Guest lecture by Corinne Fortier (CNRS, France).
Guest Talk at SDAC: “For an Anthropology of Love: Passion, Gender and Arabic Poetry in Mauritania”
On Thursday, June 26th, 2025, from 4:15 to 5:45 pm, we are pleased to welcome a guest lecture in the SDAC Seminar Room titled:
“For an Anthropology of Love: Passion, Gender and Arabic Poetry in Mauritania”
This talk is part of the seminar “Is This Love? Mate Choice, Marriage, and Romantic Sentiments Across Societies” led by Prof. Dr. Jean-Baptiste Pettier
Summary of the Talk:
Anthropology began only recently to take interest in love. When the study of structures, functions and kinship where determining its path of inquiry, individual feelings as love had only a minor role to play for research. Love was not born in the West during the twelfth century: the pre-Islamic Arabic poetry of the sixth century testifies to its existence in the ancient Arab world. Love poems in the Moorish society of Mauritania are not the privilege of a handful, they are primarily composed with the aim of reaching the woman’s heart, like bedouin pre-islamic poetry. In the Moorish society of Mauritania, the sphere of seduction and passion, very often poetized, coexists in parallel with the marital sphere. It is thus never his wife to whom the poet addresses his poetry but another woman that he desires. The lover’s figure is a feminized figure, because he can no longer control himself and is subject to a passion that is annihilating him. However, even when the man is in this state in the seduction phase, marked negatively with passivity and suffering, it is only a temporary situation that represents minor harm on the way to conquering the woman and gaining a dominant position over other men. Courtship has commonly been a male prerogative, while women are often not supposed to manifest their desires except in an indirect way.