ABSTRACT
In short, as “A vava inouva” traveled from village to vinyl, it recreated the practice of village storytelling, and “Berber culture” more generally, as an object of desire that invited new forms of identification. The Tunisian desert village of Shebika would seem an unlikely place to begin “A vava inouva’s” history. Seemingly bypassed by modernity, the village was falling apart when French sociologist Jean Duvignaud first visited it in 1960. Radios began to appear in some villages just before the Algerian revolution, in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Folk traditions were not simply to be preserved in static form, however, but to be modernized so as to constitute the basis of a revolutionary national culture. In an especially crass illustration of this polarization, at the 1978 Folklore Festival in Tizi-Ouzou, one Kabyle group staged a typical olive-picking ritual as another sang and danced the agricultural revolution.
