Auteur: Aures
Date: 2008-10-03 17:22:03
The people of the Aurès massif
J’aimerais poursuivre ce thème avec les écrits de l'auteur du message précédent; c'est-à-dire avec ceux de M. W.Hilton-Simpson.
On sait que ce dernier a enrichi la bibliographie aurésiennes de plusieurs œuvres :
1- Il a écrit deux (2) livres sur les Aurès :
a)Journeys among the Shawia of the Aurès Mountains (cf. le message précédent)
b) Arab Medicine and Surgery: A Study of the Healing Art in Algeria (c’est un livre consacré à la médecine traditionnelle en Aurès et particulièrement à la pratique de la chirurgie crânienne : la trépanation. Je posterai prochainement un compte rendu de ce livre)
2- A instar «des grands explorateurs » de son l’époque il a donné plusieurs conférences sur les Aurès et sur le mode de vie de ses habitants, les Ishawiyen (un exemple de ses conférences sera bientôt en ligne)
3- Il a écrit plusieurs articles sur divers sujets relatifs à la vie quotidienne des aurésiens (pour un échantillon représentatif de ses articles voir l’URL cité précédemment)
4- Même s’il n’est pas un cinéaste c’est lui qui est à l’origine de la réalisation d’un film ethnographique sur les Aurès
Justement, l’objectif du message d’aujourd’hui est de faire connaître le contenu de ce film: le contexte de son tournage, les scènes, l’analyse, le débat, etc.
En fait, il s’agit d'un RÉSUMÉ des commentaires de M. W.Hilton-Simpson prononcés lors de la première projection de ce film cinématographique devant les membres de la Geographical Society le 17 novembre 1924
La projection fut suivie d’une séance de question et de quelques mots du cinéaste J. A. Haeseler.
Le message est composé de deux parties:
I- Le résumé des commentaires de M. W.Hilton-Simpson et l’analyse de plusieurs scènes
II-Le débat ou la période de questions
Bonne lecture
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THE PEOPLE OF THE AURES MASSIF
M. W. Hilton-Simpson
The Geographical Journal, Vol. 65, No. 1. (Jan., 1925), pp. 24-28.
-I-
(1- l’introduction et le contexte )
THREE years ago I read a paper before the Society (published in Geographical Journal, January 1922) in the course of which I tried to show how the geography of the Aures massif, in S.E. Algeria, had made of that restricted area an "island" of ancient culture.
Its forbidding frontiers of precipitous rock have, to a large extent, kept out the foreign intruder. Yet at various times its fair-skinned Shawiya tribesmen, of Berber or Libyan stock, have adopted certain arts, crafts, and customs either from the successive conquerors of the neighbouring country or from other peoples of the Mediterranean basin, with whose culture they have come into contact in the past. These arts, crafts, and customs, much in the primitive form in which they were first introduced, appear to have persisted in the secluded valleys of the Aures to this day.
After I had read my paper two speakers, Prof. J. L. Myres and Mr. Henry Balfour, pointed out that much light might be thrown on life in classical times and in various epochs of the history, and even prehistory, of the Mediterranean region by a study of the present-day ethnography of the Shawiya. These remarks considerably enlarged my outlook. Up till that time I had been too much inclined to attribute everything I found of apparently ancient origin to the influence of Rome.
During my two subsequent winters' stay among the Berbers I tried to collect as many details of old crafts, customs, and folklore as I could obtain, and, during the intervals between the journeys, I endeavoured to trace the origins of them by means of research at home. These researches are as yet by no means complete; but, as a result of them, I have been led to believe that several phases of modern Shawiya life date back to long pre-Roman times.
When my wife and I were about to recommence our work in the Aures hills last winter an unexpected opportunity arose of obtaining a series of motion pictures, illustrating some of these ancient arts and crafts, which could be laid before ethnologists and students of ancient history at home. We became acquainted with Mr. J. A. Haeseler, a young American traveller who had taken a B.Sc at Harvard and who holds the Oxford Diploma in Anthropology. He told us that he had been carefully trained in the use of the cinematograph camera, and that he intended to devote himself to the building up of a "library" of ethnographical films for scientific and educational uses.
It was decided that he should commence this career by accompanying us into the Aures. Haeseler was to take the pictures; I was to be responsible for their ethnographical accuracy; while my wife was to use her persuasive powers with her now very numerous friends among the Shawiya women, who, being Mohammedans, might well be expected to look upon the camera with distrust.
( 2- Quelques scènes du film)
From the very clear negatives which Haeseler secured, and which are of course his own property, we have pieced together some 4500 feet of film which we have ventured to lay before the Society.
- The early part of this film illustrates the geography of the central part of the massif; the southern European nature of its northern valleys, once to some extent colonized by Roman agriculturalists; the typical North African scenery of the Rasira cañon; the sheer wall of rock which, forming the southern boundary of the Aures, frowns down upon the Sahara below; and the narrow cleft, some 700 feet in depth, through which the Rasira stream carves its may southward, through this rocky wall, to lose itself in the desert.
Next we have proceeded to show how the rock formations of the hills have kept in use cave-dwellings which do not seem to have changed since Palaeolithic times, and how these dwellings can be found inhabited to-day in various stages of improvement and development until we arrive at the complete, stone-built Shawiya hut.
In the consideration of the influence which Roman architecture may have exercised on the Shawiyan, we have included a series of pictures of Rasira hamlets, perched high on the edge of that cañon, which seem exactly to recall Sallust's account of Jugurtha's stronghold; thus indicating that the form of the Aures villages has been little, if at all, altered by contact with Rome.
- The next section of the film deals with the most easily photographed aspects of Shawiya life, namely the occupations of the men. These subjects include basketry, and the fashioning, by means of an extremely primitive adze, of wooden locks for doors: locks of a type which Prof. Sir W. Flinders Petrie says were introduced into Egypt in Roman times (' Social Life in Ancient Egypt,' p. 103).
Some pictures show the method of grinding corn in use before the twin-stone quern. The quern, possibly of Italian invention in about the second century B.C., is shown in course of manufacture and in use in the Aures. My authorities for attributing an Italian origin to the quern are Messrs. Bennett and Elton in their ' History of Corn Milling,' vol. I.
In representing the agriculture of the district we have included pictures of the very primitive Shawiya plough. This appears to resemble closely the implement, but little advanced from the hoe, which Sir W. Flinders Petrie describes as in use, drawn by cattle, in early Egypt (op.cit., p. 134).
The system of irrigation employed by the Shawiya and their method of measuring time in this connection have also been recorded. I described this system of time-measurement in two papers published in the Geographical Journal (January 1922 and May 1924).
Though the Shawiya attribute their agriculture to the Romans, the direct descendants of whose cereal seed they claim to sow annually, we must remember that, to these people, everything ancient is derived from the Romans, the ruins of whose luxurious city lie at Timgad, on the northern edge of their country. Yet I believe that Rome acquired much of her agricultural knowledge from the Phenicians (Carthaginians), and according to some writers (e.g. Ernest Mercier, ' Histoire de 1'Afrique Septentrionale,' I, p. 47), the Phcenicians themselves attempted to perfect the existing agriculture of Barbary rather than to introduce that science into a virgin field. Further, it is at least interesting to note from Sir W. Flinders Petrie (op. cit., p. 3) that "So soon as the rainfall ceased in North Africa and the Nile partly dried up, there were mud flats for cultivation, and there was less game on the hills. A race pushed in from the west, bringing agriculture and abolisking cannibalism." The italics are my own, but the above quotation does seem to open up a very wide question with regard to the history of agriculture in the Libyan hills.
The production of crops in the massif has, long ages ago, led to the construction of multi-storied defensible granaries which appear to conform to the description given by Sir W. Flinders Petrie (op. cit., p. 4) of the central granary which became the foundation of the early Euphratean city-state.
The film we have prepared proceeds to illustrate the marketing and exchange of produce and the daily Shawiya life in the market-place.
- Next it deals with the life of the children: their early infancy; their games; and the meagre education of the boys in their little Mohammedan schools. In the latter are used wooden writing-tablets which appear closely to resemble those used in Egypt in very ancient times.
- Thence we pass on to the most difficult of our tasks, namely, the photography of women. Fortunately, previous acquaintance with my wife and two young children (who had traversed the Aures with us before) had made the Shawiya women far less distrustful then might have been expected; with the result that they allowed us to photograph them at all their daily tasks.
Beginning with their hardest work, the carrying of water and fuel up to their cliff-top villages, the film goes on to show their home-life, cooking, etc., in their dingy stone-built huts or caves.
Next come the two series of pictures which, I think, are the best we obtained: the arts of weaving and of pottery-making. In the former the whole art is shown: shearing, combing, carding, several methods of spinning, loom mounting and weaving on the horizontal and the vertical looms. The first of these two looms seems to be the more primitive. It appears closely to resemble that in use in Ancient Egypt some twenty centuries before Christ. The pedigree of the vertical loom appears to go back about 3300 years, if I am right in connecting it with looms illustrated on the walls of Egyptian tombs.
In drawing these conclusions as to the origin of Shawiya textiles I have been guided mainly by a study of two of Mr. H. Ling Roth's works: 'Primitive Looms' and 'Ancient Egyptian and Greek Looms.'
The pottery is of a very early type. No wheel is used, and the fabric is produced by hand in a manner similar to that made in prehistoric Egypt and Sicily, despite the fact that wheel-turned pottery was made, I believe, in Carthaginian Africa as early as the seventh century B.C.
The pictures which illustrate this process include every stage in the manufacture of a pot from the digging of the earth to the finished article.
The pots are not built up by the spiral application of strips of clay. Their sides are placed upon their bases in three or four slabs of clay, which are caused to merge into one another and to attain a greater height by manipulation with the fingers of the potter.
- The film terminates with a very short reel devoted to folklore. It includes a method of divining future events by means of an upturned dish and a praying-necklet, to the origin of which I have as yet found no clue, and it shows in progress an ancient game resembling hockey.
In a previous paper (Geographical Journal, January 1922) I pointed out the probable connection between this game and the "strife" of the Ausean maidens in what is now southern Tunisia, as described by Herodotus, in honour of a great goddess. Further traces of the worship of this goddess may be found in the rain-inducing ceremony shown on the film, in which a ladle decorated to resemble a woman's head is carried from house to house, and in the performances of the dancing girls of the Ulad Abdi Shawiya tribe.
These girls claim that their profession has been handed down in their families from mother to daughter from time immemorial, and it is firmly believed that, should they abandon their very doubtful mode of living the crops would suffer in consequence. It seems more than likely that here too we have a survival of the cult of that great goddess of fertility and the crops, Ta-Nit, Astarte, Ashtoreth, Athena, as she was variously called according to the region in which she was worshipped.
( 3- La conclusion )
I hope that the comparatively few phases of modern life in the hills of Libya that can be shown in the course of an hour may have indicated the great antiquity of some of the customs to be studied there; customs and crafts possessing pedigrees far longer than that of Rome herself.
To me it seems that Haeseler's film shows clearly that, when once an art or craft has penetrated to the secluded valleys of the Aures, the geographical isolation of those deep ravines has preserved it for our contemplation as a relic of a dim and distant past.
It is again my pleasant duty to express our gratitude to all the French officials we have met for their never-failing kindness and hospitality. Each year we visit the Aures they place us more deeply than ever in their debt.
II - DISCUSSION (à suivre)
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