Kabyle Tales, Patriarchy, and Myths in the Work of Camille Lacoste–Dujardin.

Abstract

The « tamacahut » tale in Kabylie was once a living narrative, repeated during evening gatherings by women. Until the early twentieth century, storytelling in rural settings remained an active oral practice. In Kabylie, the tale embodies good speech—the literary performance of women in a language rooted in orality. Camille Lacoste-Dujardin rejected any collection of tales detached from their context of production. In her work « le conte kabyle. Étude ethnologique » (Bouchène, 1991), Lacoste-Dujardin undertakes an analysis of nineteenth-century tales—tales conceived by the group for its own use, in the original language—within an anthropological perspective.

Since she did not have access to fieldwork in war-torn Kabylie, what methods did she prioritize to study the changes taking place in these village communities? To what extent did the detours she employed allow her to transcend the ideological pressures of colonization?

Lacoste-Dujardin draws connections between orality and writing, comparing tales from other regions of Algeria and from urban centers such as Blida (Desparmet). She extends her comparisons to the Mediterranean basin—to the Maghreb (Laoust in Morocco), Corsica, and Greece. The tales reveal an ordering of the world, the value system of the group, the coexistence of competing conceptual systems (rural tales/political tales), and internal social tensions (mechanisms of acculturation and counter-acculturation). She classifies a typology of tales following folklorists’ methods: genres, themes, and discourses. She also cross-references oral and written versions.

In this article, drawing on her book « le conte kabyle », we retrace and criticize the method employed by Camille Lacoste-Dujardin—who used linguistic tools in a manner reminiscent of the formalists, while also considering the context of narrative production, and who treated orality through reference to written versions of tales, as did the orientalists. We show that the female storytellers, through the unfolding of their narratives before the domestic group and their children, express a form of opposition to rigid patriarchy, whereas mothers-in-law scrupulously ensure the preservation of the representation of the man as protector of the woman and of the household whose fertility he guarantees. We will see that Camille Lacoste Dujardin, in her analysis, explored the meanings and denotations at work in fairy tales while referring to symbols. This paves the way for field research to venture into the mythical dimension and its transformations.

Keywords: Kabyle tales, orality, myth, patriarchy.