In this dialogue held in the mid-1970s, Pierre Bourdieu and the Algerian ethnologist, writer, and poet Mouloud Mammeri (1917-1989) explore and explicate the social bases, uses, and meaning of oral poetry in Kabyle society and history, thus illuminating the peculiarity of oratory and the social conditions of symbolic efficacy. As the son of the next-to-last amusnaw (sage, bard) of his tribe, Mammeri is uniquely placed to situate this master of words who served the traditional function of mediator and carrier of knowledge, and stood as the living incarnation of tamusni (the practical philosophy of Berber excellence), in relation to the marabout, bearer of the sacred scriptures of the Koran, and to the peasants who composed his main audience. Becoming an amusnaw occurred by election and entailed a two-fold apprenticeship, first by osmosis in a milieu saturated by verbal commerce and contest (in the armourer's workshop, the village assembly, the markets and pilgrimages) and, later, through explicit training with a master-poet setting out a series of exercises and exams. It required not only commanding a set of verbal techniques and an oratorial canon but also imbibing and embodying wisdom. Playing on the multi-layeredness of language, adapting with flexibility and à propos to the specificities of each occasion and audience, the Kabyle bard was continually tested and his cultural skills endlessly refined, to the point where he would not only master the rules of the craft but also play with them, transgress them within the spirit of tradition in order to invent new rhetorical figures extracting the maximum 'yield' from language. Tamusni thus emerges not a body of inert knowledge cut off from life and transmitted for its own sake but as a 'practical science' constantly revivified by and for practice. The poet is the spokesperson of the group who, through his cultural discernment and expert use of language, perfects the specific values of the group, separates things that are confused and, by shedding light on things obscure, mobilizes the people.
poetry; oratory; tradition; practical knowledge; craftmanship; Kabylia