Dr. Valerie Nur and Prof. Dr. Joël Glasman on artisanal knowledge in Niger from a mobility perspective
Abstract
- Abstract
- During this episode Cluster fellow Valerie Nur talks with her fellowship host Prof. Dr. Joël Glasman (Chair of African History at the University of Bayreuth) about her research on the topic of artisanal knowledge and skills from a mobility perspective. Artisans in Niger often offer their services on the road and, in doing so, rely on a broad kinship network during their travels, within which knowledge, practices, and materials are exchanged, modified, and enhanced. By looking beyond single workshops and individual skills, she understands artisanal skill as a shared dynamic practice and places and routes of learning and exchange as hubs of technology and knowledge transfer over long distances. During her research, Nur aims to conceptualize craft as an epistemology of an exclusive professional community.
Description
- Transcript
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Speaker 1: Cluster Conversations, a podcast by Africa Multiple.
Speaker 1: Okay, so this is a new episode of our podcast, the Cluster Conversation of the Excellence Cluster Africa Multiple at the University of Bayreuth. My name is Greg Lassmann. I teach history here at the University of Bayreuth. I am a member of the Institute of African Studies and a member of the Cluster of Excellence. And last semester, I had the pleasure to host Dr. Valérie Noueux as a fellow of the cluster Africa Multiple. Thank you for being here with us, Valérie.
Speaker 1: You are an anthropologist. You have studied in France, in Switzerland, in Germany, and you have finished a PhD, completed a PhD that has made some noise and received several prizes among which the Frobenius Prize. Is that true? What was the title of the PhD? What was it about?
Speaker 2: So yeah, thank you for inviting me to the podcast. Yeah, my PhD was on craftspeople among Tuareg in Niger and the title was Craft as a Social Practice.
Speaker 1: And how did you come to this topic? How did you come to study craft in Niger?
Speaker 2: It started actually with a seminar on Tuareg where I had to present—I had to choose a topic—and I thought okay, Tuareg are nomads, so I have chosen the topic on artisans because I thought this should be something very small and easy to manage because they are mainly pastoralists. So when I started to prepare my presentation, I found that Tuareg artisans are not just doing technical practices, but all the literature was about the supernatural powers and magic attributed to them. So especially literature from the nineties—they treat the special social status they have and the magic and how their status is connected to that. And this was somehow exciting and later I went to Mali—it was for an internship. However, accidentally, I met an artisan and I only knew all these magic and supernatural things I read in the literature and I was surprised he was sitting in his workshop and he was just making like normal, like a knife—a very simple knife without any decoration. And there were other people sitting around and I was asking them aren't you afraid of the magic and powers here going on? And they were laughing, hey no, here we're just—we are sitting here drinking tea. And then I recognised okay, what is how they are represented in the literature is not what's maybe going on in everyday life in their work life. So and then I really found it exciting to study craftsmanship among Tuareg. So I want to start like really looking like what's going on, what is happening in the workshop. And while in the literature it was always emphasized that they are endogamous—that means they marry within the family—and the occupation, like the craft practice, is handed over in the family as something remarkable, like you know they are somehow related to magic, they are half in the world of the human, half in the world of the supernatural. And so they are somehow deemed to marry within the group because no one else wants to marry. This is how somehow how they are presented in the literature. And actually endogamy is just a way of cousin marriage. I mean, and this is a very common practice all over West Africa and beyond and even beyond Africa. So to call only one minority of the Tuareg as endogamously organized while everyone else is practicing cousin marriage is a bit strange, no?
Speaker 1: So are you telling us that the Tuareg are presented as a caste society and it is not?
Speaker 2: Exactly. Like especially like when I—in conversation and also when I talk to other anthropologists saying I study Tuareg artisans, anthropologists would directly say ah, they are castes, right? But the term caste—it always implies something like unfreedom, oppression, restriction, like predetermination. And it puts them into this box. And even now in our conversation, we start like yeah with this perspective.
Speaker 1: How did you approach craft among the Tuareg? How did you go about that?
Speaker 2: Okay, so craft is a physical, tactile and material practice. However, craft learning and working is...
Speaker 1: also like always linked to social relationships and this is for the Inadan the family. So for Inadan marriage within the family goes hand in hand with the fact that crafts are often practiced at home. So craft and family are interconnected in two ways by marriage and by everyday life. Yeah women sew usually they work with leather and they sew bags of different sizes and men they carve mortars and beds and forge garden tools knives and silver jewelry. Remarkable is that the workshops at home are open to all family members men women children you can also see neighbors women and men every age and even travelers who pass the time in the workshops. So this creates a very heterogenous workshop society which is exceptional in Tuareg social life. Like anyways handicrafts are part of everyday family life and children learn to forge carve and work leather as a matter of course. So in my research I focus on what happened in the workshop and I was trying to capture the embodied practical knowledge and the skills. Yes so I tried to capture how they really shape the material cut the wood and file yeah and how they engage with the whole body and how this can be understood or grasped and put into words as a shared practice. So at the beginning I didn't know how to approach craft what is craft and how could I write about it. So I only knew what I found like purely technical descriptions is not what would explain what's going on in the workshop. Like in the sense of Chenoparatoires only like focus on the modification of the materials and materials is not what I have to spend one and a half year of my life in Niger right. So Pierre Lemonnier French anthropologist and scholar in material culture he speaks of technological choices and to follow these choices is interesting and insightful. So I started my study like observing because I didn't know how to do it so I started observing these technical activities and I was asking for the names of the tools and the different practices and it was good also to learn Tamajaq and the craft related vocabulary. So it was a good approach even because for the craftspeople it was something specific when I do study about craft and I ask for the names of tools and observe how to make a camel saddle. It was a good introduction so to say. So I have all these details my diaries are full of how to make different artifacts and so on. But while doing all these observations I understood that craft is a specific knowledge of things and tools and a specific feeling of things and how to approach things. It's so to say a perception of the world yeah. But how to study a perception of the world. So to make it simple or graspable for me I took it as craft as a skilled vision and grasp onto the material world. And I was trying to follow this and in order to experience or to grasp this sensory experience I worked with them I cut the leather I took the knives I even tried to forge rings to take on or to understand how it feels the materials and everything. So and only then for example when I was spreading the millet glue on the leather I understood why they always do it with the middle finger. While I thought like why they don't use the index finger it would be much more like easier right you can easier handle. So and only when I did myself I knew when you spread the glue with the index finger then whatever you touch afterwards is sticky. So they use the middle finger to keep the index finger clean to do all the rest of the things. And like while I was doing the I mean it took really lot of time I spent many weeks and hours in the workshops and long time like what what can I do out of all this. So I found one
Speaker 1: like aspect which become really an interesting thing and it really is a full, I have a full chapter in my thesis about the tools.
Speaker 2: What kind of tools and what when you're speaking about tools, what kind of tools are they using? What kind of tools did you use when you were so you were doing participant observation?
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: And what kind of tools can you give us a little bit information where did you work? Was it in Niamey? Was it somewhere else? And what kind of tools did you use to do what kind of objects?
Speaker 1: Okay, so actually I started my research in Niamey because the airport is in Niamey, so this was where I had to start. But during my research, I was travelling quite a lot. So I went to the north, to Agadez, to the mountains and even once I went further south to Maradi. And this was in the beginning due to the political situation because of danger of kidnappings by AQMI from the north and Boko Haram from the... I mean, in fact, we didn't know the situation. So I was advised by the people to be a bit on the move, to travel more and to travel spontaneously and not to tell around wherever I go. So this made me really travelling a lot. And this is even how I found out about the huge network of the Inadan family, which I consider as a community of makers and experts instead of calling them castes, which really evokes other ideas than skill and knowledge, you know.
However, like everywhere, you Inadan, they work with metal, with iron, with metal. They make silver jewellery, they make garden tools. Further in the south, where you find big trees, they work more with wood and make bats and mortars. And women always sew leather bags in different sizes and for different occasions. So they need really quite a big range of tools to work leather, different kinds of metals, iron, wood and so on. However, when you look in the toolboxes, now I'm coming back to the tools, they are surprisingly sparse and simple there. And when I in the beginning started to make inventories, I was surprised, but how like there are some tools missing, how is it possible? And then when I was observing the way they work, their practices and I started to work with them, because only when you're engaging in craft, you really understand what's going on technically, I recognised that they are constantly making tools. They are forging tools, they are melting other things down to make a new tool. Once a blacksmith was making a knife and then he needed this tool, this iron to sharpen the knife and he didn't found it, so he just took a file and he made this iron to sharpen the knife out of it, like besides without saying anything. So and then I understood that here it is, you know, you cannot consider craft by just looking at the objects in the toolbox because it is just one moment gaze, but the toolbox is constantly in transformation. And when I went to the literature, like anthropological literature on craftspeople, it is really surprising that toolmaking is no issue at all. I mean, toolmaking is the human, this thing is human from animal ones, it was said, right? Now we know it is not the case. Anyways, like even the material culture studies working on craftspeople, they give lists of tools, but no one discusses toolmaking as such. I found two references or two remarks on toolmaking. One, I mean, it is from the eighties and nineties. Anyways, anthropologists were saying, yeah, they make their own tools because on the markets they are too expensive. And another guy was saying they would make their own tools because the markets are too far away. And I said no, like making your own tools is not a lack of...
Speaker 1: money or whatever, but is there a competence? They make their tools because they can do it, they know what they need and they're able to do it. And to recognize this is something crucial to take artisans seriously. I mean, there's a big debate nowadays on technology in Africa, from Africa, yeah, but artisans are not really considered anyways. I don't know why, because they are really the ones who are the technologists, yeah.
Speaker 2: So what you are telling us is that those craft people are not only playing a role in religion and in magic, and that's the contribution of your PhD, I guess. But does it, do you mean they don't play a role in religion at all or?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true. They are not only working as craftspeople, but they have a very important role in other cultural or religious activities. For example, I mean, in the crucial rituals in life, they perform at the wedding ceremonies and they take over the main task in the naming ceremonies also. So they sing and dance at the weddings and at the naming ceremonies, they cut the hairs of the babies and they even protect. They stay with the mother like after birth, the first seven days till the naming giving, mother and baby are somehow meant to be in a like half between half in the world, half not in the world status. Only after seventh day, the baby, even before it's called among Tuareg, a guest, the baby, only at the seventh day, the naming ceremony, they sort to say arrive in the world of the humans. And here the smith women play a very important role protecting the mother and the baby. As the same at the wedding, like there you change your social status, so it's somehow liminal phase and again the smiths are the ones while singing, dancing, drumming accompany the couple in the new status of being married couples. So indeed they have these ritual roles and they are somehow, yes, related to the supernatural, perceived as having specific powers because of their craft skills, because wow, they can melt metals, so there must be something about it. And I followed them, yeah. I mean, in the summer, in the season, they there are all the weddings going on, like everyone, the students from the city, they come to the village and then the weddings going on and you can rarely find the craftspeople in the workshops, but they are always busy with doing wedding, performing at weddings. However, my idea and my research was, I mentioned all these things in my thesis, but I want to emphasize even in these rituals, they are like knowledgeable and skilled people and they are not a damned caste who is somehow dismissed or outside society, yeah. They can go to, they are close to the bride, they are close to the newborn baby. So they are not a caste which is not respected.
Speaker 2: One of the concepts in your work by which you question the notion of caste and you show that it's not only a closed caste, but it's more than that, it's the notion of mobility. Can you explain us what you mean with that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, mobility, I found it really very crucial to understand these artisans as a community of experts and makers. When I started my research, of course, I went to the workshops and in the workshops, I found artisans working. And I first only focused on those who are engaged in craft. I mean, you always find those in Adan who maybe once they have learned, but they do other things, they study, they work as drivers or whatever, teachers. So I thought I would focus only on those working in the workshops. And then after like I spent more than...
Speaker 1: Or one and a half years, I saw that artisans working in the workshops they're leaving. They decide, ah, I will go to the village and grow onions. And I thought, wow, what's going on? How can they leave their the work of their family? But after some months, they came back and said, oh okay, now I come back to the anvil. And then I thought somehow okay, the youth is there change or what's going on? But when I started to talk to the older artisans and smiths, they all told me when they were young, they were travelling. Did very different jobs. They were working for NGOs. They went to Kano to make camel and or they they went to Libya, Nigeria and worked there as seasonal workers in the gardens and pursued very different jobs. However, they always stayed within the family. They went to the south to work for a project from a French organization, but they stayed with the mother's brother or with the grandmother or with the father's or cousin. Staying there and learned another skill like perhaps with their parents, with their father, they learned like jewellery making and then they learned camel saddle making. And this is how like everyone developed his own skills and specialized in different craft activities, but even how the knowledge circulate among them and how they develop further and update the different practices. And before I was thinking of the craftsman like somehow settled down in the workshop all his life and handing over his knowledge to his son and one line. But then I saw how it is circulating and how each according to his own interests yeah develop his own set of skills. Yes, and only when you take on this mobility perspective, like I was able because me too, I was traveling and I found some people I met in the capital Niamey, I found them later in the village and I thought, ah, what are you doing here? And then he was telling me, yeah, I came here to help my brother and helping him making knives for some weeks and then he would maybe go back to Niamey.
Speaker 2: Right. And and I think this this concept of mobility, that's also what brought you to your new project and position at the chair of the sociology of migration and mobility at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich. Thank you very much for being here with us. And I remind everybody of your upcoming book published in 2024 with the Frobenius Institute, Die Unbeständigkeit der Dinge. We're looking forward to see this important work published and thank you to all for listening to us and we will have upcoming episodes of this podcast coming up.
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Origins & context
- Title
- Dr. Valerie Nur and Prof. Dr. Joël Glasman on artisanal knowledge in Niger from a mobility perspective
- Language
- English
- Podcast series
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Cluster Conversations
- Date
- April 19, 2024
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- 23 minutes, 16 seconds
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