This introductory program in anthropology is constructed around the audiovisual material which Jacques Willemont, filmmaker and ethnologist, has collected on the Gnawa since 1969 when Viviana Pâques, a researcher at the CNRS, asked him to accompany him on site in Morocco.
Today, the collected documentation includes some 80 hours of film on the daily life, the Chabaâbane rituals organised by the brotherhood, the Tamesloht and Moulay Brahim pilgrimages, which the Gnawa undertake at the time of Mouloud, and on some of the most important figures in gnawi music.
Interveiws were held with historians, anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and Moroccan, French, American and Canadian psychiatrists as well.
The methodological approach of this program was structured around this documentation by a number of lecturers and researchers, mostly from the University of Strasbourg. It is all the more useful that Viviana Pâques’ interpretations, as well as those of the entire current of French symbolism are put into historical and methodological perspective, for scientifically legitimate reasons.
This program will present both a synchronic and diachronic anthropological apporoach which will be emphasised during the course of the interventions of Maurice Godelier, professor at the EHESS (l’école des hautes études en sciences sociales) in Paris.