Rich of field recordings on agricultural and feeding practices of Sahara’s desert population in the years 1955-1975, the Ahaggar area corpus of the ethnologist Marceau Gast¹ also contains a few songs and some instrumental pieces.

Some are parts of ceremonies like weddings, others are recorded during informal moments, most are in link with agricultural works. This call and response labour song is a pervasive pattern, with some verses in tamahaq (tuareg langage) and some in arabic.

Today² we chose this song to explain the methodology of the MMSH sound archive center for analyzing, digitazing, disseminating field recordings³ in the workshop organized in Mexico, at UNAM about Clinica para el análisis documental de grabaciones sonores y audiovisuales.

What kind of information did we have to analyze and to contextualize this field recording? There was not a lot:
– Information written on the package during the field recording (or just after) by the anthropologist;
– A book⁴, Marceau Gast PHD, pusblished 4 years after recording, in 1968 : Alimentation des populations de l’Ahaggar: étude ethnographique, especially pages 78 and 79 begining of the chapter about the wheat, because this song was sung to plant the wheat.

The song, called El Brih by Marceau Gast, is led by a man named Azoum. The call is picked up by a group of men who pray to the prophet and some saints of the region, mixing Arabic and Tamahaq. This agrarian song was led by the peasants from a village called Ideles to animate agricultural work in the gardens. Helping together for planting in the gardens, men, side by side, cadenced by the song sung all together, accompagny the leader.

We hear the sound of tools, feedback from farmers, exchanged greetings in Arabic dialect, between Mr. Gast and some people hanging around. During the recording we hear in the background the sound of women and children,

When we pusblished the song on the MMSH sound archive center sholary blog, an other anthropologist, Hélène Claudot-Hawad, added comments and helped us to improve our analyze. She insisted on the tamahaq word naming the song which has meaning of “collective and mutual assistance work”.  40 years after it was recorded, she illustrated it with several references, giving a new interpretation of the song. Four other comments were published in link with the post about this song. Engaging this on line conversation, we realized that dissemination is fundamental to help us to better understand our archives and it was really great for the MMSH sound archive center team to see how much citenzens are interested by our archives.

What is the Phonotèque de la Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme (Mediterranean Research Centre for the Humanities; henceforth MMSH)? It is an archival research center, created in Aix-en-Provence (France) at the end of the Seventies by Philippe Joutard, a contemporary historian, and Jean-Claude Bouvier, a specialist in ethnic dialects, both researchers at the Centre de recherches méditerranéennes sur les ethnotextes, l’histoire orale et les parlers régionaux of Aix-en-Provence (CREHOP). The collections consist of deposits by scholars working with oral inquiries or by associations dedicated to heritage preservation. Wishing not only to preserve their recordings and to have field interviews published, they strived to make their sources available for the general public. In connection with the MMSH researchers, CREHOP holds field recordings collections in the domains of anthropology, sociology, linguistics, political sciences, history, music and literature, all focused on the Mediterranean area. It illustrates fields poorly covered by conventional sources or complements them with the point of view of witnesses. In 1997 CREHOP integrated MMSH creating a research and training campus, including 11 research laboratories, all based in the South of France and specialized in the Mediterranean culture. In 2015, the collection held more than 7000 hours of audio archives. They were recorded since the late Sixties and concern four main themes:
– Intangible Cultural Heritage: oral literature, ethnomusicology, techniques and know-how;
– Life experiences, oral history, collective memory;
– Language and cultural identity;
– Epistemology and methodology: workshops, seminars, courses, seminars.

Crédits photographiques : Ahaggar : Radidja et Kanaca vers 1952, photographie de Marceau Gast, CC-BY-NC-SA

1. Marceau Gast (1927-2010), ethnologist, is a food specialist in the Sahara, Yemen an Alps area [↩]
2. The workshop Clinica para el análisis documental de grabaciones sonores y audiovisuales is organized in Mexico, UNAM the 8th of september 2016, included in Jornada académica sobre preservación de colecciones sonoras y audiovisuales de origen digitales [↩]
3. In febbruary 2010, in this blog, Laure Principaud explainded already how the Marceau Gast collection was important to share with other researchers hoping a re-use of theses archives. [↩]
4. Édité à Paris, Arts et métiers graphiques, 456p. [↩]
5. This collective work, on line in open access, was first published in 1994, 2001 translated in spanish language and published in 2007, the last update was in 2015 [↩]