An ethnological reading of the story “The stone goddess“ by Ebrahim Elkouni

1. Introduction

Africanists have divided the African continent into two parts: North Africa and South Africa. The Great African Sahara is a barrier between these two parts. The lands located north of the Sahara are called North Africa and the countries south of it are called South Africa or Black Africa. They call the inhabitants of North Africa Afro-Arab due to the influence of Arab-Islamic culture and consider the absolute name "African" worthy of the people of Black Africa. This distinction has permeated African studies, including literary studies. According to African scholars, traditional African literature is spoken and written literature in this continent is a mixture of African oral culture with two other cultures: Arabic-Islamic culture in the north and Western culture in the south. But they do not consider all the written literature of this continent to be representative of African literature, but they consider the works from the south of the Great Sahara in this category. It is worth paying attention to the fact that only works written in one of the European languages are included under modern African literature. The mentioned division and the emphasis on the western language of writing excludes Arabic-language creations from the cycle of modern African literature, but familiarity with the literature of countries such as Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Libya makes the researcher reconsider this approach. read The works of some story writers of these countries, whose written language is Arabic, have such a local flavor that it cannot be considered Arabic-Islamic. The writings of this Libyan writer, who is a descendant of the Tuareg tribe, are like a canvas on which the climatic characteristics of the Great African Sahara and the cultural characteristics of the Tuareg tribe are imprinted. He is so committed to the representation of the geographical and cultural ecosystem of his people that his literary creations have an ethnographic aspect in addition to the narrative aspect.

2. Methodology

The connection between literature and anthropology is not a new issue; Because ethnography, as a branch of anthropology, has paid attention to the oral literature of the peoples (stories and legends, epics and myths) from the beginning. What is new and fresh in literary anthropology, as an emerging branch of anthropology, is attention to written literature, especially fiction. In this branch, the connection between the two fields of literature and anthropology is viewed from three perspectives: 1. The use of literary texts as a source of ethnography; 2. Using literary writing methods in ethnography; 3. Bio-cultural anthropological investigation, especially literary creation. Of these three, the first aspect is the focus of this research, and of course, among the various forms of literary text, the story. Janet Tallman in the ethnographic novel article; In search of the inner voice, he examines the place of the ethnographic novel in anthropological researches and recognizes it as a work that provides important information about the culture(s) of origin of the novel. . However, since the storyteller is one of "them" and uses emotions as a tool for his work, the impact of his story is much more than the ethnographer's report (Tallman, 2002: 21). In this article, Tallman points to the novel of drinking water written by Antonio Olinto and shows how this novel is related to the author's ethnographic works.In this research, following Tallman's approach, we try to show how Elkouni used ethnographic phenomena in the story of the Stone Goddess in his narrative.

Totem and ritual hunting

"Bukha's" father gave his life for hunting goats; Hunting the sacred animal. In describing this animal, his mother called it a sacred creature that has the spirit of ancestors in its body (Alkouni, 1992: 10). He considers mountain goat hunting forbidden in the tribe's religion, and if his wife did not do it, he would have worked to save the lives of his wife and child from starvation. The term totemism indicates the relationship between nature and culture. In this story, the spirit of the ancestors of the tribe dissolves in the body of a mountain goat after death; Harming the saddle is like wounding a person and its antidote is death.

Marriage and ceremony
The marriage ceremony in this story has two stages: first, the "happy ceremony" which lasts for seven days, and second, the bride's departure to the groom's house, which takes place one year after the first ceremony. The actions of the first seven days are reminiscent of the rite of puberty. This ritual, which is called "mystery journey", lasts for seven days and at the end of it, the bride enters the groom's cabin. A guide is in charge of organizing the ceremony. All three main elements of the rite of passage can be seen in this ceremony: isolation, death and rebirth.



The birth of the goddess; From myth to magic

A cave that holds the hands of ancestors. He finds a smooth wall and polishes it. Then the orator engraves the face of the goddess on it. The stone becomes wax against the spell of the sorcerer. Then he went to "Tamdort" and kidnapped his soul with the help of magic and blew it into the stone. This is how the goddess lives.
A short story like The Stone Goddess is full of small and big references to the Tuareg people's life. As an ethnologist, Elkouni provides the reader with a lot of data about his people, some of which were mentioned in this research. Ethnographer also has no choice but to talk about the beliefs of a people about superhuman inhabitants, magic, ritual actions, the origin of the tribe and the dos and don'ts that they adhere to. This story more than any belief shows the pre-Islamic beliefs of Tuareg; Beliefs rooted in millennia lost in history.In this work, the cultural ecosystem of an African people is well depicted, and therefore it can be considered as a representative of African literature.