Today is the first day of this year’s cycle of funerals in Karankasso Sambla. Music has played all night yesterday, and today in the early afternoon there is more music and various rituals are performed. I have joined the hunters who gathered to honour the mother of one of them, Karim Ouattara. Karim is the…
One of the main aims of my April 2015 trip to Burkina Faso is to screen my documentary Kalanda – The Knowledge of the Bush to the hunters who are its protagonists. But the trip is also an opportunity to meet again, after three years, my fellow students in donsoya. As far as the group…
In the past two weeks I have been presenting some video fragments from the footage I am working on for the documentary The Sambla Baan. First for a presentation in Italy and later for my course on West Africa here in Manchester, I selected two short scenes that show interactions between the musician playing the…
This is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of my PhD dissertation, slightly edited and enriched of various media. I prepared this post for the reading list of my course in Regional Studies of Culture – West Africa on Ways of Knowing in the Mande. Learning to hunt One of the crucial days of my fieldwork,…
When on fieldwork in Burkina Faso, working on donso hunters and their knowledge of the bush, I found myself to need a shotgun in order to join the hunters in their outings. In Bobo Dioulasso I came across Boubacar Traoré, who comes from a Jula family of blacksmiths. He sold me a locally made 12-gauge…
Three years ago, precisely on 25 March 2011 I was in Orford Ness, a shingle spit on the Suffolk coast that the National Trust turned into a natural reserve. But before being valued as a nature conservation site, Orford Ness was owned by the Ministry of Defence. Important research for the development of radar technology…
Radicazioni is a three-days music festival that sees on stage various groups inspired to folk music in Italy and abroad. Musicians perform on stage and later until early morning in the narrow streets of Alessandria del Carretto, a small village in northern Calabria, Italy. But it is also an important gathering for local musicians and young…