Sociology, University of Perpignan, France
Research project : "The imaginary institution of society in North-West Africa: the voices of women and about women at the heart of establishing symbolic systems."
The construction of the objects for this research concerns one of the major issues of the institution of Islamic societies since the Middle Ages to Present Times: "at the heart of societies" (M. Sahlins), is not the status of woman or women but of symbolic systems which found, justify and establish the relationships between women and men. Societies structured in and through difference, domination and inequality, own their very existence and reproduction to power and strength (P. Clastres and L. Marino), but also to resistance, circumvention, shunning and reversal of the power and strength against their source.
Narratives (myths, stories, epic poems and hagiographic tales) that are the raw material for analysis, can be worked to identify formal logic or internal consistency. This work will be done only as a step toward the proper socio-anthropological analysis. The latter - whose source is the life of the researcher and "immersion" in the social groups who receive him periodically, but irregularly and for at least three decades - is developed in the constant concern to link the lively speech of women and men about their reciprocal relations.
It was then that the unsuspected importance of the relation to the body itself and to kinesics, to the appropriation of space and to the trial of domestic and societal territorialization. The assumed inaudible voice of women is, on the contrary, deafening: structuring space and time, the reproduction of society, as well as rituals and economic and politic rhythms, it orders the differences and inequalities and maintains a constant symbolic tension between, on one hand, the powers exercised on women and subjecting them and secondly the forces of opposition of the women reducing domination or making it implode.
My work is both a critique of theories of unilateral domination of women by men and a construction of new questions based on the analysis of original oral ‘texts’ of women and on women.