OSU - Berber North Africa: The Hidden Mediterranean Culture

Institute Units

The Institute will be conducted in English. However, it is anticipated that those attracted to the Institute will have considerable expertise in French, and some will have a working knowledge of Arabic and/or Berber. The Institute will run for four weeks, from June 25 to July 20, 2007, and will blend three strands of study. The three units will be led by guest lecturers, but overseen and articulated by the co-directors. All unit sessions will meet four days per week (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday) from 9:00 am to 12:00 noon, with the exception of the first day of the Institute when the morning will be devoted to introductions and general discussion about the academic components of the Institute. This meeting on the first morning will also allow the participants to begin framing (beyond what was explained in applications to the Institute) the directions of the teaching and research and the grounds for integrating Berber civilization into their university endeavors. Based on these opening presentations the co-directors will identify professional affinities among the participants in order to organize them in pairs or small teams during the Institute. The opening lecture will take place during the afternoon of the first day.

Typically, morning segments will open with a short lecture by guest speakers which will elucidate the weekly themes with reference to the assigned readings. The lecture will then be followed by general discussion so that participants can ask individual questions about the theme or the readings. During the fourth week of the Institute there will be an additional morning segment on Wednesday.

Following a break (from 10:20 am to 10:40 am), the second part of the morning will consist of group activities designed by the guest lecturer. The activities could involve small group responses to a short questionnaire on one or two key passages in the assigned readings; or they could require teams to formulate a set of answers to a particular problem presented in the lecture or readings.

During the first three weeks, afternoons and Wednesdays will be devoted to individual and group projects and to informal meetings with guest lecturers. During the last week, the pairs of participants will present their group projects on Thursday and Friday afternoons. On Monday evenings the guest lecturers will give keynote addresses on campus that will be open to the public. The final evening will close the Institute with a Berber musical performance hosted by Oregon State University.

Evenings will be left free for study and additional meetings with guest lecturers to discuss curriculum development, research projects, assignments and Institute-related matters. On some evenings (usually Monday) guest lecturers will give short keynote addresses on aspects of the Berber world. On two evenings during the Institute there will be screenings, with English subtitles, of acclaimed films on Berber culture (these are specified below).

Participants will be sent several of the assigned readings prior to their arrival in order to be prepare for the Institute. General cultural background information and specific articles will also be made available to them electronically in advance through the Institute’s web site. Participants will be given a password in order to access and print these documents without compromising fair use guidelines. Once at the Institute, each participant will receive an Oregon State University Valley Library card and be introduced to the Berber collection.   Additional assigned books will be available to participants for purchase at the OSU Bookstore. All secondary readings (on the appended list) will be placed on reserve at the Valley Library.

Unit One: The Berber World in Time and Space

The Institute will begin with a unit lasting two weeks entitled, “The Berber World in Time and Space.” It will be conducted by Professors Ahmed Boukous and Fatima Agnaou, both from the Royal Institute for Berber Culture in Morocco. The purpose of the first unit is to situate Berber culture in its chronological juxtapositions with other Mediterranean civilizations and to make comprehensible links between the physical and human geographies of North Africa. The participants will then be given socio-historical and cultural background information on the region, which will permit them to engage in discussion on the timeless or recurring attributes of Berber culture. Study in the first unit will also focus on the history and particularisms of Tamazight (Berber language) specifically to show in what way the language continues to serve as the primary vehicle for Berber culture. Attention will also be paid to enduring aspects of traditional Berber religious beliefs within the vortex of North Africa’s colonial past.

In the first morning segment, Professors Boukous and Agnaou will give a background presentation on a specific period of history, advancing in a chronological order throughout this two-week unit. In the second morning segment they will organize group activities around the particularisms of Berber culture, specifically its language, belief systems, adaptation to colonial rules, gender roles, relationships with the land, commercial networks, and formal and informal social and political institutions.

On the first Wednesday evening, Dr. Fatima Agnaou will give introductory lessons in the Berber language as an option for the participants. If this proves popular a second language lesson will be arranged one afternoon or evening during the first unit.

For this specific unit, participants will be asked to read: The Berbers: the Peoples of Africa by M. Brett and E. Fentress and History of North Africa: Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, from the Arab Conquest to 1830 by Julien, Ch.André, translated [from the French] by John Petrie, edited and revised by R. Le Tourneau. The two books complement each other chronologically and represent excellent surveys or North African history. They will allow the participants to gain the basic knowledge on Berber history from the prehistoric era to the present times. They also raise a range of questions about each historical period to be discussed during the unit.

Unit Two: Modern Scholarly Approaches to Berber Studies

During the third week the Institute will be guided by Tassadit Yacine, Professor of Anthropology and North African Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (The School for Advanced Social Studies), in Paris and by Professor David Crawford, an anthropologist at Fairfield University in Connecticut. The objective of this second unit is to validate the different modern research orientations to the Berber world, and give the participants a clear understanding of the different methodological schools and theories undertaken by the major scholars in the field throughout history, from Ibn Khaldun (History of the Berbers, written in the 12th century) to the late Pierre Bourdieu (Algeria 1960).   An exposure to these different orientations should be of considerable use to participants wishing to incorporate Berber studies into their curriculum from an analytical rather than purely descriptive point of view.

Dr. Crawford will expose the different scholarly approaches to Berber Studies, following a chronological order, and will engage participants in discussion of how Berber culture has been encapsulated over time (both by Berbers and non-Berbers), and how this scholarly encapsulation has served as a mechanism for cultural transmission. In the second part of the morning Professor Tassadit Yacine will lead team activities on the studied materials. Thanks to her long experience teaching in this particular field, she will invite the participants, not only to critique each theory, but to examine the different ways of applying them to university course development. Professor Yacine will also help the participants investigate the multiple ways in which Berber culture influenced non-Berber scholars, and explain how the simple fact of working on Berber culture helped shape their intellectual work on other issues. She will, for instance, focus on how Pierre Bourdieu’s writings on the Berbers of Algeria paved the way to his later sociological theories on his native region of Béarn (France) and his colossal works on domination and poverty.

On the first evening of this week, Dr. Crawford will share with the participants, in the form of a keynote lecture, his field research in Morocco, and will provide tips on how to undertake and complete research projects on Berber culture. On Thursday evening, Dr. Yacine will lead a roundtable discussion with Professor Crawford and the two co-directors on future approaches to Berber studies and on the role of Berber culture on the world stage during this age of globalization.

The required reading for this unit will be Arabs and Berbers: from Tribe to Nation in North Africa edited by Ernest Gellner and Charles Micaud.   Most chapters in the book examine the successive theories on Berber culture from sociological and anthropological perspectives.
Ample attention is paid to the most significant Berber scholars. Participants will also be provided with a small packet containing illustrations of the scholarship of writers like Pierre Boudieu.

Unit Three: Expressions of Berber Culture

Finally, the third unit will be devoted to “Expressions of Berber Culture”, and will be conducted by one of the world’s preeminent Berber scholars, Professor Kamal Salhi, from the University of Leeds, and by Professor Helene Hagan, the Executive Director of the Tazzla Institute for Cultural Diversity in Burbank, California. This unit will emphasize the literary and artistic expressions of Berber North Africa.

The first part of this unit will be devoted to the literature produced in Berber North Africa from the earliest writers such as Apuleius, Saint Augustine and Franto to the late Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar and Mouloud Memmeri.

Participants will also learn about the complex relationships between the languages of colonization and the multiple indigenous Berber dialects. The participants will discover how Berber authors have used Latin, Arabic, and French to write about their own culture. Emphasis will be placed on the nuanced intercultural relationships that are at the heart of the literary universe of many Franco-Berber writers. This unit will be directed by Kamal Salhi, Joseph Krause and Nabil Boudraa.   Initially, Kamal Salhi will invite the participants to probe Berber culture through the prism of its oral traditions. He will then examine how the oral language is finally inscribed in written forms. Kamal Salhi will show that the linguistic shifting and the process of inscription reveal specific characteristics of Berber civilization: for example, its way of apprehending the world, its relationship to the desert, the sea and the Atlas Mountains, and the way it protects itself from a colonizing presence.

Joseph Krause, Institute Co-director, will invite participants to examine the uneasy relationship that has existed between mainstream French culture and the diasporic Berber culture since decolonization. There are more than one million Berbers living in France today as a result of massive immigration during the second half of the 20th century. Berbers (first, second or third generation) residing in France have folded into the larger immigrant and Beurs (North African) populations. Their authors, writing in French for the larger French-speaking public, have also produced literary works that now constitute a large part of what is termed Francophone literature. Joseph Krause will consider the dynamics which define French and Berber cultures as revealed in the writings of the most celebrated Franco-Berber author Driss Chraïbi. One of his novels, Une Enquête au pays (Flutes of Death), will be read in translation.

On Tuesday evening, Nabil Boudraa, Institute Co-director, will present an introduction to Berber cinema and will propose multiple ways of using this medium to integrate aspects of Berber culture into university coursework. He will also discuss the significance of landscape in both Berber cinema and literature. His presentation will be followed by a screening of the highly acclaimed Berber film, La Colline oubliée (The Forgotten Hill) which will be shown with English subtitles.

The second part of this final week will run for two days and will be devoted to the study of several plastic arts. Berber culture is very well known for its visual representations through the plastic arts. For this reason, this unit also seeks to describe some key imaginative characteristics that appear in Berber art, linking them to different historical periods. This section will be directed by Helene Hagan, Director of the Tazzla Institute in Burbank, California. She will also explain how Institute participants can draw on Berber visual arts to enrich undergraduate teaching on North Africa and to underscore the salient features of Berber civilization. An additional morning session has been included on Wednesday to allow the participants to give their final presentations on Thursday and Friday afternoons, and to give the co-directors and Helene Hagan an opportunity to revisit the Institute’s major themes of study in the closing lecture on Friday morning.

For the first segment of this unit, participants will read the article, “Discourse and identification in Franco-Berber writing” (by Daniela Merolla and Kamal Salhi which appeared in Francophone Studies, Discourse and Identity). This article will develop the ideas presented by Professor Kamal Sahli in his presentations on colonial and post-colonial Berber literature. Flutes of Death by Driss Chraïbi will serve as a concrete example of Franco-Berber writing for Professor Joseph Krause’s segment of the unit. Chraïbi’s novel is a humorous reflection on the confrontation between the French and the Berbers. Chapter four of Roy Armes’Postcolonial Images: Studies in North African Film offers an introduction to Berber cinema to prepare participants for Professor Boudraa’s presentation. Finally, Jeanne d'Ucel’s book, Berber Art: an Introduction, offers an excellent background on Berber art. Participants will read key chapters in the book for Helene Hagan’s final segment of the unit.