Les récits d’origine. Contribution à la connaissance du passé ouest-saharien (P. Bonte)

Pierre Bonte examines the ‘regime of historicity’ of these narratives, some of which contribute to legitimising the Islamisation and, even more so, the Arabisation of local populations of Berber origin. Sometimes written and transmitted locally, sometimes collected by researchers interested in oral literature – he himself collected a large number of them during his missions – these texts, published in the appendix to the book, constitute an unpublished corpus. Pierre Bonte’s contribution to the knowledge of Western Sahara’s past also sheds light on the profound changes these societies have undergone in recent decades. The rich material he has assembled includes an examination of the following mythical-historical topoi: al-Imâm al-Hadramî and the Almoravids (11th century), the Bafûr, the Sharr Bubba war (17th century) and the Sharîf Bûbazzûl. Director emeritus of Research at the CNRS and member of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale at the Collège de France, Pierre Bonte (1942-2013) spent half a century researching the Tuaregs of Niger and then the Mauritanian Baydhan society. He is the author of numerous publications on ancient and modern Saharan society (including La montagne de fer, Karthala, 2001; L’émirat de l’Adrar mauritanien, Karthala, 2008, Arabic translation, Jessour/Ponts, 2012; La Saqiya al Hamrâ, La Croisée des chemins, 2012), as well as on nomadism, tribes, kinship, sacrifice and oral literature in the Arab world. He is also co-editor of the Dictionnaire de l’ethnologie et de l’anthropologie (PUF), which has been reprinted several times and translated into several languages.