, on 1997, in Notebooks of Africain Studies, 165, XLII-1 : 191-194.
2002. Frederica Fogel, Memo of the Nile. Nubiens of Egypt in migration, on 1997, in Notebooks of Africain Studies, 166, XLII-2 : 405-407.
2003. Sahelian variations on an incestuous topic (Regarding : Geneviève Calame-Griaule, loving Tales, cruel tales of Sahel of Niger, Paris, Gallimard, on 2001.) the Man 166 : 193-200.
On 2003 Sophie Caratini, The Saharan education of a black kepi : Mauritania 1933-1935, on 2002, in The Man 167-168 : 359-361.
2004. Mark highway. Anspach, In load of revenge. Elementary faces of reciprocity, on 2002, in rural Studies: 169-170.
2006. Claude Calame, poetic Practices of memory. Representations of space-time in ancient Greece, on 2006, in Archives of social sciences of religions 136.
2008. Laurent Barry, The consanguinity, on 2008, in The life of ideas.
2008. Michèle Baussant, Pied-noirs : memo of banishment, on 2002, in site of the Centre of social history of the Mediterranean world.
