Whereas most people might see the current state of Berber culture and its commodification as a puzzling social, cultural, and economic snarl, Jane Goodman sees multi-leveled, multi-faceted webs of meaning -- distinct circuits of relationships, causes and effects, and clear pathways of interaction and identity. Her writing style is a pleasure to read as she lays out complicated cultural situations in plain language.
Goodman divides the book into three main sections. The first, “Part One: Circuits,” addresses pathways and communities of identity and culture. Goodman uses three subsections to demonstrate the different ways in which circuits may be conceived. In “The Berber Spring,” she uses an overview of Berber history both to give readers a general knowledge base and to demonstrate specific historical trends. “Refracting Berber Identities” begins to deal with the impact of the song A vava inouva and the new levels of cultural understanding (from both within and without) that the song created, particularly the “‘internal gaze’…informed by neither the East nor the West but by indigenous modes of knowledge” (49). “The Mythical Village” follows a more descriptive anthropological approach as Goodman lays out the complexities of residency and the Berber village. While this concept has become something of a romanticized ideal for many, in reality, most Berber villages are left half-vacant by migratory workers who nevertheless insist upon maintaining their houses in the village. By walking readers through the dusty village streets, and into the immigrant/migrant communities in France, Goodman helps readers to better understand the complex, quasi-mythical, yet omni-present, status of the modern Berber village.
In Part Two, Goodman switches gears to move from historical and cultural framing to textual analysis. As an overall comment on this section, I find that Goodman’s inclusion of many textual examples, clearly arranged to illustrate her points, greatly adds to the quality of this section. She continues to use the text of A vava inouva as a uniting thread as she untangles its movement from a song sung by old women to a popular ballad to which raises issues of copyright and the politics of global marketing. “Collecting Poems” focuses on colonial collections of Berber poetry, exploring the subtexts created by the compilers with various artistic and political agendas. In “Authoring Modernity,” Goodman explores the impact of two Kabyle Berber artists, poet Ben Mohamed and singer Idir, on contemporary articulations and understandings of Kabyle poetry. Sometimes working together and sometimes not, these two men used folk resources and recrafted the poems as their own artistic expressions. Goodman traces the creative process of revisions in a tactfully unbiased light, neither championing artistic innovation nor lamenting a loss of traditional context and meaning, but rather using the tensions of intertextual space as layers of added meaning. In her discussion of “Copyright Matters,” Goodman raises a very logical and valid question: “If most of song text can be found in village repertories, shouldn’t it instead be attributed to the public domain?” (143). Wisely refusing to choose a side in this debate, Goodman comes to realize that “the tensions surrounding the question of origins were more revealing than the responses” (145). The significance, for her, lies in the transformation of the attitude of Kabyle women towards themselves, with many moving from self-identification as singers to culture carriers, and finally to seeing themselves as creative authors.
Part Three, “Performance,” addresses some of the challenges in staging Kabyle cultural productions. With the adoption and adaptation of traditional women’s songs as the backbone of Idir and Ben Mohamed’s creative processes, the strong tradition of separate public spaces and venues for men and women became increasingly problematic. Particularly for children’s choruses, which ostensibly have participants too young to understand the complexities of sexual and gender dynamics, the social prohibition of mixed gender performance became a stumbling block on the road to artistic freedom and cultural expression. Goodman uses the experiences of one innovative children’s ensemble that successfully staged a mixed-gender choir to explore the complexities of this issue in Kabyle culture. In the same section, she considers a different kind of performance, that of women in public leadership roles. Using the sensitive situation of a fledgling Kabyle cultural society in France as a case study, Goodman discusses the ways in which personalities and traditional gender roles intermingle to impact modern Kabyle culture. In the final section, “Village to Video,” Goodman turns to reflexivity and uses her own experiences participating with a women’s chorus in a professional Kabyle video production. She ties together many of the threads that have been running though the book: women’s creative agency, men’s difficulty with crediting (and paying) them, textual revisions, and artistic license, to name a few. Her account lets readers know that some of the tensions may still be a bit raw (and, for my taste, she might not have gone into such great detail), but she maintains a professional, academic tone throughout and her infusion of herself into the text casts the entire book into a less academic and more real-world light.
In summary, Jane Goodman’s Berber Culture on the World Stage: From Village to Video is an absolute gem. Her ability to untangle and articulate complex webs of interaction and levels of meaning is quite impressive. Goodman seamlessly balances the ethnographic with the theoretical, her prose effortlessly flowing from examples to the theories that they demonstrate. The distribution of the book’s three sections, moving from history to text to performance, makes the work applicable in a number of classroom settings. Goodman’s framework reflects the value of interdisciplinary research, giving readers a better understanding of her subject matter and providing them with intellectual tools with which to analyze and perceive their own acdemic and personal situations.
--------
[Review length: 950 words • Review posted on December 15, 2006]