Ruth Finnegan FBA OBE (1933, Derry, Northern Ireland) took a DPhil in Anthropology at Oxford, then joined the Open University of which she is now an Emeritus Professor. Her publications include Oral Literature in Africa (1970), Oral Poetry (1977), The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town (1989), and Why Do We Quote? The Culture and History of Quotation (2011). Ruth Finnegan was interviewed by Sarali Gintsburg (ICS, University of Navarra) and Luis Galván Moreno (University of Navarra) on the occasion of an online lecture delivered at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Navarra. In this trialogue-like interview, Ruth tells about the childhood experiences that were decisive for her interest in orality and storytelling, about her education and training as a Classicist in Oxford, the beginnings of her fieldwork in Africa among the Limba of Sierra Leone, and her recent activity as a novelist. She stresses the importance of voice, of its physical, bodily dimensions, its pitch and cadence; and then affirms the essential role of audience in communication. The discussion then touches upon several features of African languages, classical Arabic and Greek, and authoritative texts of Western culture, from Homer and the Bible to the 19th century novel. Through discussing her childhood memories, her assessment of the development and challenges of anthropology, and her views on the digital transformation of the world, Ruth concludes that the notion of narrative, communication, and multimodality are inseparably linked.

This article invites the reader to revisit the ancient and universal genre of the lullaby. We start by pointing out that the lullaby has almost never been studied in its natural settings: instead, it is often approached exclusively as a heavily proofread literary text stripped from its context. Further, we focus on tendána, a lullaby from the island of Soqotra. The tendánas used for our analysis were collected from a largely preliterate, non-media-exposed culture and in natural settings. By running a comparison between tendánas and lullabies from a number of other cultures, we conclude that, although there are a number of similarities between them, tendánas also have several unique traits, among them a different sense of safety and danger, only sporadic use of onomatopoetic vocabulary, and an absence of cumulative and counting elements.

In this research I aim to contribute to a better understanding of transitionality in poetic language by applying for the first time the hypotheses recently developed by pioneers in the emerging field of cognitive poetics to a living tradition. The benefits of working with a living tradition are tremendous: it is easy to establish the literacy level of the authors and the mode of recording of poetic text is also easy to elicit or, when necessary, to control. I chose a living poetic tradition originating from the Jbala (Morocco). Although it is not epic and local poets create only relatively short poetic texts, memorisation is also used; it has been demonstrated that oral improvisation and the use of memory are not mutually exclusive. This suggests that research on the living Jebli tradition holds promise for our understanding of oral poetry, and for revisiting the intriguing question of formulaic language.

In my paper I analyze transformations happening in the oral tradition of the Jbala, an Arabic speaking ethnic group inhabiting the western and central part of the Rif mountains of northern Morocco. My analysis centers on the work of two modern poets, who although they see themselves belonging to the oral tradition, compose their poetry in writing. Their poetry is, therefore, characterized by use of two different, and, to some degree, opposite modes of language – the oral and the written. This is especially interesting in the context of the Arabic language, where, officially, only Standard Arabic exists in two modes – oral and written, while its dialectal varieties are seen as exclusively oral forms of communication and ‘vulgar’ poetry. The textual analysis will be substantiated by information received directly from both poets. To complement this analysis I examine this tradition through the lens of major cultural and identity changes occurring in local Moroccan genres and traditions at the national level and argue that the oral tradition of the Jbala is converging with the more popular and prestigious tradition of the malhun.

The Jbala region in northern Morocco is known for an enormous number of Sufi lodges, shrines of local saints, and the cults of those saints. However, this topic has entirely escaped the attention of modern scholars. This paper focuses on the ziyara, or tradition of pilgrimage to a shrine of a saint, connecting it to the debate on place and space on the one hand, and identity studies on the other. Using a classical ethnographic approach, I analyze one such pilgrimage that took place in 2018, in which I was invited to participate as a guest,. In this paper I understand pilgrimage as a communal spiritual journey and analyze the roles the collective and individual play in it, as well as how and by what means the participants cocreate and experience constructs of place and space.