{"id":27991,"date":"2022-01-28T15:56:19","date_gmt":"2022-01-28T15:56:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.donkosira.org\/?p=27991"},"modified":"2022-05-12T03:29:03","modified_gmt":"2022-05-12T03:29:03","slug":"repertoires-collectifs-villageois-enjeux-dune-numerisation-collective-a-damaro-guinee-par-elara-bertho","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.donkosira.org\/en\/repertoires-collectifs-villageois-enjeux-dune-numerisation-collective-a-damaro-guinee-par-elara-bertho\/","title":{"rendered":"Collective village repertoires: the challenges of a collective digitisation in Damaro, Guinea"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Elara Bertho (LAM, Sciences Po Bordeaux), Co-investigator in SOAS research project: Watigueleya K\u00e8l\u00ea, Equitable Climate Resilience in West Africa: A Comparative Research Action Programme (Mali, Guinea and Senegal)<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n

In a reflection on the notion of a collective village repertoire and its digitisation, I return to the research-action programme carried out with the Malian association Donkosira, which since 2017 has aimed to digitally conserve local knowledge in rural communities in Mali, Senegal and Guinea. The modus operandi is quite simple: village delegates are provided with mobile phones so that they can record the community data they wish to preserve. The aim is to create small blog posts on the <\/span>Donkosira association’s website<\/span><\/a>, with short videos, photos and short multilingual texts. It is about valuing local knowledge and inverting the decision-making relationship with regard to field data; it is the delegates themselves who produce for their community the data that they post online. We also wanted to soften the hierarchical investigator\/respondent relationship (often modelled on post-colonial relationships), by giving more latitude and room for manoeuvre to the collaborators. It is not my intention here to go back over the many difficulties and setbacks in regulating this asymmetry, which has never been completely erased. Instead, I would like to return to an unexpected consequence of this room for manoeuvre left to the interlocutors: the constitution of a collective village repertoire, alive and relevant to the village on a daily basis. I will return to this notion of collective repertoire by taking the example of the village of Damaro, in Upper Guinea, before presenting an illustration of this repertoire. This will be an opportunity to define the notion of ‘common’ in performance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Village collective repertoire: texts that network and belong to the community<\/b><\/p>\n

Studies of oral literature have drawn heavily on the notion of ‘repertoire’, for example in relation to the repertoire of a storyteller or the repertoire of a griot. It is a set of texts that a master of the word or an artist keeps in his memory and can utter, perform in a recitation context for his audience. This use of the term refers to what an opera or theatre might call its ‘<\/span>repertoire’<\/span><\/a>: a set of works that are part of a ‘usual background’, likely to be performed by the ballet company or the theatre company. In literary studies, however, it is often centred around a figure of a performer, a griot or an artist who masterfully embodies his or her repertoire. The notion of ‘author’, of ‘authority’ in the mastery of the text, is still prevalent.<\/span><\/p>\n

I propose to change the focus thanks to the notion of collective village repertoire, for which the question of authorial authority seems out of place: these are not great epics recited with brilliance by this or that griot. Locally, it is a set of texts that are regularly performed in groups in a village to punctuate daily life. They can be wedding songs, praises of founding ancestors, tales, advice to the bride and groom… They are sung collectively, often with a leader of the song, and the group in response. They are known to all and they are re-vocalised at regular intervals. They belong to a community and they perform the community when they are re-vocalised.<\/span><\/p>\n

Attention to ‘<\/span>endogenous knowledge<\/span><\/a>‘, as Cheikh Ba points out, calling for a ‘political ecology of knowledge’, allows repertoires to emerge ‘from below’ and not in response to a demand. Above all, it allows to emerge stories and texts that I would never have imagined asking for, for the good reason that I didn’t know they existed. These texts and songs bear witness to a literary practice that is less prestigious than epics (which are studied extensively elsewhere), but which is nevertheless much more present in everyday life.<\/span><\/p>\n

The digitisation carried out by the delegates from Damaro, Ansoumane Camara and Fatoumata Doumbouya, is not exhaustive, of course: it would be futile to try to collect every tale known to everyone or every song. An “attempt to exhaust” the village of Damaro, a la P\u00e9rec, would not be of much use, but the range collected allows us to realise the great amplitude of the stories told in daily life. Here are a few links to the stories posted online that give an idea of the texts collected:<\/span><\/p>\n