HISTORY IS IN THE WAITING

The oral transmission of history often results in inconsistency, despite historians' expectations of logical coherence. In southern Tunisia, there is a strong distortion between the wealth of memory about daily or ritual practices from the past and the extreme evanescence of more political and historical recollections. Furthermore, these two sorts of memory may disagree. 'Native ethnography' has turned out to be the place for storing a full-fledged political memory. The attribution of a sense of identity (inclusion/exclusion) is all the more varied and variable insofar as it has to do with nuances in practices. This accounts for a form of overemphasis on tradition. As marriage rites show, ritual traditions and the stories related to them may convey a mute mimetic memory that is grounded neither in the notion of habitus nor in the principle of commemoration. Unvoiceable or censored truths, missing in historical accounts, may thus be latently conveyed without being written down.