Le patrimoine vivant [Ressource électronique] : ethnographic dilemma in Independent Tunisia / Virginie Rey

Bibliogr. p. 347-349

After the Protectorate ended in Tunisia, ethnography, a discipline disowned by local academics for being too primitive to analyse the fast-changing nature of the country, was recuperated in the mid-1960s by the Centre d'Arts et Traditions Populaires (CATP), the governmental body in charge of managing vernacular culture. Within the Centre, ethnography was used by researchers to serve the developmentarist paradigms supported by the Bourguiba government at the time. But this was not all. In a period which bore the stigma of colonialism and extreme modernisation, ethnography also assumed an important role of self-objectification and introspection. Its ambiguous status, as an emancipating tool developed in the colonising West, led to important interrogations within the CATP itself that echoed larger debates regarding the status of the social sciences in the postcolonial Arab World