Dominique Casajus is a specialist in Tuareg history and anthropology.

He is fellow emeritus
at the Institut des Mondes Africains (CNRS).

Research Themes

• Poetry and writing

• The Homeric question
• Traveler writers
• History of Libyco-Berber scripts

Distinctions

• Prix Robert Cornevin 2015 of the Académie des Sciences d'Outre-Mer for his
book L'alphabet touareg. Histoire d'un vieil alphabet africain.
• Prix Georges Dumézil 2016 of the Académie française for his book L'alphabet touareg.
Histoire d'un vieil alphabet africain.

Published works
The tent in solitude

My first research focused on Sahelian Tuaregs. In particular, it gave rise to the writing
of four books. The first of them, La tente dans la solitude. La société et les morts chez les Touaregs Kel-
Ferwan (Cambridge University Press, 1987), explored the values around which a Tuareg society
of the Sahel is organized. I provided new data on the status of women in Tuareg society – a
subject in which, oddly enough, ethnography had not been interested so far, so that we were
still, more or less, close to the somewhat fanciful data that owed as much to Pierre
Benoît's Atlantis as to the observable reality.

Word and poetry among the Tuaregs

Then, after having published two collections of Tuareg texts and their translation (a
collection of tales in 1985, Peau d’Âne et autres contes touaregs ; a collection of poems in
1992, Poésies et chants Touaregs of the Ayr, in collaboration with Moussa Albaka), I published in
2000 Gens de parole. Langage, poésie et politique en pays touareg, book which, again, opened new ways
in the study of the Tuareg since, as almost nobody since Charles de Foucauld had been
interested in their poetry, nor in their language, nor in the social implications of their way of
thinking about language. The title of this book took note of the fact that the words of my
interlocutors had provided the raw material. In this book, the Tuaregs are painted as men of
words, who refer to themselves as “people of the Tuareg language” (kel-temacheq) or “people
of the word” (kel-awal). A “word” of which they have themselves a singular conception: it must
be, as they say, reserved, penitent, in a word close to silence. This is true of their daily speech,
true also of the one they value among all, poetry. Their elegies portray a lonely narrator,
tormented by a burn of which we do not know whether it is caused by the aridity of the deserted
steppe or the ardor of his love. His journey to a distant tent from which perhaps consolation
will come to him seems to me to be the poetic transposition of the fact that men are always,
by their place in the social game, far from the tent.

The Homeric question

From the desire to collect, translate and analyse tales or poems, I went on to a more
general reflection on what we call oxymorically oral literature. Which culminated in a
book (L’aède et le troubadour. Essai sur la poésie orale) published in 2012. In addition to putting into
perspective all that I had discovered about Tuareg poetry, as well as archaic Arabic poetry in
which it draws some of its themes, this book focused on the Homeric question, which was a
logical accompaniment to my work on orality. For several reasons, the subject has, in fact, an
anthropological interest. First of all, the epics of Homer have the particularity of being texts
that have been with us for a long time, while bearing an irreducible part of otherness. Homer
is the Other – in time and space – but a familiar Other. Parry and Lord, the two homerists who
the two heroes of Ismayl Kadare's Dossier H, did nothing but remind us how misleading this
familiarity was. During the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, the
Moderns anathematized Homer because of this otherness.Ancients like Boileau accepted his
otherness but could not find the words to make it acceptable to their opponents. In other
words, the attitude towards Homer is indicative of an attitude towards otherness, a trait that is
still perceptible today when we speak of Homer. Moreover, the study of the Homeric question
is a natural extension of the work that I lead around the concept of author. In a way comparable
to what I discovered for Tuareg poetry, troubadouresque poetry or archaic Arabic poetry, the
character of Homer was born from the texts attributed to him.

The bard and the troubadour

For this book also made room for troubadour poetry. There were several reasons for
that. First of all, the figure of a poet who has gradually emerged from my examination of Tuareg
poetry and Arab poetry is no stranger to them. It is admitted, indeed, that the troubadours were
the first in Europe to feature a narrator speaking in the first person of his own feelings – in
this case love feelings. New in the West, this association of love and poetry was, from the
beginning, an obvious thing for the Arabs. One could certainly evoke the more distant
precedent of Roman erotic poetry, but the troubadours as well as the Arabs of Paganism stand
out in that the narrator whom they feature sings not the delights of love but the painful
loneliness of the abandoned lover, all traits that are found in contemporary Tuareg poems. It
seemed to me that the loneliness of this weeping narrator is above all a transposed image of
the situation of the poets who feature it: unlike the Serbo-Croatian bards studied by Parry and
Lord and, it seems, Bards of archaic Greece, who all composed in the very moment of
performance, they work in solitude. In addition, the troubadours helped me to overcome the
somewhat abrupt opposition between oral poetry and written poetry on which Lord thought
it necessary to base reflection. One point distinguishes them indeed from their Arab or Tuareg
counterparts, so comparable as they are in other respects: their repertoire seems to have been
at least partially the fruit of writing. They were therefore writers, but writers whose
compositions were intended for an oral reception. Lastly, it seemed to me interesting to
conduct with the troubadours an experiment analogous to that to which Homer gave
rise. They, too, are familiar to us, less because of what our scholars have written than because
of all the half-learned literature about them. And once again, wrongly so.
Toward a shared history of the Tuaregs and the French

I also broadened my initial intention to another research theme: aware that the “Tuareg
world” of which ethnologists and journalists speak has been shaped by history and especially
by its interactions with the colonizer, I have addressed the history of these interactions. I
studied, through the lives of the explorer Henri Duveyrier (1840-1892) and Charles de
Foucauld (1858-1916), the first contacts between the French and the Saharan populations. This
work led to the publication of two biographical essays (Henri Duveyrier, un Saint-Simonian au
désert, 2007; Charles de Foucauld moine et savant, 2009) and two books: Chants touaregs recueillis par
Charles de Foucauld, 1997; Journal d’un voyage dans la province d’Alger par Henri Duveyrier, 2006).

These biographical essays are nothing but the prolongation of the exegetical articles I
published about twenty years ago on Montesquieu, Dumont or Mauss. Once again, it was a
question of examining the path of thought that led to the production of a work. But in these
first articles, I was left with the texts. I went a step further with Foucauld and Duveyrier; first
of all, I studied manuscripts and drafts, that is to say, the actual materiality of the texts they had
produced; moreover, I became interested in how the production of their work had interfered
with the miseries of their lives.

Moreover, the frequentation of the archives showed me how much the colonization of
the Sahara was not a blind and anonymous process. Some individuals, with their personalities,
their idiosyncrasies, played such a role that things could have been different in their absence. Of
course, the Sahara would have been conquered anyway and the Tuaregs would have been
subjugated. But, as recent works have shown, this affair, as much as a clash between cultures,
has been an encounter between a few individuals – Duveyrier, Foucauld, Laperrine, Moussa
agg Amastane... – so that the historian must, willy-nilly, be also a biographer. My works on
Foucauld and Duveyrier are therefore a contribution to a shared history of the French and the
Tuaregs. We can even say, since the Tuaregs I am talking about in these works are especially
those who lived in Algeria, that this was my personal contribution to the writing of a shared
history of France and Algeria in which so many researchers then engaged. In addition, it was
also a contribution to the history of our discipline, because our knowledge of the Saharan
populations and the image that we make of them owe a lot to these two men and the context
in which they worked.

On anthropological writing and the "case" Charles de Foucauld

Moreover, the works I had already devoted to the history of the discipline and to some
of its outstanding figures (Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Mauss, Bouglé, Dumont...)
had already allowed me to measure how much some biographical facts might have weighed in
the development of the works I was studying. Louis Dumont, for example, never concealed
that his years of captivity in Germany had been for him a founding experience, where all his
work on totalitarianism originated. In the same way, it is well known that his condition as a
provincial gentleman, uncomfortable at the royal court where his Gascon accent might have
sounded unpleasant, was for something in what Montesquieu wrote of the monarchy. To be
interested in the work therefore always leads to an interest in the worker. And this especially if
the raw material in which he made his work is a moment of his life. This is precisely the case
of a Duveyrier. The book which made him pass to posterity is the transposition of what he
saw, heard and tested in the Sahara between May 1859 and August 1861. As for Foucauld, I
consider that his work on the Tuaregs is one of the components of his life that made him one
of the Blessed of the Catholic Church. On this subject, it seemed to me useful to include in the
biography of Foucauld that I published in 2009 some elements of what I would call his
posthumous biography. What I have been able to say on this subject is rather religious
sociology and could be intitled: “How is a saint made?”

My attention to anthropological writing has led me to look at other authors, in

particular Rousseau and Nerval, the first because his Essay on the origin of languages is important
for those interested in orality, the second because the writing resources he used in his Voyage
en Orient are worthy of being related to those we ourselves use without always being aware of
them.

History of Libyco-Berber alphabets

Finally, this same interest in writing has led me to open a file which, ethnographic at
first, has become historical and even archaeological: the history of Tuareg alphabets. I first
studied the use that the Tuaregs make today of those alphabets, as well as the circumstances in
which the Europeans discovered them. Then I wanted to go further in the past. These
alphabets are derived from much older alphabets, called “Libycs” or “Libyco-Berbers”. Libyc
inscriptions can be found throughout the Maghreb today, from Libya to Morocco and even to
the Canary Islands, sometimes associated with Punic or Latin inscriptions. The discovery in
Dougga (Tunisia) of two Punic-Libyan bilinguals, one of which dates back to 138 BC, allowed
the partial decipherment of one of the variants of the Libyc alphabet. The question arises as to
whether these alphabets are an indigenous creation or are borrowed the Punics. In an article
published in 2013, I proposed a hypothesis that I would summarize as follows: The Libycs
created their first alphabets somewhere before the end of the sixth century (or, at the extreme
limit, the fourth century) BC, by borrowing several letters from the Punics, forging some others
from these first loans, and resorting for the remaining letters to signs as simple as
possible. Later, one of these signs, which then referred to a consonant, took the value of a mater
lectionis. Later, probably in the second century BC, the people of Dougga adopted the same
sense of writing than their Carthaginian neighbours and at the same time borrowed an
additional letter from them. I also studied the way, a few decades ago, the Kabyle militants or
the Moroccan Berber enthousiasts forged from these old alphabets new alphabets which are
for them an emblem of their linguistic and cultural claims. Published in 2015, the work to which
his research gave rise (L’alphabet touareg) was rewarded by the Académie des sciences d’outre-
mer and the Académie française.