writing empire, underwriting nation: discursive histories of kabyle berber oral texts

writing empire, underwriting nation:discursive histories of Kabyle Berber oral texts

JANE E. GOODMANIndiana University

In this article, I explore how colonial, nationalist, and media interests con-verge around the collection of oral texts. Moving from the French colonialproject of collecting native lore to the nationalist project to recover indige-nous heritage to the embedding of village songs in contemporary world mu-sic, I examine how oral texts from Algeria's Kabyle Berber region have beenvariously configured as signs through which social differences are imaginedand hierarchically ordered. I foreground the history of intertextual penetra-tion between North African poetic productions and Western aesthetic catego-ries, [genre, intertextuality, oral text, colonialism, world music, Algeria]

French Colonel Adolphe Hanoteau had a mission. As part of the pacification pro-gram France was carrying out during the 1860s in its newly conquered territory ofKabylia, Hanoteau had been charged with finding out what the natives in this recalci-trant Algerian Berber region were up to. In addition to monitoring their activities fromhis various administrative positions in the Bureaux Arabes, as the offices for indige-nous affairs were known, Hanoteau set out on a personal quest to collect Berber po-ems and songs.1 The result: a nearly 500-page collection of more than 50 poems andsongs through which, the colonel maintained, the Berber spirit could be unveiled. Acentury later, Kabyle geology student Hamid—soon to be better known through hisstage name Idir—set off on a related trek. School vacations would find him journeyingto Berber villages to mine not stones, but songs. Polished, set to guitars and percus-sion, and engraved on vinyl, Idir's songs hit the world music stage in 1973, launchinga cultural revival through which Berbers would "rediscover" their identity and origins.During the hundred or so years between the two figures, several dozen collectors—Kabyle and French alike—traced a similar path, generating a plethora of anthologiesand recordings of Berber "oral texts," as they are called today.2

In this article, I critically examine the shifting relationship between claims of un-mediated transparency and configurations of social difference. I suggest that a collec-tor's claim of transparency—whereby an oral text is thought to capture unreflexivelyan essence or spirit of a people—is the very place where an investigation into the con-struction of difference should begin, for such a claim presumes rather than problema-tizes the relationship between a poetic text and its producer(s). In addition, it distractsattention from the contingent relationship between the collector and the situation ofcollection. Attending to these relationships, I show how poems have been entextual-ized, recontextualized (Bauman and Briggs 1990), or replicated (Urban 1996) in waysthat allowed them to participate in constructions of Berber difference at discrete his-torical moments. In so doing, I situate oral texts as constitutive ingredients of threemajor metadiscursive traditions: the French colonial and social science literatures,

American Ethnologist 29(1 ):86-122. Copyright © 2002, American Anthropological Association.

writing empire, underwriting nation 87

the discourses of Algerian nationalism and Berber subnational identity, and the worldmusic circuit.3

Scholars from several disciplinary perspectives have recently been paying re-newed attention to the ways cultural texts figure in constructions of identity.4 BenedictAnderson attributes to "cultural products" the power to generate the attachment, love,and even willingness to sacrifice themselves that peoples feel toward their nations(Anderson 1991:141). This works in part, he suggests, through the "primordialness oflanguages/' which "loom . . . up imperceptibly out of a horizonless past" (Anderson1991:144) to produce a deep sense of attachment and affiliation. Anderson goes on topropose, in true Herderian fashion, that people imagine themselves as connectedthrough language via their understandings of and experiences with shared texts, espe-cially poetry and songs, which produce "a special kind of contemporaneous commu-nity" (Anderson 1991:145) that is generated largely through a common semantics:Only English readers (or Indonesian, as the case may be) can understand particularculturally resonant phrases, which "bring goose-flesh to the[ir] napes" (Anderson1991:147) but remain untranslatable and thus impenetrable to outsiders. Andersontouches on the important notion that poems and songs may simultaneously evoke anunmediated, "primordial" quality of language and foster feelings of community. Heremains locked, however, in a Saussurian model of an ideal speaker-hearer and a ho-mogeneous linguistic commons that prevents him from addressing the more compel-ling questions of how, by whom, and in relation to what agendas such texts aresemiotically crafted so as to produce an impression that they are unmediated whilegenerating powerful effects of identity and difference.

Moving from national to transnational imaginings, Arjun Appadurai has pro-posed that scholars attend not only to shared texts but also to the ways particular"communicative genres" are valued—to the "pragmatic genre conventions [that] gov-ern the collective readings of different kinds of text" (1990:10). He allows for the pos-sibility that texts may be translated and reinterpreted within different contexts and thatthe social uses of texts may vary. He does not, however, address the initial question ofwhy communicative genres should constitute a site where identity is negotiated. Ap-padurai calls attention to the fact that the pragmatic uses of texts merit attention, buthe never pursues such an analysis, merely hinting at its possibilities.5

Scholars of postcoloniality—Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (1989) and Bhabha(1994), among others—have complicated anthropologists' understandings of howcultural texts serve to configure social relationships in colonial and postcolonial con-texts. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin draw attention to three textual processes throughwhich colonial selves and others are interrelated: silencing (of the postcolonial voiceby the imperial center), abrogation (rejection of the metropolitan power and refusal ofits categories), and appropriation (adaptation of the metropolitan language to de-scribe alternative cultural experiences and expectations). These processes can act to-gether, opening up the possibility of ambivalent and sometimes vexed relationships tocolonial regimes of power—and to the modes of identity they enable—that Ander-son's framework closes off. In a similar vein, Bhabha (1994) describes the condition ofmimicry that colonialism fosters, whereby the colonized Other must be imagined asboth radically different from the colonizer yet similar enough to require continuoussurveillance. This process can be turned on its head, as the language and tools of thecolonizer are used to undermine colonial domination (even as their usage signals anirrevocable penetration of colonial practices). Although these scholars allow for thepossibility that one can simultaneously identify with and against dominant modes ofpower, their concern (as with much of cultural studies) is primarily with the literature

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produced and published by individual authors (typically elites) in response to colonialsituations. They implicitly retain a Eurocentric distinction between literature and oraltexts (more typically referred to as folklore). Oral texts figure not at all in Bhabha'swork and appear in Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin's account only insofar as they inspirealternative modes of organizing narrative structure in indigenous writing (thus furnish-ing "raw material"—supposedly unmediated—for more critical accounts).

My analysis is grounded in the proposition that oral texts derive symbolic powerfrom their ability to move between both sides of a potent metadiscourse on text/writ-ing and speech/orality. This metadiscourse assigns fixity, authority, and conscious-ness to text/writing while attributing to speech/oral ity an ephemeral, unmediated, andnatural status. Such a dual association endows oral texts with fluid signifying possi-bilities. As texts, they are invoked to demonstrate the existence of a shared culture orsubculture and to formulate representations of group identity (Silverstein and Urban1996). Because they generally contain features that set them apart from the flow of or-dinary discourse (for example, rhyme, rhythmic parallelism, framing devices, etc.),oral texts can easily be decontextualized, or lifted out of one interactional setting, andrecentered or recontextualized in another (Bauman and Briggs 1990; see also, Bau-man 1992, 1993, 1995; Briggs 1993a; Briggs and Bauman 1999; Hanks 1989; Kap-chan 1996; Raheja 1996; Urban 1996). These easily manipulable signs of group iden-tity have thus been of special interest to a range of parties, from colonial collectors tonationalist cultural leaders to ethnographers. As oral productions, oral texts arethought to move directly from producer's breath to collector's pen, untainted byeither the producer's conscious awareness or the collector's touch (see Herzfeld1996). Because oral texts are assumed to originate in their producers, the ways inwhich collectors participate in their construction are easily camouflaged. The focus,in other words, is directed to the text itself as a fixed, preexisting cultural object, andnot to the complex strategies through which it is recontextualized or recreated. Oraltexts are thus powerful and persuasive naturalizing devices: Through sophisticatedrhetorical strategies that make the texts seem authentic, the broader agendas that mo-tivated their collection to begin with are masked.

I focus my discussion around five arenas in relation to which Berber oral textshave been constituted: the French pacification and civilizing missions of the late 19thcentury, European liberalism, modern Western literature, folklore and nationalism,and postcolonial identity.61 conclude with an analysis of New Kabyle Song (la nou-velle chanson kabyle), as Kabyle Berber world music has come to be called. In settingNew Song in relation to previous collection practices, I foreground the ways in whichits creators both drew on and broke with earlier entextualization processes, opening anew passage from collector to author.

civilizing mission: Colonel Adolphe Hanoteau

Adolphe Hanoteau (1814-97), colonel in the French army, officer in the Legionof Honor, and a member of the Order of Leopold de Belgique, published Poesiespopulaires de la Kabylie dujurjura in 1867, ten years after the conquest of Kabylia.7

The seal on the book's cover announces its mission: Two cherubs surround an ovalcapped with a crown, with an eagle at its center and the letter N (for Napoleon) on thebottom. Framing the eagle, and curving up the sides of the medallion, are four words:Administration, Law, Science, and Art. The spirit guiding the colonial missions ofHanoteau's day—the heyday of France's mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission)could not be more clearly depicted. Administrative, legal, scientific, and culturalknowledge had become as important to the colonizing enterprise as military force.


Over the course of Hanoteau's army career, he became an expert in all four areasinscribed on the medallion.8 His impressive three-volume set La Kabylie et les cou-tumes kabyles (Kabylia and Kabyle Customs [Hanoteau and Letourneux 1872-73])lays out Kabyle "customs" in the areas of agriculture, industry, medicine, administra-tion, and law at a level of detail that no work has tried to capture since.9 In the workdiscussed here, Hanoteau's primary concern is literature—one of the branches of art.Knowledge of a people's literature required mastery of the corollary domain of lan-guage, for which Hanoteau had already developed a grammar and devised a roman-alphabet transcription system (Hanoteau 1858).10 Hanoteau states these twin objec-tives in no uncertain terms:

In offering to the public this collection . . . I had a dual objective: to furnish originaltexts to those wanting to study the Berber language, and to make known the popula-tions who speak this language, not by the appreciations—always subject to error—of aforeigner, but through the works of the spirit. [1867:i, emphasis added]11

What does Hanoteau mean by "works of the spirit," and what does he think these"works" are communicating? His interest in poems rests on the premise that poetryconstitutes an unreflexive site in which Berbers unknowingly unveil the state of theirsouls, all the while believing themselves "sheltered from our curiosity . . . depicting]themselves naively and unselfconsciously'' (Hanoteau 1867:i). Hanoteau outlinestwo basic uses for these unconscious revelations. First, they allow the French to gleaninsight into native perceptions of the colonial presence and serve as a benchmarkagainst which progress in the pacifying mission could be measured (especially valu-able because the natives had "no sense of history" [Hanoteau 1867:vi]). Second,Hanoteau looked to the poems to assess the level of the population's primitiveness,which would in turn justify the colonizer's presence.

Hanoteau makes these twin goals of the civilizing mission seem natural throughthe classificatory device of genre, as he allocates to each goal its own genre of poems.Part 1 contains "historical or political poems" in which "the expeditions of our colo-nizers, the acts of our administration are presented from the Kabyle point of view . . .a kind of counterpart to our bulletins" (Hanoteau 1867:xi). Part 3 is said to contain"women's poems and poems about women"; it also includes any poem related tomarriage, magic, or sexuality, whether authored by men or women. Despite its mixedauthorship, Part 3's topics are indexed to women and used to assess the degree towhich the Kabyles would require civilizing. Opening Part 3 is a long essay decryingthe status of Kabyle women, which Hanoteau considered "among the most miserable,a testimony to the degree to which this society is lacking in civilization" (Hanoteau1867:287). Between these well-defined sections lie the poems that would not fitneatly into Hanoteau's classificatory rubric, grouped in Part 2 under the unassumingtitle "Poems of different genres."

Although Hanoteau claims that Berber poems are unmediated "works of thespirit" (1867:i), the way he entextualizes the poems makes salient the mediating cate-gories through which he views Kabyle society. He injects these categories into the po-ems through titles and authorship attributions. The "political and historical" poemsare attached, with one exception, to named male authors.12 More than half were ma-rabouts (religious clerics, indicated by the title "Si") or had accomplished the pilgrim-age to Mecca (indicated by the title "El-Hadj"). Claiming descent from the Prophet,marabout men generally received some form of Quranic education and had someknowledge of Arabic; those who had completed the pilgrimage often enjoyed high so-cial standing and greater-than-average wealth. The poems attributed to women, in


contrast, are never connected to individuals but are deemed to be either collectivelyor anonymously authored: "[This song] is the exclusive product of women . . . itwould be very difficult to find the author" (Hanoteau 1867:397 n. 1). Further,Hanoteau names each poem in the male genre ("political and historical" poems) toevoke European journalistic or historical genres: for example, "Campaign of 1857" or"Insurrection of 1856." By contrast, poems in the section on women are unspecifiedand undated, entitled simply "Song/' "Poem/' "Another Song." Clearly, in the eyes ofHanoteau, Berber men could be at least minimally differentiated around the emergingliberalist criteria of education and religious training, while women were seen only aspart of an undifferentiated mass.

The gendered way in which Hanoteau handled questions of genre, authorship,and naming also provides clues to his own position in Kabyle society and hints at thekinds of collection strategies he may have employed. He apparently did not have di-rect access to many of the poems themselves, let alone to the "spirit" said to animatethem. Poems passed through at least two individuals, author and transcriber, beforereaching Hanoteau (1867:v-vi). Women's poems are further mediated: Becauseabout half of the poems in the "women's" section are attributed to named maleauthors—including some that are recognizable today as part of a female repertoire—it is likely that men recited for Hanoteau's informants the poems that they thoughtwomen sang.13 Given that Hanoteau, as a French Christian male, was triply distancedfrom the social contexts in which women would sing these poems, he may have casthis own lack of access to the women as their lack of original authored material. Hisundifferentiated treatment of women's poems may also relate to a Western aestheticnotion that original creation can only be individual; Hanoteau was probably not look-ing for collective processes of poetic authorship that might transpire among a group ofKabyle women.

That mediation of poems was far from transparent is further suggested by the un-derstated presence in the collection of Hanoteau's friend and informant Si Moula nAit Ameur, a marabout with whom he worked intensively for three years (and whowas a primary informant for Hanoteau's 1872-73 work). Although Hanoteau offi-cially acknowledged Si Moula in the volume of poetry only for furnishing transcrip-tions in the Arabic alphabet, it is likely that he was among the marabouts who, asHanoteau indicates (1867:v-vi), recruited poets, wrote down their poems, and trans-mitted them to the colonel—no doubt with their own spin. A later account by Hano-teau's son Maurice suggests that Si Moula may not have been trusted by the commu-nity: He lived in a two-story house built by the g4nie militaire (army corps ofengineers) that featured three outward-facing windows (Hanoteau 1923)—almost un-heard of at the time, when Berber houses typically opened onto an interior courtyard(see Maunier 1926). This house was burned to the ground during a regionwide upris-ing in 1871 (Hanoteau 1923), four years after the poetry collection was published—atelling commentary on the tenuousness of the marabout's, and perhaps the colonel's,acceptance by the society.

In short, classing poems by genre, title, and author implicitly encoded and natu-ralized imperial constructions of an imagined Kabyle social order. By evoking an un-mediated native spirit, Hanoteau was able to mask his own presence and locate theneed for the French mission in the Kabyles. Through the entextualizing devices dis-cussed above, Hanoteau also began to constitute the natives in relation to emergingbourgeois criteria such as educational and religious training, a sense of history, or thecivilized treatment of women. These goals are rearticulated in an extensive subtext offootnotes, which construct Kabyles as irrational and prone to exaggeration and violence.


For example, "Lament for Dahman-ou-Me^al" (1867:154-160, Poem 16, Part 1) wassung by women following the firing-squad execution of a Kabyle man namedDahman after he had shot and wounded a French lieutenant. The women accuse theFrench of executing Dahman in front of his mother. In small type below, Hanoteau re-writes the story, claiming that Dahman's execution was carried out appropriately—that is, with no family members present (1867:154 n. 1). Hanoteau's outrage in theface of what he perceived as native fanaticism leaks into the otherwise descriptivetone of the account: "Dahman . . . was simply a fanatic indignant to see Christiansdirty his village with their presence" (1867:155 n. 1). This is the only poem in Part 1(''historical and political poems") attributed to women. Hanoteau is so caught up insetting the record straight that he does not appear to realize that through this genre(which he correctly labels adekker), women have a forum to comment on political af-fairs.

Hanoteau's attempt to justify Dahman's execution clearly addresses readers be-ginning to conceive of themselves as bearers of civilization through pacification. Gra-tuitous violence had to be expunged from the French self-image and cast onto theKabyle as irrationality, fanaticism, or overdramatization. Hanoteau addresses (andconstitutes) the emerging French bourgeoisie in such asides throughout the work. InHanoteau's representations, it would be hard for any reader to miss the Kabyles'crude sexuality: 23 of the 25 poems in the section on women deal with love, desire,and sex. So crude is their sexuality, in fact, that Hanoteau does not translate some po-ems into French but glosses them in Latin—not because there is no French equivalentbut because Hanoteau would no doubt blush to repeat them before a civilized audi-ence. The attentive reader will also discover that the Kabyles never wash their clothesand don't take them off until they disintegrate (1867:26 n. 3; 398-399 n. 2); thatwhen the French captured native women, they "gave them new clothes, of whichthey were in dire need" (Hanoteau 1867:29 n. 4); that the Berbers try to exorcise de-mons, believing that they are the cause of illness (1867:415-416 n. 2); or that theKabyles think women without men are vulnerable to fleas (1867:428 n. 1). In short,the work's subtle embedding of intimate details about bodies and beliefs shows read-ers not (only) who the Kabyles are but also who the French are not. Such commentarysuggests that the civilizing mission Hanoteau purports to be describing may havedone as much to construct the civilizer as the other way around (see Stoler and Cooper1997).

In sum, Hanoteau's poetry collection participated in France's mission civilisa-trice in several ways. On a basic level, Hanoteau sought to devise subtler, bourgeoismeans of controlling the population by claiming to monitor its spirit. Art—one of thefour measures of civilization—would enable him to discover how the Kabylesthought, what they believed, what motivated them, and how they perceived theFrench. To find out, he attempted to observe the Kabyles in a place where he imag-ined them as showing their spirit unawares: their poetry. Finding out how theythought was important not only to monitor them better but also to explain the civiliz-ing mission to the readership. Hanoteau's selection and entextualization of poetry tar-gets an emerging French bourgeoisie receptive to the suggestion that its nation's con-quests rested on humanizing principles, not brute force. By imagining their nation as aprovider of clothing to women "in dire need," Hanoteau's readers could comfortablyjustify their capture in the first place.


liberalism: Si Ammar Ben Boulifa

Thirty-five years later, Kabyle schoolteacher Si Ammar Ben Boulifa (1865-1931)would look in on Hanoteau and craft a trenchant response.14 In his 1904 Recueil depoesies kabyles (Collection of Kabyle Poems), Boulifa sought to complete and correctHanoteau's perception of Kabyle women—and through them, of Kabyle society. ByBoulifa's day, the concerns of the colonial enterprise were shifting from pacificationto a liberalist focus on inclusion and exclusion (see Mehta 1997). France's Berberpolitics was a primary site where this debate unfolded, as scholars, administrators,and missionaries scoured Berber regions for signs of proximity to Europe—republicaninstitutions, secular laws, entrepreneurial spirit—that would make them appropriatecandidates for assimilation (inclusion) (see Ageron 1960). The primary problem area,and the one where the exclusionary argument was made most powerfully, was thestatus of Berber women (see Clancy-Smith 1996,1998).

Boulifa entered this debate by erecting a densely authoritative scholarly scaffold-ing punctuated with references intended to demonstrate Kabylia's inherent demo-cratic spirit by linking Berber institutions and practices to the classical civilizations ofantiquity.15 In an introductory framing essay, he describes Kabyles as "borrowing . . .from Roman law its spirit" (Boulifa 1990:47); as being "at the sides of the Greeks,Romans, Persians, and Arabs" (Boulifa 1990:47, citing medieval chronicler IbnKhaldun); and as displaying a "purely secular" character (Boulifa 1990:51 ).16 Citingworks on Kabylia by authors from Strabo and Sallust to Ibn Khaldun to the French ori-entalist Masqueray, he contends that since ancient times, his society had operated ondemocratic and egalitarian principles: "The basis of Berber society rests, today as inthe past, on equality and individual freedom, without distinction of rank or sex . . .Animated by the most democratic spirit, the Kabyles do not forget that individual lib-erty is the most sacred thing" (Boulifa 1990:52, 56, emphasis added).

Boulifa contested the accuracy of Hanoteau's knowledge of Kabyle society, buthe shared the colonel's conviction that oral poetry was a transparent medium thattransmitted the spirit of the people: "In songs . . . [the Kabyle] betrays himself[T]here, he paints himself just as he is . . . . It's through the cry of the heart. . . that thepoet communicates the character and spirit of the people as a whole" (Boulifa1990:58). What Hanoteau got wrong, argues Boulifa, was not the notion that poemsunveil the soul. Rather, Hanoteau's interpretation was flawed. Drawing on selectedpoems in Hanoteau's corpus, Boulifa attempts to demonstrate how Hanoteau couldhave reached opposite conclusions.17

Although Boulifa's introductory essay presents Berber society in unabashedly lib-eral terms, the way he entextualizes the poems seems to contradict the lofty republi-can principles to which he professes allegiance. Boulifa's primary corpus contains108 poems of Si Mohand, a late 19th-century bohemian figure who developed a newgenre of personalized poetry about love and loss (see Mammeri 1969). This is fol-lowed by a second corpus of 161 poems of a similar genre whose authorship Boulifacould not authenticate, and a brief third section of one poem, which critiques theFrench administration.18 The poems are annotated by nearly 400 footnotes, addressedto an educated, French-speaking readership and containing detailed social and relig-ious histories, reflections on the colonial presence, and evaluations of Kabyle prac-tices. The footnotes do not depict an "essentially secular" (Boulifa 1990:51, citingSabatier) society but one structured through saint veneration and religious orders (see,e.g., Boulifa 1990:171 nn. 12, 13; 174 n. 41; 175 n. 48; 178-179 n. 81; 182 n. 112;183 n. 119; 185 n. 141) and punctuated by prayer and religious holy days (Boulifa 1990:178 n. 80; 180 n. 95; 191 n. 195). They do not describe a society "without distinction


of rank or sex" (Boulifa 1990:52) but a stratified and heterogeneous mix of blackslaves (1990:175 n. 51), Ibadites (1990:187 n. 161), and Jews (1990:187 n. 162), aswell as a hierarchy of maraboutic lineages, some more noble than others (1990:180n. 99; 193 n. 216). They do not emphasize transcendent principles but the minutiaeof which lives are constituted: how to make clove necklaces (1990:176-177 n. 64),apply kohl to the eyes (1990:196-197 n. 248), smoke kef (1990:173 n. 33), or con-coct a hashish mixture (1990:175 n. 50). The footnotes also supply detailed etymolo-gies revealing that the Berber spirit to be read in poetry, far from pure or unmediated,was shaped by the region's Roman (1990:185 n. 146), Arab (e.g., 1990:185 n. 146;187 n. 166; 189-190 n. 184), Spanish (1990:188 n. 170), and French (e.g., 1990:183n. 125) histories.

When it comes to women, Boulifa's notes are contradictory. At one point Boulifacomments on a love poem, arguing that the poet depicts men and women as equalpartners in love (1990:196 n. 240) and using this alleged equality to counter Hano-teau's claim that in Kabylia a woman is seen as only "an object of luxury, a beingmade solely to satisfy men's desire" (Boulifa 1990:196 n. 240, citing Hanoteau).Boulifa also attempts to interpret what might be considered problematic treatment ofwomen by casting Berber society in evolutionary terms in relation to Europe's ownpast: Kabyle women were no worse off than, say, women in 18th-century France orimperial Russia (Boulifa 1990:49). But most footnotes on women, too numerous tolist, describe them as beautiful but distant, provokers of unrequited love and desire.For example: "It was for [Saadia] that the poet sought to commit the worst sins—drinking alcohol, smoking tobacco—in order to calm his tormented heart that coulddo nothing but beg for Saadia" (Boulifa 1990:195 n. 236). When women refuse thepoet's love they are described as loose, even prostitutes (1990:188 n. 169).

In sum, both Boulifa and Hanoteau locate oral poetry outside the social order inan unmediated, unreflective, transparent realm where the people's spirit couldemerge unfettered. Attention to the way they entextualize the poems, however, showshow their collections work to construct specific political and ideological agendas. IfHanoteau looked to poetry to help him justify a need for pacification, Boulifa usedpoetry to depict Kabyle society through a liberalist lens that would set it on equal foot-ing with Europe. His professed adherence to republican ideals rests, however, on apalpable tension surrounding what—through liberalist eyes—would constitute basicinequalities and exclusions at the heart of his own society. These exclusions leak out,disorganized and almost unreadable, in footnotes, where the split between the loftyand the local is underscored, where descriptions of the dense web of social habits andpractices, of the complex interactions between religion, race, and gender, challengethe ideal-typical principles of freedom, equality, and rationality that Boulifa's framingessay so carefully erects.

literature, folklore, and nationalism: Jean and Taos Amrouche

For brother and sister Jean Amrouche (1906-62) and Taos Amrouche (1913-76),collecting poetry became a way to position Berber culture on a par with Europeanculture, not in terms of liberalist criteria but in relation to supposedly universal cate-gories of literature and folklore. At the same time, collecting poems began to define anew kind of otherness located within the self. Jean and Taos Amrouche situated po-etry in relation to a sense of fragmented duality within their own psyches, a state of in-ternal otherness at the core of their being. "I am a cultural hybrid; cultural hybrids aremonsters," Jean would say (Faigre 1985:134).19 For them, Berber poems—especiallythe songs of their mother—were a means of transcending exile to reach a state of cultural


and spiritual wholeness that they could imagine only through its absence (see Ivy1995). Their move was not idiosyncratic but part of a broader anticolonial nationalistcurrent emerging during the 1930s and 1940s, in which folk productions were in-creasingly associated with an "inner" or "spiritual" domain of culture that was consid-ered impervious to colonial penetration (Chatterjee 1993).

Algerian Berber Christians by birth, Jean and Taos were raised primarily in Tuni-sia, where they received a classical French education. They accentuate some of thecontradictions that came to characterize French-educated native elites throughout Af-rica. Jean was a teacher of French literature, a French-language poet, and a literarycritic; Taos was a singer and one of the first Algerian female French-language novel-ists.20 Both served as radio hosts in Tunisia, Algeria, and Paris, where Jean produced aseries of dialogues with prominent European literary figures and Taos developed sev-eral shows, including one in Kabyle entitled "Let Us Remember Our Country."21 Situ-ated within an avant-garde intellectual milieu peopled primarily by Europeans, Jeandeveloped a lifelong friendship with Andr£ Gide, had regular correspondence withClaudel and Mauriac, and communicated occasionally with DeGaulle; Taos waswell-acquainted with classical musicians Yehudi Menuhin and Olivier Messiaen,among others. Both collected, published, and recorded the songs of their mother as ameans of simultaneously orienting themselves to and demarcating themselves fromthe European culture that surrounded them.

Jean

In an introduction to Chants berberes de Kabylie (Berber Songs from Kabylia), his1939 collection of the traditional poems sung by his mother, Jean Amrouche maps thedoctrine of man's fall from grace onto his own experience of exile, imagining a lostparadise where body and soul are at one with nature and the cosmos. He endows thesongs of his mother and his forebears with the power to reconnect him with the ances-tral land and thereby restore him to a state in which duality is absent, to an "ineffableorigin, a Wholeness from which we are cruelly separated" 0- Amrouche 1988:36).Jean's discussion rests on a blend of Herderian romanticism, Durkheimian binarism,and elements of Christian doctrine. At one pole, the conflation of mother-nature-childhood-innocence produces an epiphany that Jean associates with divinity. At theother, European culture and civilization are linked to exile, fragmentation, and duality.

If through poems Jean seeks a return to an unmediated wholeness, he effects thisreturn through highly mediated metadiscursive techniques that reveal the ambiguitiesof his own positioning in relation to both Kabyle and French societies. For even as heassociates Kabyle poems with an unmediated natural realm, he simultaneously at-tempts to place them in a classificatory hierarchy of genres in which literature is asso-ciated with high culture and characterized by original expressions of universal, hu-manist themes, while folklore is seen as low culture, particularistic, and unoriginal.Seeking to demonstrate that Kabyle poems are comparable to Europe's high culture,he invokes similarities with the works of Baudelaire, Hugo, Claudel, Verlaine, Rim-baud, and Ungaretti.

Jean also employs translation strategies and genre attributions to configure thepoems as literature rather than folklore. For the first time, the Berber text is erased. Toconstitute the poems as literature, Jean makes them stand on their own in French. Ona visual level, the absence of Berber makes the book indistinguishable from any othervolume of original French poetry. This is reinforced by the generic framing of the col-lection: Jean groups the poems into sections titled with such familiar European head-ings as "Love," "Satire," or "Exile" (the latter section dedicated to Gide). Further, as in


European books of poetry (and unlike earlier Berber collections), no footnotes inter-ject sociological or linguistic commentary, which tends to orient the poems as itemsof folk culture through which readers can supposedly understand an indigenouspopulation. Erasing the Berber text also starkly reveals Jean's own unstated adherenceto a central metadiscursive premise that was an integral part of a more widespreadEuropean linguistic ideology: that the essence of a poem resides in a realm of pure sig-nifieds, outside its concrete realizations not only in individual performance but also inthe signifiers associated with a specific language. To reach this realm, Jean first de-taches a poem or song from the discourse of the individuals who recited it (here, hismother) and claims that it constitutes a shared item of Berber culture (see Urban1996); he then extracts it from a particular language and situates it in a transculturalrealm of universality, where it is thought to belong to humanity.22 At times, one won-ders whether Jean felt that the universalist themes he saw in the poems were bettercaptured by French than Berber: "To express an idea or a sentiment, or more pre-cisely, that constellation of sentiment and thought that animates [the poems], [the po-ets] do not call upon an abundance of forms, but on a brief suite of images and sym-bols. There is no formal link between these images, no term of comparison. No doubtthe [Berber] language itself did not put at their disposition a very developed gram-matical apparatus" 0- Amrouche 1988:31-32).

Attending to Jean's French translations of the poems reveals, however, not a uni-versal spirit but particular, culturally specific modalities of interpretation that can beunderstood in relation to Urban's notion of transduction—the transformations that oc-cur when carrying over one instance of discourse to a new context with intent to repli-cate the original discourse (Urban 1996).23 Working between Jean's French texts andthe Berber texts that were restored in the 1988 edition reveals that—in an attempt toreplicate the spirit of his mother's poems—he erased Berber metapragmatic conven-tions and substituted French ones (in an intersemiotic conversion). For example,poem 17 in the "Love" section (1988:122-123) describes a lizard on a wall watchinga lovely young girl, burning desire filling its silent eyes. The French poem opens withan added line that injects a first-person narrator whose presence must be inferred inthe Berber text: "If only I could become a lizard" (J'aimerais lizard devenir). The en-tire French poem is then voiced in the first person, culminating in lines that wouldviolate communicative norms associated with cultural standards of modesty if sovoiced in Kabyle: "I will kiss your tiny mouth, I will awaken you if you sleep." In con-trast, the Berber text voices the poem in the third person, desire distanced from thespeaker through its displacement onto the lizard: "He will kiss her tiny mouth, he willawaken her if she sleeps." Whereas a Berber speaker would understand that the poet'sdesire was voiced in the third person, Jean apparently feared that a love poem in thethird person would be unconvincing to a French reader, so he translated Berbermetapragmatic understandings into French through voicing and semantics. Such amove has crucial implications for any claim that the poems represent an unmediatedrealm of Berber culture, for the Other—here, the French reader—is metadiscursivelyembedded in the texts themselves. These poems are not the same as the ones Jean'smother sang to him but have been saturated by and ultimately rewritten through theconventions and expectations of another cultural universe.

Even as he orients the poems to the conventions of French literature, Jean continuesto claim that they are unmediated expressions of the divine that enter the world throughthe words of those seen as most in harmony with the cosmos—peasants, and especially,peasant women. The poets, for Jean, are conduits, unaware of what flows throughtheir poems: "It is certain that Kabyle peasants . . . never dreamed for a minute . . .


that they were singing the great pain of man expelled from Paradise" (J. Amrouche1988:36). Song and poetry are not learned, acquired, or the product of conscious re-flection, but rather "unstudied/' "instinctive/' and "effortless," emanating from a"Spirit of childhood" 0'Esprit d'enfance) through which divinity manifests in the world0- Amrouche 1988:44-45). In order for this spirit to shine forth, Jean effaces the inter-preter (in this case, his mother): "Her [his mother's] voice is present only to the degreethat it is necessary for the birthing of the melody on the sea of silence... . The listeneris put into direct contact with the beauty of the music and the naked richness of thewords. The message is transmitted to him without the voice that's singing or the inter-preter denaturing it by refracting it" (J. Amrouche 1988:55). Likewise, his mother'sstyle of singing is "not the result of study, is not created from without but is formed in-stinctively and from the interior " (J. Amrouche 1988:59); her voice contains an "an-gelic naivete" (J. Amrouche 1988:58). And the melodies are "untranscribable," con-forming "not to any canons but to the requirements of the heart, the ear, and the spirit"0- Amrouche 1988:52; see also 38, 51). Echoes of Hanoteau? Kabyle poetry— evenfor an educated poet—is still unselfconscious and unmediated.

In sum, if Jean were convinced that his mother's poetry could help him to recovera lost sense of oneness, to transcend the uncomfortable hybridity he experienced as aTunisia-raised Christian Berber Algerian writing in French, he could reach this state ofcommunion only through the very European categories from which he sought escape.Further, by locating his mother in unmediated relation to the cosmos, he precludesthe possibility that her experience might also be hybrid. Her own complex subjectiv-ity is utterly negated by Jean, for whom his mother's poems evoke only his own lack ofwholeness. In his eyes, his mother had a single culture; he did not.24

Taos

Taos Amrouche also situates herself as a "hyphen between East and West" (Am-rouche 1968b). On one side, she claims to be but a repository for an age-old, unmedi-ated oral tradition. Her mother's songs, which Taos recorded on six albums and per-formed throughout Europe, simply passed through her, she claims, as they hadalready flowed through countless prior generations. So as not to disrupt the purity ofthis age-old tradition, she refused to study solfege or vocal technique (Amrouche1968c). But while claiming that pure tradition flowed from an unmediated realm oforality, she configured the songs in complex relation to European folklore, national-ism, and the performance practices associated with classical music genres.

Taos displays less intellectual tension than her brother Jean when she categorizesher mother's songs as folklore because she associates folklore with the prestigious sci-entific and nationalist projects of accumulating and classifying historical, linguistic,and cultural knowledge.25 Her conviction that there was inherent value in classifyingthe songs of her ancestors was shaped in part by the nationalist notion that a publicdomain containing items of shared cultural heritage should be filled with Berber stock(see Goodman in press). Taos grouped the songs her mother may have sung for a vari-ety of occasions into an authoritative corpus of "95 prototypes," had them tran-scribed, and registered them in her name with the French copyright agency SACEM(Society of Authors and Composers of Music), where they acquired a new legalstatus.26

The scientific, classificatory discourse through which Taos situated her mother'ssongs also drew authority from the emerging disciplines of folklore, ethnomusicology,and anthropology, which erected such criteria as age, authenticity, or demonstrablekinship with other folk specimens as evidential tests to which scholars should subject


specimens in order to discern their cultural worth. Taos often invokes these legitimat-ing criteria in her metadiscourse about the corpus: Kabyle songs, she reports, wereconsidered by "expert musicologists" to be "among the most authentic and venerablemessages in the world"; these specialists situated the poems far back in time—"thou-sands of years, perhaps even to ancient Egypt" (Amrouche 1956).27 This association ofage, authenticity, and value was already present in the scientific community at thetime of Taos's first public performance, at the 1939 First Congress of Moroccan Mu-sic, where she reports that linguists and other "people of science" were interested in"what was authentic" in her songs (Amrouche 1968c).

Taos also orients the songs to the requirements of scholarly and nationalist pro-jects for a local folklore by situating them as oral. She does so in part via the discursivetechniques through which her recordings are presented. The recorded songs are givenFrench titles that generally identify each song with a broad universal theme: "Song ofExile," "Love Song," "Meditation Song."28 The French translation follows. The pres-ence of the Berber language remains primarily oral; although she sings in Berber, noKabyle text is furnished. Berber print appears only in a discussion of six "styles" identi-fied in the liner notes, which describe not the universal themes suggested by theFrench titles, but discrete melodic and rhythmic features. The notes also briefly dis-cuss the kinds of occasions at which a song would be sung. Each song is linked to aBerber style, the name for which is listed parenthetically after the title. The style indi-cation is generally the only Berber text on the album. After her first recording, the Ber-ber styles are never explained but simply appear under the (French) song title, authen-ticating devices that mark a song as folk.

In her performance practices, Taos displayed a more ambiguous relation to thefolklore project. Although she appeared at major international folk festivals, Taos trav-eled primarily in a classical music circuit. Her performance venues included the pres-tigious Theatre de la Ville in Paris and prominent churches and concert halls through-out Europe, where she cast herself as a cultural ambassador, a mediator between Eastand West: "I sing with the knowledge that these are great works of art, and I sing be-cause I bear witness, and because I would like to awaken both the East and the West,obtain an awakening of consciousness both among North Africans and among West-erners, and particularly the French"(Amrouche 1968c, emphasis added). Althoughshe claimed that her vocal style was instinctive and unaltered by learned techniques,her singing sounds far more operatic than folk; when I spoke with him in 1994,Kabyle music video producer Ammar Arab told me that her songs are unrecognizableto some Kabyles, and French talk show hosts De Beer and Cremieux compared themwith Gregorian chant when they interviewed Taos (Amrouche 1968c).29 In short, al-though Taos may attempt to replicate the Berber texts, she takes significant libertieswith the music—the very substance that was supposedly unselfconsciously flowingthrough her.

After Algerian independence, Taos's songs were increasingly situated as signs ofa precolonial Pan-African identity. Thus, in a 1966 interview with Dakar Matin beforeher appearance at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Taos quotesSenegalese President Leopold S£dar Senghor as saying: "What interested me the mostwas the unity of African civilization . . . to which the songs bear witness" (Institut duMonde Arabe 1994:106). In Algeria, however, Taos's work also began to be associ-ated with the problematic rise of Berber subnational consciousness. By 1969, she wasbarred from representing the Algerian nation at the First PanAfrican Cultural Festival.

In sum, the Amrouches' claims that poems index a realm of unmediated culturaland spiritual wholeness are articulated through metadiscursive techniques that speak


to the profound contradictions and dualities that characterize Jean's and Taos's expe-riences as expatriate intellectuals during a time when anticolonial nationalism was onthe rise throughout the colonized world. Their work begins to situate poetry as part ofan "inner domain" of "culture" (Chatterjee 1993) in which expatriates could find re-newal; as Chatterjee describes for India, culture is increasingly gendered female andassociated with women's expressive forms. The Amrouches' relationship to poetrycollection also suggests the emergence of a new kind of otherness located within theself and characterized by a fantasy of cultural wholeness that is imaginable only be-cause it is already lost.

In 1988, Mouloud Mammeri, a Kabyle intellectual who launched the postcolo-nial Berber press Awal, selected Jean Amrouche's Chants berbdres de Kabylie as oneof the first works to be reissued—with restored Kabyle texts.30

postcolonial identity (1): Mouloud Mammeri

On March 10, 1980, Mouloud Mammeri (1917-89) was to give a public lectureon the role of poetry in traditional Kabyle society—the subject of his newly publishedbook Poemes kabyles anciens (Old Kabyle poems).31 The talk was to take place atHasnaoua University in the city of Tizi Ouzou, the intellectual and commercial hubof Algeria's Kabyle Berber region. A crowd of more than a thousand had gathered, butMammeri never arrived: He was stopped at a police roadblock, brought before the re-gion's governor (wali), and informed that the event had been cancelled. The reason:"risk of disturbing the public order." At schools, universities, and businesses, the can-cellation sparked demonstrations and strikes that would rock the Kabyle region formore than two months. Matters came to a head on April 20, when, at 4:15 in themorning, riot police stormed university dormitories, a factory, and the local hospital.Armed with tear gas and clubs, they arrested hundreds and wounded many more.Subsequent demonstrations, often violent, swept the region. Echoes were felt as faraway as Paris, where some 600 demonstrated before the Algerian Embassy.32 Widelydiscussed in the French press, the events were reported to human rights organizationsincluding Amnesty International and the International League of Human Rights.33

Mammeri hoped his book would "serve as an instrument in the transmission ofBerber culture" (1980:47), but he could hardly have foreseen the catalytic impact thecancelled lecture would have on the Berber Cultural Movement. Although the periodof violence resolved, its memory mushroomed: The Berber Spring (Tafsut Imaziyen),as April 20 is now called, is commemorated unofficially in Algeria as well as in theBerber diaspora in Europe and North America where, among other things, the worksof Mammeri and other poetry collectors are displayed. "Traditional Berber poetry"has become a key signifier at such gatherings. At Berber Spring celebrations from Tizi-Ouzou to New Jersey, from Marseille to Montreal, crowds gather around exhibits ofpoetry anthologies new and old, searching the works for signs of their history. Vol-umes of verse out of print since the colonial era are reappearing on the market, newlyprefaced and annotated, and in some cases restoring "original" Kabyle texts to poemsinitially published only in French translation. The books themselves seem at least ascompelling as the poems they contain—the claim to a Berber history documented bytexts almost transcends interest in the contents of the texts.

Mammeri's 1980 collection of poetry represents a break with the works of hispredecessors in two fundamental respects. First, Mammeri attempts to extricateKabyle poetry from an ahistorical, essentialized realm, which he recognizes as a fabri-cation of colonial science. Second, via framing devices and translation strategies,Mammeri segments readers into two distinct audiences (Berber speakers and French


speakers), and for the first time addresses a contemporary Berber readership in Berberexclusively. In other ways, however, Mammeri perpetuates notions about an authen-tic realm of oral poetry, seeing his written collection as a necessary but impure trans-formation of this body of oral lore (Mammeri 1980:55-57).

An introductory essay in French is oriented primarily to colonial science, tak-ing up nearly every major ethnological theory put forth about the Maghreb, from14th-century writer Ibn Khaldun to British social anthropologist Gellner. Com-posed during the same years that Said was writing Orientalism (1978), the essayseeks to refute the ways in which Western science had turned Kabyle culture on itshead. Mammeri was perhaps also trying to extricate himself from orientalist formsof knowledge about the Maghreb that had informed his own early writings, whichdescribed Berber social organization as unreasonable, illogical, incapable ofevolving, lacking the prerequisites for nationhood, and eternally condemned toremain outside universality because of blind enslavement to family loyalties andclan ambitions (Mammeri 1991). By the 1980 volume, Mammeri had come to rec-ognize that ethnology—and its allegedly scientific study of African oral litera-tures—was a tool with which "Western tribes" (Mammeri 1980:13) built up aprimitive Other with which to contrast themselves:

Ethnological peoples can serve to enlighten men, the true, civilized ones, about thetimes of their savage past.... It is we who have demarcated the off-limit Indian re-serve, where provisional humanities continue to die while elsewhere unfold thehighly rational games of the true civilization.... Freedom, the power to act on a col-lective destiny, was the weighty privilege of the Western man; the others were nevermore than the unconscious protagonists of a preexisting harmony.... Our poemswere dead objects, mere arguments in the conceptual edifice erected by the Westboth to confine us and to understand itself.... But as subjects of this so-called objec-tivity we were in complete disarray. It wasn't just our skin or our sentiments that wereattacked, it was our reason.... It is to reverse this process that I wrote this book, in thehopes of preparing the grounds for more radical projects, so that one day the culture ofmy ancestors will fly with its own wings. [Mammeri 1980:14,15,47]

In Poemes kabyles anciens, Mammeri appropriates social science's theoreticalarsenal to spin Kabyle poetry into a new story. Drawing from major theories of NorthAfrican social organization, Mammeri sets Kabyle poetry into a four-part periodiza-tion of North African history: "The Time of the States" (16th century), "The Age of theTribes'' (16th-19th centuries), 'The Colonial Trial" (1830-1962), and "The PresentMoment" (1962-present).34 With this framework, Mammeri appropriates Westerncategories (relying, for example, on linear notions of time and on such dichotomies astribe versus state) in an attempt to give Kabyle poems the kind of history that earliercollectors denied, demonstrating not a transcendent "native spirit" but rather poeticgenres that shifted radically in form, style, and content from one historical moment toanother.

At the same time, like his predecessors Jean and Taos Amrouche, Mammeri situ-ates the poems as living documents passed down through sages (imusnawen), the lastof which (he claims) was his father. Yet, the social situations in which he himselfheard or read the poems figure very little in his analysis and are never part of theframes in which the poems themselves are presented. Positioning himself (as hadTaos) at the end of a long chain of poets, Mammeri sought to provide—via hisbook—an "echo" (Mammeri 1980:57) of the nights he spent with the sages in his vil-lage. If this echo was "impure" (Mammeri 1980:56) because fixed in writing, it was


also the only way for "Berber culture today [to] be an instrument of emancipation"(Mammeri 1980:56).

Although Mammeri geared his framing essay largely to French-educated audi-ences, his preface addresses a new kind of Berber reader—one capable of learningabout and transmitting Berber culture through a medium of print. Written in KabyleBerber, the preface is structured as a letter from Mammeri to Muhed Azwaw, a sym-bolic figure who represents the Kabyle.35 The letter emphasizes the contemporaryrelevance of tamusni (traditional wisdom transmitted orally through imusnawen),concluding that although its form has now changed, it remains a torch, a light thatmust not be allowed to die but rather must be continuously passed from one hand toanother, albeit via a different medium: "There are no meetings or reunions where youand your generation can learn tamusni in the way your ancestors learned it. Now, ta-musni is found in books. I wrote this book for you and your fellow travelers, Azwaw,so that it might serve as a pillar of support, a pillar upon which to build" (Mammeri1980:60).

Mammeri further segments French- and Berber-speaking audiences throughmetadiscursive framing of the poems themselves. The pages with Berber poems con-tain not a word of French. Even the footnotes are in Berber, and they are not trans-lated. The Berber notes include variants of the poems, parenthetical asides fromMammeri's informants, or Mammeri's explications of particular words, grammaticalpoints, or interdialectal relationships (e.g., Mammeri 1980:100 n. 39). On the pagesthat contain the poems translated into French, the notes (in French) identify place ortribe names, people, and events for those unfamiliar with the Kabyle geographicaland historical landscapes; notes on this side also reference earlier collections(Hanoteau makes frequent appearances).

Mammeri also constitutes the two audiences in the way he introduces the poems.He presents many Berber poems through reconstructed direct quotations, producingthe impression of a dialogue out of which a poem seems to emerge spontaneously.The use of everyday speech forms makes the poems seem "live": One can almost hearthe old poets conversing. In contrast, when he presents the poems in French, Mam-meri reproduces the overly generalizing framework he critiques elsewhere. Ratherthan using reconstructed dialogue, he often provides brief descriptions of the context,using the French pass4 simple, a formal literary tense (which by definition is neveremployed in speech). In a particularly vivid example, Mammeri introduces poem 20in Berber as follows: "One day Yusef was reciting poems. No sooner had he finishedspeaking, than a widow said to him, "And my [own] son, why didn't you speak of[praise, i.e., in your praise poem] him?" Yusef replied: "[Here Mammeri inserts thepoem]" (Mammeri 1980:98). When Mammeri presents the poem in French, this dia-logue is not reproduced. Rather, an intertextual link is established with the precedingpoem in the collection (and not with an imagined situation of enunciation) via literaryterminology; the speakers are distanced through indirect reported speech. The Frenchintroduction to the same poem reads: "The drama is not only a tragedy [reference toprevious poem], it is also a game. To a woman who complained that the poet hadn'tmentioned her son in his verse: [Here Mammeri inserts the poem]" (Mammeri1980:98). Moreover, in the French part of the text, Mammeri engages the Frenchpractice of using single poems to make ethnological pronouncements about Berbersociety. A good example is Poem 21 (1980:98-99), introduced in French as follows:"The acts of an individual, in a society without organized political power, engage thewhole group." This sentence is absent from the Berber side, which delves right intothe particulars of the situation in which Mammeri imagines that the poem was recited.


Mammeri, in short, configures two separate contexts within which the poems couldbe interpreted. In so doing, is he unselfconsciously reproducing literary norms instilledby his French training? Or is he slyly crafting a double message, decodable only by bi-lingual readers (almost exclusively educated Berbers): that he can write with the bestof the French (who, he apparently assumes, don't care about the particulars of per-formance) while offering performative specificity to those who can interpret it?

Although seeking to reclaim the poems as "living documents," as "part of the re-ality that gives meaning to the group that created them and, through the group, to [his]own existence" (Mammeri 1980:7-8), Mammeri tacitly acknowledges that they areno longer part of a "reality that gives meaning" (Mammeri 1980:8): "The book is in-tended not just to preserve [the poems] as 'indifferent documents' but to serve as aninstrument in the transmission of Berber culture, like the poems themselves oncewere'' (1980:47, emphasis added). But as Mammeri knew, because the Berber lan-guage was not taught in Algeria, only a fraction of the population would be able toread his collection in Berber. Was it for that reason that he began to provide tradi-tional texts to Idir and other contemporary singers? Perhaps Mammeri realized thatBerber culture was not ready to "fly with its own wings" from the printed page alone.It would require another medium.

postcolonial identity (2): Idir and Ben Mohamed

In 1970, a young Berber student—who would soon become known throughoutNorth Africa and the diaspora by his stage name, Idir—found himself crisscrossing theAlgerian hinterlands in search of the poems and songs of his ancestors. A year before,in July of 1969, he had attended the First PanAfrican Festival, held in Algiers to cele-brate the end of colonial rule.36 The PanAfrican Festival was conceived around theprinciple that "culture, [once] an arm of domination, is now a weapon of liberation"(Revolution D£mocratique Africaine 1970:41). Festival organizers invoked neo-Marxist ideology, embraced by almost every new state, to shift the locus of culturalproduction from a privileged, European-educated elite to "the people" (see, e.g., thestatement of Guinean President Ahmed Sekou Toure [Revolution Democratique Afri-caine 1970:11]; see also Fanon 1963:206-248). Festival publications appropriatedanthropological definitions of culture formulated by Malinowski, Sapir, Herskovitz,L£vi-Strauss, and others, if at times ambivalently, both to attest to basic human simi-larities and to locate under the universalizing rubric of culture a range of practicesthat had been labeled "primitive" or "backward" during the colonial era (Organisa-tion de I'Unite Africaine 1969).37 Although independence marked the end of overt co-lonial control over such "material" domains (Chatterjee 1993) as state administration,economic policy, and social welfare, it also opened up a propitious ground uponwhich a new form of subjectivity could emerge (Goodman 1998). As articulated bypolitical and cultural leaders throughout the African continent, this project involvedtwo dimensions. First, a "new man" would be decolonized through developing a criti-cal inventory of colonialism's effects.38 The emergent self, a cultural tabula rasa,could then be inscribed with a new identity predicated on a selective rediscovery ofthe value of its own cultural heritage (see Soci£t£ Nationale d'Edition et de Distribu-tion 1969:41 -42).39

Idir was powerfully moved by Festival events. When I spoke with him in 1996about the Festival, he told me: "I saw other human dimensions. I saw sweaty, satinyblack skin, tremendous expressive power in the music. . . . I asked myself, what is thisgreat power that has swept down on us, this great nation that has arrived with suchunbelievably rich folklore. . . . And I said to myself, but we too, we must have this


dimension somewhere, hidden, we just need to draw it out." So it was that vacationsfound him immersed in traditional music and poetry, learning new instruments andpercussion styles, discovering the rhythms of his own nation: "the spaces, thesounds . . . that make us vibrate, through which we can forge a personality" (Idir1996). On returning from one of his cultural pilgrimages, he composed a tune in-spired by the refrain of a story told by old women throughout Kabylia. He asked hisfriend, poet Ben Mohamed, to write new verses.

While Idir was crisscrossing the countryside, Ben Mohamed was learning towrite the Kabyle language in an unofficial class taught by Mammeri. He was alsoreading the works of Hanoteau, Boulifa, and Jean and Taos Amrouche, along with anyother Berber poetry that fell into his hands. Ben, too, had attended the PanAfrican Fes-tival: "It was there," he told me in a 1996 interview, "that I began to grasp what itmeant to belong to a culture." Immersed in African cinema and theater during the fes-tival, Ben didn't have time to attend the dozens of talks on postcolonial culture, iden-tity, and politics that took place over the 12-day event. But when these texts were sub-sequently published (Societe Nationale d'Edition et de Distribution 1969), Bendevoured them, connecting his own experience to writings by Memmi (1969), Ki-Zerbo (1969), Amilcar Alencastre (1969), and Rene Despestre (1969), among others.40

As Ben pondered Idir's request, he recalled a talk he had recently attended byFrench ethnologist Jean Duvignaud, who had just made a documentary film about theTunisian village Shebika.41 As Ben relates it, Duvignaud described how the film hadhelped Shebikans to transform the image they had of themselves. Duvignaud nodoubt drew on his 1968 ethnography Change at Shebika:

Our investigation brought about a notable change in the village. Hitherto disdainedobjects, devalued acts and half-forgotten beliefs regained a sort of vitality from thevery fact that a researcher recorded them in his notebook.... Through the repeatedscrutiny to which we subjected him, the man of Shebika developed a new perspectiveof himself.... It was dramatization [of the activities of daily life], in which Shebikaplayed the role of Shebika . . . that led the village to the extreme political limit of self-affirmation. .. . The man of Shebika gave himself a name in the larger context of thelife of Tunisia when he discovered a language in which to give his new experience ex-pression. [Duvignaud 1970:296-298]

For Ben Mohamed, the lecture sparked the desire to create a forum that, like Du-vignaud's film, would serve as a mediating mirror, enabling Algerians to developwhat he calls an "internal perspective" or an "internal gaze" (le regard intfrieur) ontheir own culture. "Our system of reference," he explained to me in a 1992 interview,had been "either the East or the West, [but] we didn't have our own lens" (see also,Arnaud 1993). Idir concurred: "The history of North Africa has always been written byothers. . . . We have never looked at ourselves except in relation to the outsider"(Humblot 1978). In the nine songs that Ben and Idir would author together, theysought to create this "internal gaze" that would enable them simultaneously to reval-orize and critique their own society.

The genre that Idir and Ben launched—New Kabyle Song—provides a compel-ling example of the use of intergeneric and intertextual relationships to develop a newvision of Berber identity. It does so through a creative intermingling of genres, blend-ing the harmonies, instruments, performance modalities, and technologies associatedwith folk rock with rhythms, melodies, and texts drawn from Berber village reper-toires. Because the vision of Berber identity mediated by New Song was at odds withofficial state ideology, which defined Algeria as exclusively Arab and Arabic speak-ing, New Kabyle Song has generally been depicted as oppositional—a form of protest


song—in both the media and the scholarly literature (see, e.g., Chaker 1987a, 1989b;Lacoste-Dujardin 1978; Mehenni 1983; Zoulef and Dernouny 1981). In examiningNew Kabyle Song solely as a form of synchronic engagement with adjacent culturaldiscourses, however, scholars have not considered the new genre in diachronic per-spective—that is, in relation to earlier processes of collection and transformation ofBerber oral texts.42 My focus here is on the way New Song reconfigures the poemsand songs that Idir and Ben collected from village women.

In looking at Idir's and Ben's collection processes against the practices of earliercollectors, a key difference emerges: Earlier collectors did not intentionally alter whatthey thought they had found. Their relationship to the poems they gathered is articu-lated through such strategies as genre attributions, framing essays, and footnotes. Benand Idir, in contrast, collected with a desire to transform. Their relationship to the po-etry they gathered is not presented around the text but is folded into the new poemsthemselves.

How does this process of folding occur? How do Idir and Ben draw on village po-etry to develop an "internal gaze" that simultaneously constructs and critiques whatthey imagine as traditional Berber culture? Such questions go to the heart of my ownethnographic and theoretical concerns, inviting detailed examination of the specificentextualizing operations in which Idir and Ben were engaged. My focus lies with theminutiae: the specific intertextual changes, line by line and word by word, that songshave undergone in their journeys to the world stage. By examining how Ben and Idirread texts from one genre and rewrote them within another, I invoke Briggs and Bau-man's notion of intertextual gap—the interpretive space within which a particular textis linked to a broader genre (Briggs and Bauman 1992). How do Ben and Idir build in-tertextual relationships with older poems that enable their songs to resonate as "pro-foundly Berber" (Ben Mohamed, personal interview 1994)? Are these to be under-stood as "minimal" gaps, which imbue the new song with the authority or auraassociated with the old genre, or as "maximal" gaps, which can resist this authorityand propose an alternative vision (see Briggs and Bauman 1992:149)? By invoking orchallenging generic authority, in what ways are intertextual gaps also deeply ideological,bound to claims of power or negotiations of identity (see Briggs and Bauman 1992:148)?

To address these questions, I turn to the song Isefra, or Poetry (see Text 1), whichis generally acknowledged as one of Idir's most traditional.43 At first glance it seemsalmost identical to women's versions of the song. When I told Kabyle women that Iwas looking for their versions of Idir's songs, they would typically launch into thisone, indiscriminately mingling his verses with their own. During trips to Ain-el-Ham-mam and At Yenni (Idir's natal village) in 1993,1 collected more versions of this songthan any other.44

TEXT1

Isefra (Poetry)Text copyrighted by Mohammed Benhammadouche (Ben Mohammed). Reproduced

with permission.

Verse 1

A nekker a nebdu cekkran Let us rise and begin to sing praisesa ncekker kra da We will praise everyone herekecgni a bab n tmey ra You, for whom we are gathered in celebration,a mmi-s n tnina Oh son of Tanina


yis-ek i nedhent tezzyiwin It's you to whom your comrades lookditizi lyila In the hour of need.

Verse 2

La lehhuy lucla lucla I am walking in the fieldyejjujeg umezzir The lavender is in bloomatan ieeddan-d yemnayen The horsemen passed bys rrekba d zzhir in a thunderous stampedea yuzyin serrej aeawdiw Oh handsome groom, mount your horse,ezwir ay itbir Go to the front of their ranks, oh beautiful bird.

Verse 3

A timebremt n lebrir Oh silk scarf,a m' tballiwin beautifully adornedyeqqen-ikem-id Ibaz ukyis The eagle has attached yousennig teeyunin above his browsism-is inuda lefrac His name is known in every tribeyerna timdinin And even in the cities.45

The similarities between Idir's Isefra and the women's renditions are evident. Theformal (syllabic, rhythmic, rhyme) structures match: they employ Verses of 6 lines, di-vided into 3 couplets; each couplet has alternating Verses of 7 and 5 syllables; the "b"lines of each couplet rhyme. Lexically, the songs are very close—in some cases, thewords are almost identical. Melodically, they resemble each other as well. The villagesongs—which belong to a genre of praise songs (known as tibuyarin)—can be used tolaud the qualities of either a newborn male baby or a man about to be married. Theyoften open a village celebration, and Idir has retained their annunciatory position, fre-quently beginning concerts with Isefra.

Idir's version of the song appears to show minimal intertextual distance with itsvillage predecessors. In what ways, then, has it been transformed? When I asked Benthis question in 1993, he responded:

The meaning of the song, first of all, it isn't by accident that I titled it "Poetry." The driv-ing idea [/'/ctee motrice], it's the old poems, I tried to look [in them] for the values thatwe like in our culture and to emphasize them. What is it that makes us respect thisleader, this person.... I took some of [the old poems], I extracted the values, then Iput them into my text. There is the idea of physical beauty and of the beauty of acts, ofconduct, of the ability to be a leader.

We then listened together to what Ben took as his "original"—a cassette tape thathis friend's grandmother had recorded for Ben, and that he considered representativeof women's repertoires. He at first had a hard time extracting from the tape thoseverses that he had altered, but he finally found one verse (Verse 2), which he wrotenext to his own (see Text 2). As we began to compare the two versions, the entextuali-zation strategies that guided him began to emerge.

TEXT 2

From source tape used by Ben Mohamed, recorded by his friend's grandmother inAin-el-Hammam in the early 1970s.

Yaxi testewbec lucla Oh, how the field causes fearyejjujeg umezzir The lavender is in bloom


atan ieeddan-d yemnayen The horsemen passed bys rrekba d zzhir in a thunderous stampedeay isli serrej i wsawdiw Oh groom, mount your horse,ezwir ay itbir Go to the front of their ranks, oh beautiful bird.

First, Ben excised the specificities of name or place that index the song to particu-lar social relationships. More importantly, he sought to give his text linear cohesive-ness, whereby one image would flow "logically" into the next, with all terms subordi-nated to the message or value he sought to portray. He changed the first line of thewoman's Verse 2, for example, from "Oh, how the field causes fear" to "I am walkingin the fields" because, as he put it,

I needed to inscribe the line in the overall meaning of the text.... I didn't see the rela-tionship between fear and the blooming lavender [the next line].... It isn't becausethe lavender is in bloom that one is afraid in the fields.... But to say "I am walking inthe field, and the lavender blooms"—there I'm describing the state of a place—andthen, in front of these flowers, the horsemen arrive.46

Ben seems to be reading and writing in relation to a Western literary aesthetic inwhich action stands out from a static, natural backdrop. Does the grandmother's verseconceptualize these differently? It is possible that in the grandmother's verse fear (de-spite its placement in the line) is related to the stampede of horsemen rather than tothe field.47 If so, then the grandmother's verse had already anticipated this impendingevent, but in nonlinear fashion, by inscribing emotion within the setting. Even if Benhad read the grandmother's verse in that way, however, he still would have changedit, he said, because "I did not want an image of fear in my text."

What about Verses 1 and 3? They were reproduced directly from the grand-mother's version of the poem—almost. Ben excised religious references, changing theopening words of the song from "In the name of God let us begin to sing praises"(bism'lleh a nebdu cekkran) to "Let us rise and begin to sing praises" (a nekker a ne-bdu cekkran). As he explained it to me, such "formulaic" phrases simply take upspace, get in the way of talking about "real" problems, and make no sense in relationto the "main idea" of the text:

There were, in the old texts . . . these religious lines . . . used as stop-gaps (bouche-trou). The essential is said in two lines, then you start with a religious thing (true), youend with another, and it's just to garnish. It sometimes makes no sense in relation tothe main idea (i'id€e maftresse).... So I said to myself, why not enrich the text, de-velop its idea . . . instead of including these garnishings that have nothing to do withthe text.

As the new opening words resonate against a space where most Kabyle listeners ex-pect to hear religious invocations, they simultaneously evoke the earlier phrase andcall attention to its suppression—a Bakhtinian double-voiced utterance (Bakhtin 1981 ).**

The new text can also be read in relation to the dozens of verses that Ben didnot select. Why were these three verses chosen? What might have been left behind? Idid not have the heart to ask Ben to transcribe for me the grandmother's entire tape,and he had promised not to lend or copy it. However, I recorded two similar songsduring visits to the Ain-el-Hammam and At Yenni regions of Kabylia in 1993.1 exam-ined these two field recordings against Ben's criteria, as I understood them from ourmany conversations. A later discussion of these field recordings with Idir (1996)largely supported my interpretations.49

Looking at Text 3, the boldface lines in Verses 2 and 4 immediately stand out tome: They laud the young man's qualities via reference to the strength of previous


foreign occupiers of the region—the French, the Turks. Such references to foreignerswould have found no place in Ben's poem. Yet, as he sought to (in his words) "extractcultural values" that are "specifically Kabyle/' he would risk erasing the historicalmemory that such verses contain.

TEXT 3

Field recording by jane Goodman in Ain-el-Hammam, November 1993.

1. A timebremt n lebriram'tballiwinyeqqen-ikem weqcic ukyissennigtecyuninism-ikinudaleerac

yerna timdinin

2. A timebremt n lebrirism-im [Lluja] [unclear]yeqqen-ikem wecqic ukyissennigtwenzaism-is inuda leeracyerna-d Fransa

3. A taxuxet yelluggwinyefyiri bbwamdun[unclear] bab-is di tsullaattwennee Iceyuna Sidi Sidi Muradacruruqelmun

4. Axi tsewbec luclateflujeg Ifakyaatan ieeddan-d yemnayens rrekba t-twiya [unclear]a Murad serrej i waewdiwtezwireda laya

5. Axi tsewbec ludayeffujeg umezziratan ieeddan-d yemnayens rrekba dzzhira Lbamid serrej asawdiwtezwireqlayitbir

1. Oh si Ik scarf,beautifully adornedThe handsome groom has attached youAbove his browsYour [groom's, m. sing.] name is known in

every tribeAnd even in the cities.

2. Oh silk scarf,your name is [Lluja] [unclear]The handsome groom has attached youAbove his foreheadHis name is known in every tribeAnd even in France.

3. Oh ripe peachOn the banks of the pond[trans, unclear][trans, unclear]A Sidi Muradwith tassels on your hood.

4. How the plain causes fearThe fruits are in bloomThe horsemen passed byin a devastating [unclear] stampedeOh Murad, mount your horse,Go to the front of their ranks, oh "agha."

5. How the plain causes fearThe lavender is in bloomThe horsemen passed byin a thunderous stampedeOh Hamid mount your horseGoto lead them, oh beautiful bird.

In Text 4, the kind of selective reading process Ben would probably engage in iseven clearer, as eight of the 12 verses would fail to meet his criteria. Verses 1 and 2would most likely be excluded for their licentious references to sexuality, associatedwith the loom and with manipulating the bamboo wood, described as "too long" or"too stiff" (cf., Genevois 1967 and Messick 1987). Removing such verses de-gendersthe song, suppressing links to the female domain of weaving. Verses 4, 5, and 9 con-tain explicit references to the Quran, popular religious practices, or God—unacceptablefrom Ben's secular, modernizing vantage point. Verses 8, 9, and 11 do not have thecorrect number of syllables for Idir's music. Others contain personal names or other


particularities that would not support a generalized cultural message. Although thesuppression of such verses may not have been noticed, their inclusion would be unac-ceptable to listeners who shared Ben's quest to bring Berber culture into "modernity."References to religion, the Turks, or the French clearly would not evoke the kind ofBerber identity that Ben outlined in his conversations with me.

TEXT 4

Field recording by Jane Goodman in Ain-el-Hammam, November 1993

1. Eyyamt a nger a^eftayefyiri bbwasifeyyamt a ngezm i uyanimbezzaf j_gwezzifa Sidi Sidi Murada£eqq'

2. Eyyamt a nger a?eflayefyiri g_geyzereyyamt a ngezm i uyanimbezzaf i geeejjerA Sidi Sidi MuradAcerjun n ttmer

3. Wi-t-ilan Ibara-yinnayessan s webladur t-id-ikeccem yiwenhac'AtSebbad{a Sidi Murad Sidia Ibaz inmewwer)

4. Ay Ixir-inu Rebbizewjey-as i mmibbwiy-as-d buret Icin

lebruzyeftimmi

Rebbi ketter-as-d iqcicenanebderanili

5. Ay Ixir-inu Rebbizewjey-as i warasbbwiy-as-d huret If in

lebruzyefammas

Rebbi ketter-as-d iqcicenat tebder yemma-s

6. Atimebremtn lebriram'tballiwinyeqqen-it-id Sidi Scidsennigtecyuninism-is inuda leerac

1. Come [f. pi.], let's assemble the loomOn the banks of the riverCome, let's cut the bambooIt's too long0 Sidi MuradSeed of wild geranium.

2. Come [f. pi.], let's assemble the loomOn the edge of the ravineCome, let's cut the bambooIt's too stiff.

Oh Sidi MuradCluster of dates.

3. To whom does the house belongthat is standing on large, flat stones?No one can enter itexcept those wearing shoes.Oh Sidi MuradLuminous eagle.

4. How great is my joy, oh Lord1 have married off my son.I brought him one of the beautiful

women of Paradise[protected from the evil eye] by amulets

on her forehead.God, grant him sonsWe will all be witnesses.

5. How great is my joy, oh LordI have married off my brown-skinned boy.I brought him one of the beautiful

women of Paradise[protected from the evil eye] by amuletson her hips [i.e., belt].

God, grant him sonsHis mother will be present.

6. Oh silk scarf,beautifully adorned.Sidi Said has attached itAbove his brows.His name is known in every tribe


yernatimdinin

7. A timebremt n lebriram'tballucinyeqqen-ikem-id Sidi Muradsennigteeyuninism-is inuda leeracyerna timdinin

8. Eyyamt at teddumt a nrubs azayar a-d-nerr ullia Sidi ceziz Murada taqadumt tecba lemriakk' iqqaren watmaten-isd amerbub a gma Ibenni

9. Eyyamt at teddumt a nrubyer wedrar a-d-nawi Ibeccnniy-as kegc ay islitaqadumt tecba tnefcickra i nmenna di Rebbiar qabel a nesrebb aqcic

10. Ay Ixir-inutura fukken imettawena nkkes akw lebzenyellan seg wacbal uyen[unclear] a Muradamzun yekker-ed wi' yemmuten

11. A tasekkurt yecrurdenyefyiri bbwasiftebean-t-id iseggadenbedd ur-t-id-yettifwi t-id yettfen d At Xaledimawlan n nnif

12. Lehhuy luda ludayejjujeg umezzir[unclear] amnayens rrekba u zzhira Murad serrej i wasewdiwtezwireday itbir

And even in the cities.

7. Oh silk scarf,beautifully adornedSidi Murad has attached itAbove his browsHis name is known in every tribeAnd even in the cities.

8. Come, let's go [f.pl.] togetherto bring the sheep to pastureOh, dear Sidi Muradwhose face resembles a mirrorAs his brothers say,"May the henna bring you prosperity, oh

brother."

9. Come, let's go [f.pl.] togetherto the mountain, to bring back some herbs[I said to myself,] Oh bridegroomwhose face is preciousEverything we desire comes from GodIn the coming year we will gain a son.

10. How great is my joyNow the tears have ceasedWe are going to remove all the sorrowthat we have known for so long[unclear] oh MuradIt's as if the dead have arisen.

11. Oh partridge who walks with tiny stepson the banks of the riverThe hunters followed itbut no one could catch it.Those who got it are the At XaledA family of honor.

12.1 am walking on the plainThe lavender is in bloom[unclear] the horsemenin a thunderous stampedeOh handsome groom, mount your horse,Go to the front of their ranks, oh beautiful bird.

Read against verses that would be eliminated from consideration, the verses Benselected take on new meaning. Although they almost exactly match some verses in thewomen's songs, Ben's verses were explicitly culled from dozens of "rejected" ones.Their selection thus contains within it a series of evaluations that imbue the chosenverses with new expressive value (Bakhtin 1986), making them subtly double voiced.

In sum, although Isefra appears to show minimal intertextual distance from thevillage songs out of which it is inspired, it rests on a number of gaps in relation to theolder texts. I suggest that it is in these intertextual gaps that a new "internal gaze" isemerging. This is constructed through sophisticated entextualization practices, starting


with a radical rereading of the older texts that already announces a new relationshipto them. Here, the women's texts are read against a contemporary notion of culturalvalues and are inscribed in a linear logic. Words are seen as detachable from onecontext and inscribable in another because their referents can be double voiced oroverlaid with new expressive meanings. Not all words can undergo this operation,however. Some are so tainted by links to situations that are problematic from a secularmodernist vantage point—women's sexuality, religion, foreign occupation—that theyrequire suppression.

Despite these important transformations, Idir's Isefra resembles the older versionssomewhat more than do other New Songs inspired by village repertoires. Some songsemploy overt parody and hybrid juxtapositions, setting, for example, a traditionalverse about the presumed power of local saints against the singer's critique of saintveneration (e.g., Idir and Ben's song Muhend-nney, discussed in Goodman 1998).Others imbue locally resonant words with larger meanings by embedding them innew semantic surrounds: The word tagmaf (brotherhood), for instance, which in vil-lage contexts can index patrilineal loyalty and its attendant rivalries, is set into a newframe (Idir 1976,1991) where it acquires a meaning of "universal brotherhood" in Idirand Ben's song Qi'vy (Goodman 1999).

Finally, in relation to earlier collections, New Kabyle Song is distinctive in thatthe Berber text stands alone, untranslated, but is set into a musical idiom that is bothfamiliar and palatable to Western listeners. If the song texts are organized in partthrough French aesthetic concerns and the melodies rendered in Western scales andharmonies, New Kabyle Song is nonetheless immediately recognizable as "ours" tomost Kabyles, for whom it serves as a vibrant symbol of the contemporary relevanceof their culture. Here, Western forms have clearly been appropriated in the service ofconstructing a Berber cultural modernity that is, as Ben Mohamed put it, inherently"of our time."

conclusion

Through this brief metadiscursive history of Kabyle oral texts, I have sought toidentify some of the ways in which oral texts have been variously constituted andmade to serve in debates about Berber difference at discrete historical moments. Po-ems—in a few cases, the same ones—have been alternately read as signs of Berber in-civility or high culture, as traces of a pure and untainted precolonial past or as carriersof regressive social practices that need to be altered in order for Berber culture to en-ter modernity. All of the poems I examine in this article are considered traditional bytheir collectors in that they supposedly originate in the unmediated and transparentwords of an Other located in that most pristine of sites, the Berber village.50 This pre-sumption both facilitates and masks the reorientation of the poems to divergent ideo-logical horizons: the civilizing mission, liberalism, anticolonial nationalism, andpostcolonial identity.

In looking at the ease with which oral texts can be oriented to opposing agendas,I have foregrounded connections between genre, intertextuality, and ideology. Al-though genre is typically invoked as a neutral classificatory device, I have been in-spired by recent work in linguistic anthropology that explores how genres can operateas fluid and mutable components of a society's metadiscursive landscape, providingan array of conceptual frames and narrative possibilities through which perceptions ofself, other, and world are mediated (see especially, Briggs and Bauman 1992; Hanks1987; Kapchan 1996; see also Bauman 1992,1993,1995; Bauman and Briggs 1990;Briggs 1993a, 1993b; Briggs and Bauman 1999; Hanks 2000; Raheja 1996; Silverstein


1996; Silverstein and Urban 1996). Of greatest interest here are the pragmatics ofgenre attributions—that is, when, why, how, and by whom a genre is invoked. Briggsand Bauman (1992) contend that in order to identify a situated text with a broadergenre, both producers and receivers make an interpretive leap that depends not onlyon their knowledge of the genre's formal and stylistic features but also on their ownpositioning within particular historical, social, ideological, and political-economiccontexts. They refer to this interpretive space as an intertextual gap, a term that de-scribes the relative fit or lack of fit between a particular text or performance and thebroader genre or genres with which it is associated. Some intertextual strategies mini-mize the gap, or the distance between a situated text (token) and its generic prece-dents (type); this tends to imbue a text with the authority associated with the genre.Other strategies maximize the gap, challenging the genre's authority and perhaps fur-nishing an alternative vision. Selecting the genre to which a particular text is linked isitself ideologically motivated: The same text can be construed as belonging to entirelydifferent genres and thus made to serve opposing interests.

Oral texts—taken as natural, seeming to belong to no one, yet available to every-one—provide especially potent sites for collectors to manipulate intertextual gaps inorder to position themselves and their audiences in relation to those in whom the textsare allegedly located. Because the entextualizing strategies through which oral textsare constructed remain largely invisible, the texts can serve as ready receptacles ofideology and vehicles for self-constitution. The device of genre is an especially pow-erful means of orienting the poems ideologically. In virtually every case, collectors in-voked a genre that was not associated with local modes of ordering texts and thenconstituted the poems in relation to the conventions of that genre. They attempted, inother words, to minimize the gap between text and genre so as to promote particularinterpretations and to suppress others. A close analysis of their entextualization strate-gies, however, reveals not minimal but maximal gaps. In the interpretive space wherethe collector tries to make the poetic text fit the genre to which it is assigned, the col-lector's own relationship to the colonial project becomes legible. Hanoteau inventedhis own genres ("political-historical" and "women's" poems) in which the goals of thecivilizing mission were embedded; through genre, he sought to construct Berbers asan uncivilized Other against whom the French could define themselves and justifytheir presence. The strength of this generic orienting framework (Briggs and Bauman1992; see also Bakhtin 1986) meant, among other things, that a women's poem thatmight be understood as political commentary within local generic conventions wasresituated as a sign of Kabyle incivility. Boulifa entered this argument from the otherside; although he did not invoke particular poetic genres, he did set his poetry collec-tion in relation to the classical civilizations of antiquity in order to illustrate the simi-larity between Berber and European civilizations. This presumed similarity disinte-grates, however, in Boulifa's extensive subtext of footnotes. Both Jean and TaosAmrouche situated poems through the genres of Western literature, folklore, and clas-sical music as they debated the relationship of Berber culture to universal civilization.Here, the poems became signs of a lost wholeness, and they served as a foil againstwhich a new kind of otherness—one located within the self—could be articulated.Yet, this wholeness was imaginable only from a position of complex hybridity towhich framing essays, genre attributions, poem titles, and performance practices giveexpression. Mammeri employed genre to restore to Berber poetry a historicity lackingin previous accounts. If his historical periods and categories mimic European ones,the segmentation of his readership into two distinct audiences may signal an attemptto limit the power of the Other's gaze.


Whereas in earlier works, intertextual relationships are located between the po-ems and their entextualizing surrounds (essays, footnotes, titles, and so on), theauthors of New Kabyle Song enter into and interrupt the poetic text, retaining someingredients but discarding others. Here, the authors' relationship to traditional poetrymoves into the text, where it is articulated through a series of intertextual gaps in rela-tion to the earlier poem that take the form of double-voiced utterances, erasures, orhybrid juxtapositions. Following Mammeri, Idir and Ben Mohamed sought to developan "internal gaze" toward Kabyle Berber society. This gaze, however, is mediatedthrough a world music genre that digests (Bakhtin 1986:62) and then refracts tradi-tional poetry through a modernizing lens that incorporates some elements of culturewhile leaving others in its wake.

This brief account reveals a long history of intertextual penetration between Ber-ber and European aesthetic categories—a history that has been denied by most col-lectors, who seek to read in the poems a realm of Berber authenticity that is alternate-ly cast as "spirit," "essence," or "identity." In order to make such claims, however,collectors put into play a range of metadiscursive strategies that ultimately reveal thelimits of their efforts to define a realm of Berber difference—however variously thatmay be constituted. For in order to evoke a pure and unmediated Berber culture, thecollectors displace poems from one genre and social field to another. The "Berberspirit" located in the poetic text emerges as dialogically constituted at the intersectionof genre, intertextuality, and ideology.

notes

Acknowledgments. Research in Algeria and France from 1992 to 1994 was generouslysupported by the American Institute for Maghribi Studies, the Fulbright Institute of InternationalEducation, the Sachar Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Wenner-GrenFoundation. A rudimentary draft of this article was first presented at the "Aftermath of Empire"seminar at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor on March 14, 1997 under the title "ColonialHybridities: Colonel, Missionary, Ethnologue, Rock Star." Special thanks to the Institute of Ad-vanced Study and to the seminar organizers—Ann Stoler, Nicholas Dirks, and Frederick Cooper—for inviting me to present my work, and to the seminar participants for their insightful and toler-ant comments on my early attempt to grapple with this material. A later version appears in mydissertation as a chapter entitled "Collection: Discursive Histories of Berber 'Oral Texts' "(Goodman 1999, chapter 3). The material was again presented in close to its present form at theworkshop "Text, Context, and the Construction of Difference," held at Ben Gurion University(Israel) on May 16, 2000. Special thanks to the Ben Gurion Department of Middle East Studiesfor hosting this event, to workshop participants for their valuable questions and comments, andespecially to Sam Kaplan for his insight, encouragement, and generosity. In its long history, thisarticle has benefited from close readings by Carol Greenhouse, Judith Irvine, Brinkley Messick,Richard Parmentier, Susan Slyomovics, three anonymous AE reviewers, and AE guest editorBarbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Richard Bauman offered welcome encouragement at just theright moment. I am grateful to Ben Mohamed for the many hours he spent discussing his poetrywith me and to Idir for talking with me about his songs. I also thank Boualem Rabia for his gra-cious assistance on so many levels. Any remaining lapses or lacunae are my sole responsibility.

1. Correspondence from March to October 1865 indicates that Hanoteau received per-mission from the French Ministry of War to publish this collection only on the condition that herefrain from mentioning that the Ministry had authorized the publication. Moreover, the Minis-try did not grant authorization right away, fearing that the timing was not opportune because ofunrest in the region (Fonds Ministe>iels n.d.).

2. Other colonial collections of Kabyle Berber oral poetry include: H. Basset 1920; R. Bas-set 1892; Ben Sedira 1887; Layer 1913; Luciani 1899,1900; and Rinn 1887. Early postcolonialcollections include: Mammeri 1969; Ouary 1974; Savignac 1964; and Nacib n.d. Kabyle poetry


also features prominently in the more than one hundred volumes that the missionaries (WhiteFathers, or Peres Blancs) produced about Kabyle society between 1946 and 1975; see Lanfry1974. See also Ait Ferroukh 1994 and Mahfoufi 1991. Kabyle Berbers inhabit the Djurdjuramountain region on Algeria's northern Mediterranean coast to the east of Algiers. For locationsand sizes of Berber-speaking populations in North Africa, see Brett and Fentress 1996, andChaker 1989a. In this article, I employ two terms of reference: Kabyles (or Kabyle Berbers) andBerbers. In employing Berbers as a stand-alone term, I do not mean to elide the important differ-ences between Berber speaking regions. Rather, I follow both historical and contemporary us-age, in which Berber speakers from different regions may identify themselves alternately as"Berber" or through an indigenous term of self-referral. I do not employ the newer term of self-reference Imaz'ryen (which evokes a transnational Berber-speaking community alleged to sharea common language and history) because it does not figure in the works I examine. Althoughboth Idir and Ben Mohamed do use Imaziyen in some songs, in conversation we always usedthe terms Berber or Kabyle Berber.

3. Thanks to Asif Agha for helping me to bring this convergence into focus. I am wellaware that in focusing exclusively on collections of Kabyle Berber oral texts, I risk re-entextual-izing several unfortunate associations. First, I may reconstruct the very association of Berberswith oral poetry that the works I examine help to produce. Second, I may unwittingly reinforce aseparation between Berbers and Arabs that a comparative analysis of collections of their poetrycould help to mitigate. Finally, in highlighting the Berber-French relationship, I do not take intoaccount the intertextualities that are no doubt found between Berber and Arab oral texts; nor doI consider poetry collections from other Berber regions of North Africa. Although my focus inthis article is motivated in part by the limitations of my own linguistic and ethnographic exper-tise, I hope to address these important concerns in future research. Moreover, in highlighting theshifting and contradictory relationships between claims of transparency and constructions ofdifference across a 130-year collection history, I skirt equally compelling issues that a longerstudy would allow me to pursue. A more extended engagement with each collection would nodoubt reveal additional complexities and ambiguities vis-a-vis the colonial situation that cannotbe addressed in this article.

4. The relationship between cultural texts and constructions of identity has been a centralconcern since at least the time of Herder. See Bauman and Briggs 1999 for an insightful discus-sion of the language ideology informing the work of Herder as well as references to Herder'swork and to further Herder scholarship.

5. See, however, Appadurai's (1996) study of the transformation of cricket in colonial India.6. Works I consider include: Poe'sies populaires de la Kabylie du Jurjura (Popular Poems

from Kabylia of the Djurdjura [mountains]), produced in 1867 by the aforementioned Hano-teau; Recueil de poesies kabyles (Collection of Kabyle Poems), a response to Hanoteau's collec-tion published by Kabyle schoolteacher Si Ammar Ben Boulifa in 1904 and reprinted in 1990;Chants bert&res de Kabylie (1939 text rereleased in 1988, and sound recording released in1966) by two Kabyle Christian intellectuals raised in Tunisia, brother and sister Jean and TaosAmrouche; and Po&mes kabyles anciens (Old Kabyle Poems), the 1980 poetry collection ofnovelist and ethnologue Mouloud Mammeri. In organizing my account around the publishedcollections of a series of creative agents, my intention is not to provide a literary history of Ber-ber poetry collection. Rather, I draw on the works of these individuals to build a biography oftexts and textual forms that brings into focus the ways metadiscursive strategies are implicatedin wider social agendas. Moreover, in highlighting these arenas, I do not suggest that the poetryand song collections should be understood as simply reflections or expressions of shifting ideo-logical or intellectual currents (see Stoler and Cooper 1997:16). Rather, I take these collectionsas "products of socially, politically, and historically constituted processes of discourse produc-tion and reception" (Briggs 1993b:420; see also Silverstein and Urban 1996). These processesemerged through the ongoing, sometimes tentative efforts of specific, historically positioned in-dividuals to situate themselves in relation to a range of colonial others (including,previous col-lectors) as well as to the societies they called their own.

7. The French conquest of Kabylia, a mountainous, Berberophone region in northeasternAlgeria, took place in 1856-57, 25 years after Algiers was captured from the Turks.


8. In 1859, after having served for 13 years in the Bureaux Arabes in Algiers and Med£ah,Hanoteau was nominated to head the Bureau Arabe in the Kabyle town Dra-el-Mizan (Gou-vernement g£ne>ale algeYien n.d.). There he sought to develop a better understanding of Kabylelaws and customs in order to further the ability of the French to communicate with the natives.According to his son, who accompanied his father during these years, Hanoteau frequently vis-ited outlying villages, where "the locals, very talkative/' were "happy to speak with a militaryofficer" (Hanoteau 1923). In 1860, Hanoteau relocated to Fort-Napoleon, in the heart ofKabylia, where he remained until 1862. His superior Daumas, with whom he worked in Algiers,had also written extensively on Kabylia and the position of Algerian women (Daumas 1855,1971; Daumas and Fabar 1847; on Daumas's work on women, see also Revue Africaine1857-58, and Clancy-Smith 1996,1998).

9. This work is best known for its attempt to systematize Kabyle customary law within therationalized framework of the Napoleonic Code. Extensive footnotes provide a fascinating sub-text: For each Kabyle law, Hanoteau references its counterpart within the Napoleonic Code.

10. Prior to, and in the early days of, French colonization, foreigners transcribed Berber inArabic characters. See, for example, the translation and transcription of part of the Gospel ofSaint Luke (Soci&e" Biblique Britannique et Etrangere 1833). Later, roman alphabet transcrip-tions were added: Both the first grammar of the Berber language (Venture de Paradis 1844) andHanoteau's 1858 grammar provide Arabic and French transcriptions. On early Berber manu-scripts, see Ould-Braham 1988 and Van Den Boogert 1997.

11. All translations from French to English or from Berber to English are my own, unlessotherwise indicated.

12. The exception is Lament for Dahman-ou-Megal; see my commentary below.13. Sometimes, this is explicit: Hanoteau says that Poem 2 in Part 3 ("women's poems") is

a male attempt to reconstruct a women's poem about sorcery (1867:308 n. 1). In most cases,however, women's poems are simply attributed to men—such as poem 18 (1867:405), later re-corded by the popular female singer Cherifa and still part of a female repertoire; see Mecheri-Saada1979.

14. Born to a marabout family of modest means, Boulifa, orphaned early in life, was sentby an uncle to Kabylia's first public school, established in 1875. He later taught primary schooland, beginning in 1890, began to teach the Berber language at secondary school (Ecole Nor-male) and subsequently at the university of Algiers. In addition to the volume of poetry consid-ered here, Boulifa's works include two Kabyle grammar books, a history of the Kabyle region, acollection of Berber texts from Morocco's Atlas Mountains, and numerous articles. Chaker1987b provides a full list of Boulifa's publications and furnishes previously unpublished mate-rial by Boulifa.

15. On locating the colonized Other in relation to Europe's past, see Fabian 1983.16. Boulifa's work was originally published in 1904.17. For example, a line from Hanoteau's corpus reads, "Do not take a woman from your

village, she will make you too unhappy" (1867:257). Boulifa interprets this as a statement aboutwomen's power, in that men's happiness depends on how women manage the household(1990:59).

18. Boulifa explains that the poems were collected by students and other young peoplefrom the village of Adni, and that he then tried to authenticate them by reading them to the poethimself (in a few cases) or to those who knew the poet well. He relegated to Part 2 the poemsthat could not be authenticated, along with poems from other authors. See Boulifa 1990:67.

19. Jean made this statement in an interview in Tunis with the publication Afrique-Action,February 13,1961. The full quote reads: "Je suis un hybride culturel. Les hybrides culturels sontdes monstres. Des monstres tres int£ressants, mais des monstres sans avenir. Je me consideredone comme condamn£ par I'Histoire [I am a cultural hybrid. Cultural hybrids are monsters.Very interesting monsters, but monsters without a future. I thus consider myself to be con-demned by History]."

20. Jean Amrouche's major books of poetry include Cendres (1983a) and Etoile secrete(1983b). His collected writings and radio work are referenced in Faigre 1985:177-188. He alsowrote extensively on the colonial experience; Amrouche 1994 reproduces these texts. Taos


Amrouche's novels include: Rue des Tambourins (1960); Jacinthe noire (1972b); L'Amantimaginaire (1975a). She also published Le Grain magique: Contes, po&mes, proverbes berb&resde Kabylie (1979), which appeared originally in 1966. Her recordings of Berber songs include:Chants berb&es de Kabylie (1966; winner of the Grand prix de I'AcadeYnie du disque francais);Chants de procession: Meditations et danses berbdres (1968a); Chants de I'Atlas: Traditionsmillenaires des Berb&res de I'Algirie (1971); Incantations, meditations et danses sacrtes ber-bdres (1974); Chants berbdres de la meule et du berceau (1975b); and Taos Amrouche au Thea-tre de la Ville (1977). She also recorded traditional Spanish songs on Chants espagnolsarchaYques de La Alberca (1972a). For a full list of her publications, see Institut du Monde Arabe1994.

21. See "Livres: Rue des Tambourins." In Afrique Action, December 5,1960, reproducedin Institut du Monde Arabe 1994:73.

22. Of course, the belief that some languages [i.e., French] were universal while otherswere not was also part of the broader metadiscursive ideological landscape informing Jean'swork.

23. Urban's "transduction" carries a sense that exact replication is the goal; a more gen-eral term such as "recontextualization" (Bauman and Briggs 1990) need not imply an intent ofreplication.

24. As her extraordinary autobiography testifies (F. Amrouche 1988), Jean's mother expe-rienced profound alienation from and marginalization within her native Kabylia. A child bornout of wedlock in a society where civil status and moral stature are conveyed through paternallineage, Fadhma At Mansour (1882-1967) had no choice but to enter the mission schools at theage of four; at age 17, she converted to Christianity. Her literacy skills—rare for a woman at thetime—allowed her to serve in the highly unusual function of a female public scribe. After marry-ing a Christian man, she spent 40 years outside of her country, in Tunisia. There she penned herlife story as well as several original poems.

25. See Bendix 1997 for a history of the concept of authenticity in folklore and anthropology.26. Taos discusses the 95 prototypes in Amrouche 1968c. According to a representative of

SACEM with whom I spoke in 1994, she registered these songs with the agency in the early1960s. I believe the songs would have been declared in the public domain but cannot verifythis. Transcriptions were by French ethnomusicologists Yvette Grimaud and Georges Auric. Atthe time Taos was working, there was no Algerian copyright agency.

27. This article was reprinted in Institut du Monde Arabe (1994:89).28. These songs also appear in print (French translation only) in either Jean's 1939 work

(reprinted in 1988) or Taos's 1966 collection, Le grain magique: Contes, podmes, proverbesberberes de Kabylie (reprinted in 1979). Le grain magique: Contes, po&mes, proverbes berb£resde Kabylie provides stories, poems, and proverbs in French translation only, with very limitedmetacommentary (a two-page prologue situates them in relation to such collections as theMother Goose rhymes).

29. In one example, when Ammar Arab played a cassette of Taos Amrouche's singing to aKabyle hitchhiker, the hitchhiker was shocked to learn that the song was from Kabylia. As Am-mar remembered it, the hitchhiker first asked, "Why would you think I should understand this?"On learning from Ammar that the song was in Kabyle, he said, "No, that isn't Kabyle that she'ssinging. People don't sing like that in Kabyle."

30. In France, Jean Amrouche's Chants berberes de Kabylie was released in 1988 byL'Harmattan in conjunction with Awal. After Mammeri's untimely death in a 1989 car accident,his student Tassadit Yacine continued to reedit older volumes (including Boulifa's 1904 collec-tion) as well as to produce anthologies of the works of more recent Berber poets and singerssuch as Ait Menguellat, Cherif Kheddam, and Nouara. See Yacine 1990a, 1995a, 1995b.

31. Published in France, the book has never been officially available in Algeria. Collectingpoetry was only one of Mammeri's multiple cultural engagements: With a background in letters,he was a university professor of literary studies and a novelist. Born in the Kabyle villageTaourirt Mimoun (At Yenni), Mammeri migrated with his family to Morocco at age 11, where hebegan a classical education, continued four years later in Algiers. Inspired by the study of Greekand Latin, Mammeri began writing down the Berber poems he heard: "I felt that writing Berber


verse was like Homer, who had composed the Iliad and the Odyssey" (Yacine 1990b:76). Mam-meri was also imbued with the poetry of his father and uncle; according to Mammeri, the latterclaimed to be able to recite 72,000 lines of Arab poetry (Yacine 1990b:76). His father, Mam-meri recalls, knew Waterloo, but "didn't consider Victor Hugo and Waterloo any different from[Kabyle poet] Youssef ou Qaci" (Yacine 1990b:77). From 1969 to 1980, Mammeri directed Al-geria's major ethnological research center, the Centre de Recherches Arch6ologiques, Pr£histo-riques, et Ethnologiques (Center for Archeological, Prehistoric, and Ethnological Research[CRAPE]). Although Mammeri was not trained in the field, the CRAPE was one of the only cen-ters where the study of Berber language and culture was tolerated—albeit under the guise of"prehistory" or "ethnology"—in independent Algeria. Committed to developing the Berber lan-guage as a modern instrument of communication, Mammeri continued work on a transcriptionsystem in the roman alphabet, produced a grammar of Kabyle Berber (Mammeri 1986) and adictionary of neologisms (Mammeri 1973), and taught an unofficial Berber language course atthe University of Algiers from 1965 until 1972 when it was halted by the government (manysingers and songwriters, including Ben Mohamed, learned to write Kabyle Berber in thiscourse). A lifelong collector of Berber verse, he published a volume of the works of the late19th-century poet Si Mohand-ou-Mhand in 1969. In 1980, the infamous title Poemes kabylesanciens (Old Kabyle Poems) was released.

32. The potential crowd had been estimated at 10,000, but the demonstration was offi-cially cancelled by French authorities (Chaker 1982:421). Although the events of 1980 consti-tuted the first significant Berber uprising in independent Algeria, the rise of Berberconsciousness began earlier in the century. See Ouerdane 1990, for a history of Berber partici-pation in the Algerian anticolonial nationalist movement. See also Chaker 1989a: chapter 2.

33. For full press coverage of the events of 1980, see Imedyazen 1981.34. The theories of North African social organization Mammeri draws from are: Ibn

Khaldun's (1925) pendulum model; the alleged makhzen-siba (center-periphery) phenomenon(Montagne 1930); and Gellner's (1969) segmentary theory.

35. According to Ben Mohamed (personal communication, September 17, 2001), MuhedAzwaw is not an individual but a symbolic figure who represents Kabylia. Ben further informedme that the name Azwaw comes from the same root as Igawawen, the name of a large region ofGreater Kabylia (See Dallet 1982:280-281).

36. A list of festival participants, guests, and observers can be found in Societe Nationaled'Edition et de Distribution 1969:193-208.

37. Festival publications are liberally peppered with quotations from the anthropologicalliterature, but they also critique anthropology's links to colonialism and its use of an "an unsci-entific cultural pluralism" to "dilute" issues of historical materialism, class struggle, and culturalimperialism. See Revolution De"mocratique Africaine 1970:23-25.

38. The phrase "new man" was employed extensively in postcolonial Africa to describe adesire to create new "mentalities," or ways of seeing the world, in the aftermath of colonial rule.The phrase can be found in the writings of a diverse range of authors, from Fanon, who dis-cusses a "new type of man" (1963:241), to national ministers of information or culture. For ex-ample, Algerian Minister of Information Mohamed S. Benyahia used the phrase in his inauguralspeech at the First PanAfrican Cultural Festival (Society Nationale d'Edition et de Distribution1969:53).

39. Portions of the previous paragraph are drawn from Goodman 1998.40. Ben drew on some of these texts in 1976, when he coauthored (anonymously) an arti-

cle as part of ongoing debates about Algeria's Charte Nationale (National Charter). See Bulletind'6tudesberberes1976.

41. The documentary was later turned into a commercial video, Ramparts of Clay (Ber-tucelli 1970). This movie was filmed in Algeria but never shown there (Etienne and Leca1975:65). The movie's soundtrack features songs by Taos Amrouche; there is no dialogue.

42. Chaker connects New Kabyle Song to earlier Kabyle poetry by situating it within a"tradition of resistance and struggle" that characterized "a dissident society" (1989b:11). Hedoes not look specifically at collection processes.


43. Isefra was released in 1976 on EMI/Pathe Marconi (Idir 1976) and in 1991 on Blue Sil-ver (Idir 1991). Both albums are titled Avava Inouva, but their contents are not identical. An ear-lier analysis of this song is found in Goodman 1999.

44. The song also circulates in the missionary literature; see Yamina 1960,1961.45. Tanina (Versei, line 4) is a mythical female bird who chose from among all the birds to

mate with an eagle, who was the strongest. See Mammeri 1980:226-257 and Genevois 1964.46. I found the line "I am walking in the fields" in what women presented to me as a tradi-

tional poem, and it also occurs in Yamina 1961:115-117. Ben may have heard this line andsubstituted it here; often, he said, he could no longer tell what was his and what was traditional.

47. In discussing why Ben removed the reference to fear, I told him that I had been struckby how afraid Kabyle women were of walking alone in the fields outside the village. He coun-tered that the women were afraid whether or not the lavender was blooming, so there was no re-lationship. In explaining the next two lines to me, however, he acknowledged that thehorsemen made a lot of noise and that the noise could produce fear.

48. Not all listeners, of course, interpret the new verses in the same way. See Goodman1998 for an account of how some old women restore religious phrases when they sing alongwith IdiKs songs.

49. Elsewhere (Goodman 1999, chapter 6) I show how my interpretation of Ben's relation-ship to women's texts unfolded temporally and as part of a dialogical process. I now recognizethat in looking exclusively at the textual elements of women's songs, I extracted them from theircontexts of production much as had earlier collectors.

50. On constructions of the Berber village as idyllic chronotope, see Goodman 1999,chapter 4.

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accepted March 6,2001final version submitted April 17,2001

jane E. GoodmanDepartment of Communication and CultureIndiana UniversityAshton-Mottier1790 East 10th StreetBloomington, IN [email protected]