Intangible female heritage in the Oran region

The Algerian society is rich in customs and traditions related to various aspects of daily, religious, and social life. These traditions surprise researchers with their diversity, the multitude of their colors, and the appeal of their social meanings. We felt the need to start collecting materials while it is still possible and before they disappear, to allow future generations in Algeria to know them and to respond to UNESCO’s requirements for safeguarding the world’s cultural heritage, whether tangible or intangible. (See the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, Paris, October 17, 2003).

The proposed project will focus on oral productions linked to the daily social practices of women in Algerian society, selecting three regions: Oran, Tlemcen, and Mascara. The choice of these three regions is not random but responds to an academic requirement: the knowledge of the population through direct contact during surveys conducted within the framework of PE and PNR projects.

The project aims to collect the maximum amount of female oral production, including tales, proverbs, songs, riddles, and more. This corpus is connected to practices organized daily, monthly, seasonally, and annually, from birth to death. We aim to organize our work around the female practices that accompany all moments of human life.

The corpus will be collected through direct contact with local populations, recording audio and video when possible, or with the assistance of investigators and guides capable of providing information.

The expected results are not limited to gathering materials to publish a scholarly book, which we will accomplish first, but our ambition is to prepare work for a broader audience, such as a photo guide or documentary film, which would interest two economic sectors: the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Tourism.

Several studies have been conducted on Algerian customs and traditions, particularly rituals accompanying celebrations, births, the Sbou3 (seventh day after birth), weddings, and the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday. The most important written documents available are those produced by the French during colonization, including numerous ethnographic surveys conducted by Joseph Deparmet and other researchers. Most of these documents are accessible in the Revue Africaine online.

After independence, several studies on simpler forms emerged. Some researchers focused on proverbs, such as Kada Boutaren, others on storytelling, as in the work of Roseline Leila Kouriche, and later Abdelhamid Bourayou. The work of Algerian sociologists in the 1980s on rural life and women’s conditions is also relevant, as it explains how oral production is linked to women’s daily work—for example, the studies by Abdelkader Djaghloul.

Several ethnographic studies conducted in the Kabyle region will enrich the project’s library. Master’s theses and doctoral dissertations at the Institute of Popular Culture contain numerous studies relevant to the project’s theme.

From a methodological perspective, Maghrebian and European libraries contain a significant number of studies on female heritage, not to mention the Algerian archives in Aix-en-Provence.

Project objectives:

The primary objective is to present a scientific work compiling the corpus related to tangible and intangible female heritage in the Oran region.After collecting the maximum amount of data, we plan to publish a book classified according to domains of female practices (days, months, seasons, years) accompanied by oral productions (songs, riddles, tales, proverbs, etc.).For the first publication, we will select one of the three studied regions (Oran, Tlemcen, or Mascara) and keep the other regions for future completion.

Long-term objectives:

Publish a series of notebooks or small thematic books devoted to traditional female practices: weaving, bread preparation, cooking, festive clothing, etc. Given Algeria’s cultural variation, we believe that fieldwork is the best way to present this heritage to a wide audience.These guidebooks will likely interest the tourism and culture sectors, two areas where information for promoting Algerian culture is notably lacking.Visual support is also part of our objectives. Filming traditional female practices in rural areas will create audiovisual material for a documentary film, helping to preserve cultural heritage.Photos taken during surveys and recorded sequences could be exhibited in a virtual museum if the CRASC decides to open one in the future.