Amalia Dragani
Amalia Dragani is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow at the Laboratory of Political Anthropology (CNRS-EHESS) with a secondment at the University of Johannesburg (2024-2026). Previously (2020-2023), she was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellow in a joint program: at the Center for Global Islamic Studies at the University of Florida (USA), at the KU Leuven (Belgium) and during her one-year fieldwork at the LASDEL (Niger).
She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. After a PhD thesis on Tuareg poets’ creative processes in Niger, Mali and Algeria, funded by the Musée du Quai Branly and the Italian Ministry of Scientific Research, she received two French postdoctoral awards from the Laboratoire d’Excellence-Création, Arts and Patrimoine at Sorbonne-Paris 1 and the Fonds Croix rouge française at the EHESS. Most recently, she was awarded a German fellowship from the "Africa Multiple" Cluster of Excellence at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies. At the EHESS she has co-taught the anthropology of the Western African Muslim Sahel (from 2016 to 2020), she has taught Anthropology & Literature (2022-2024) et she teaches Anthropology and Literatures of Student Mobilities (2024-2025).
Her research interests are centered on the Sahara and the Sahel and include: poetic creativity, intangible heritage, and oneiric inspiration intellectual, artistic and political élites; gender and mixed marriages and currently Muslim-to-Christian conversion. From a historical perspective, she has studied Saharan student mobilities (Tuareg, Berabish) particularly in the Soviet Union and Cuba. She has published about the history of anthropology, especially about such poet-anthropologists as Bronislaw Malinowski and the connections between literature, poetry, and anthropology. She has published two books about Tuareg poetry in Italian, Giavellotti tifinagh. Poesia e poeti tuareg del Sahara (2005) and Interno tuareg. Etnografia partecipativa della poesia dei nomadi del Niger (2012), as well as special issues about poetic inspiration (2017) and poetry and anthropology (2018). She has made three short films "Le lendemain du mariage" (2020), "Bulle d'écrivaine" and "Berceuse pour Hassan" (2021). She is member of the board of the Association for Anthropology of Social Change and Development (APAD) and Society of Africanists (SdA) and film programmer at the Cinéma des Africanistes (Musée du Quai Branly). She has been peer reviewer for the following reviews: Cahiers d'Études Africaines, Anthropology & Humanism, Anthropovision, Ateliers d'Anthropologie, Africa (Cambridge), Civilisations, African Journal of Teacher Education, Journal of Arabic Studies, Sources, L'Ouest Saharien, Polythesis. Filologia, Interpretazione e Teoria della letteratura and she is a member of the reading pool of Anthropology and Humanism.
Address: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1174-8589
She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. After a PhD thesis on Tuareg poets’ creative processes in Niger, Mali and Algeria, funded by the Musée du Quai Branly and the Italian Ministry of Scientific Research, she received two French postdoctoral awards from the Laboratoire d’Excellence-Création, Arts and Patrimoine at Sorbonne-Paris 1 and the Fonds Croix rouge française at the EHESS. Most recently, she was awarded a German fellowship from the "Africa Multiple" Cluster of Excellence at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies. At the EHESS she has co-taught the anthropology of the Western African Muslim Sahel (from 2016 to 2020), she has taught Anthropology & Literature (2022-2024) et she teaches Anthropology and Literatures of Student Mobilities (2024-2025).
Her research interests are centered on the Sahara and the Sahel and include: poetic creativity, intangible heritage, and oneiric inspiration intellectual, artistic and political élites; gender and mixed marriages and currently Muslim-to-Christian conversion. From a historical perspective, she has studied Saharan student mobilities (Tuareg, Berabish) particularly in the Soviet Union and Cuba. She has published about the history of anthropology, especially about such poet-anthropologists as Bronislaw Malinowski and the connections between literature, poetry, and anthropology. She has published two books about Tuareg poetry in Italian, Giavellotti tifinagh. Poesia e poeti tuareg del Sahara (2005) and Interno tuareg. Etnografia partecipativa della poesia dei nomadi del Niger (2012), as well as special issues about poetic inspiration (2017) and poetry and anthropology (2018). She has made three short films "Le lendemain du mariage" (2020), "Bulle d'écrivaine" and "Berceuse pour Hassan" (2021). She is member of the board of the Association for Anthropology of Social Change and Development (APAD) and Society of Africanists (SdA) and film programmer at the Cinéma des Africanistes (Musée du Quai Branly). She has been peer reviewer for the following reviews: Cahiers d'Études Africaines, Anthropology & Humanism, Anthropovision, Ateliers d'Anthropologie, Africa (Cambridge), Civilisations, African Journal of Teacher Education, Journal of Arabic Studies, Sources, L'Ouest Saharien, Polythesis. Filologia, Interpretazione e Teoria della letteratura and she is a member of the reading pool of Anthropology and Humanism.
Address: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1174-8589
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It first shows that, although dreams have fascinated philosophical, medical, and artistic traditions since antiquity, modern Western thought progressively desacralized them, reframing dreams as individual, psychological phenomena. As a result, the social sciences largely relegated dreams to psychology and psychoanalysis, creating a division of labor in which anthropologists and sociologists focused more on the social uses of dreams—such as sharing and interpretation—than on their meanings or origins. Nevertheless, interdisciplinary engagements persisted, and from the late twentieth century onward anthropology increasingly emphasized culturally situated understandings of dreaming, attending to practices, performances, and local epistemologies.
The second part argues that dreaming remains an underdeveloped field within African studies, despite scattered ethnographic, historical, and religious research. Existing studies show that in many African contexts dreams are deeply embedded in social, religious, and political life: they serve as media of divination, healing, artistic inspiration, and communication with ancestors. Recent scholarship also highlights how dreams intersect with contemporary phenomena such as media, migration, and politics. Importantly, African philosophers and scholars challenge Western individualistic models by conceptualizing dreams as relational and communal experiences, often involving others, including the dead.
Finally, the special section adopts a multidisciplinary and comparative approach to dreaming in Africa, combining anthropology, history, and literary studies. Through case studies—from colonial school essays in West Africa to women’s dream practices in Congo and Islamic dream traditions in Mauritania—it demonstrates that dreams are sites where religion, power, gender, and everyday life intersect. Across these contexts, dreams function not only as symbolic expressions but also as practical tools for decision-making, social negotiation, and future-oriented imagination, thereby enriching our understanding of African cultural worlds and epistemologies.
Papers by Amalia Dragani
Parmi ces savants, nous en pouvons compter qui sont aussi poètes ou romanciers : c’est le cas de la pionnière de l’oral literature britannique, Ruth Finnegan (1933‑) qui signe son premier roman en 2015, Black Inked Pearl. Mais nous avons d’autres exemples d’ethnologues qui, n’étant ni producteurs ni même lecteurs habituels de poésie, ont été néanmoins « convertis » à l’étude des poésies orales, par un hasard de leur expérience de terrain. C’est le cas de Steve Caton qui, parti en Arabie saoudite pour entreprendre une thèse d’anthropologie politique, prit conscience du rôle important que joue la poésie dans le tissu social et culturel local, à la suite d’une série d’épisodes imprévus (il observa le retour du roi Khalid accueilli à l’aéroport par un poète de cour, à la bibliothèque de l’Université de Ryadh il tomba sur des annonces concernant les futures récitations de poésie)… Aussi passa‑t‑il les années suivantes au nord du Yémen, qu’il choisit pour la richesse de ses traditions poétiques orales.
C’est sur le Yémen que cette rubrique de recensions s’ouvre, avec une lecture de l’ouvrage que Flagg Miller a consacré à la circulation d’audiocassettes de poésie, thème dont Lila Abu‑Lughod, qui étudia le même phénomène parmi les femmes bédouines d’Égypte, fut pionnière. Mais ce dossier d’Acta fabula propose un tour d’horizon assez vaste en convoquant des ouvrages d’ethnopoétique venus de différents lieux, comme l’Amérique (Rothenberg, Bahr), l’Afrique (Degorce, Rovsing Olsen), le Moyen Orient (C. Boidin) ou — dans une perspective diachronique — venus des mondes anciens (C. Calame). Tantôt les auteurs s’interrogent sur le travail particulièrement ardu de traduction de poèmes oraux (Bahr, Degorce), tantôt ils s’intéressent à la comparaison entre traditions littéraires orales (Casajus). Ces riches lectures, que nous ont livrées B. Beucher, J. Derive, S. O’Neil, T. Roger, P.‑Y. Testenoire et A. Webster montrent le visage pluriel de l’ethnopoétique contemporaine, qui s’inscrit dans des champs et des traditions de recherche diverses et éclectiques.
This article focuses on the somatization of the creative process through the exploration of the ethnographic case of Tuareg poets. By analysing two corpora- the texts in which the poets describe themselves as “inspired” and as “prey to inspiration” and the informal descriptions given by “flesh and blood” poets of the creative process in moments of informal conversation and during my observation of the creative act. I was able to identify two distinguishing features. One concerns the body and the parts of the body involved in the creative process. As regards the former there is talk of “bodies in pieces, boiling, explosion” and emotional disorders that affect the internal organs such as the liver, heart, spleen and bowels. Moreover for “flesh-and-blood” poets, creation is essentially reflected in effects on the skin (e.g. goose bumps) and “small hairs and downs” (bristling), on external organs. The second feature concerns the description of the creative act. While poetic texts focus on the moment before creation and are silent about postcreation, the informal descriptions operate in a symmetrical and inverted way, offering silence on inspiration and discourse on the post-creation, on the “process of creation self-healing” brought by the creative process. To explain these differences, the following hypothesis is posited: to describe oneself in a state of possession, as does the poet in this oral tradition, has a double advantage, that of putting himself in an old tradition and that of staging a familiar state for his listeners, more familiar at least than inspiration.