The experience of place in the annual festival held in an Amazigh village in southern Tunisia

Abstract

The phenomenological meaning of place argued by Yi-Fu Tuan and Edward Relph involves multiple disciplines, including religious studies. Based on the idea of experience of place, the study examines the structural contrast between the inner village and the outside suburbs. Focusing on the representation of the contrast of places in the festival of southern Tunisia, it also discusses the inner and the outer experience of the human existence that such contrast implies. In this regard, interviews with the local people in the village and observation of rituals and festivals were implemented. The traditional rituals designate the contrast of the human realm and the untamed nature, which has been shaped by environmental and historical factors. Their ambivalent ontological orientations toward usefulness/controllability and toward sacredness/uncontrollability are reconciled by the experience of the festival. The dynamism of the inside and the outside in the form of olives, a bride, or a palanquin enables people to realize the source of new lives and experience the essential meaning of generation. In spite of recent political and exhibitionistic tendencies, the Mahrajān represents the universal structure of festivals in which arbitrariness is periodically broken down by introducing the external sacredness into the inner human realm.