Jula and Mooré Ajami Medicinal Manuscripts from Burkina Faso
2023–2025
RFH06
The proposed project seeks to shed light on a practice that has been so far mostly overlooked in academic publications, yet is considered something non-remarkable, almost banal, by those who practice it: Recordkeeping about medicinal topics in Ajami (ʿaǧamī), that is African languages written in Arabic script. Among the large number of languages for which Ajami practices have been recorded, two have been singled out for closer documentation in this project: Jula (also Dyula, Dioula, endonym Julakan) and Mooré, both among the major languages of Burkina Faso. While Jula Ajami has been documented not only for medicinal recordkeeping as well as in the production of esoteric written artefacts such as amulets and talismans, but also for example in religious milieus in Côte d’Ivoire, academic documentation of Mooré Ajami is basically limited to a few footnotes in scholarly literature. This is despite the fact that the Mossi (ethnonym of Mooré) appear as both authors as well as subjects in a number of Arabic manuscripts of West Africa.
The aim of this project is threefold: Firstly, to provide a linguistic and textual study of a corpus of Jula and Mooré Ajami medicinal manuscripts, secondly to investigate in detail the material aspects of these texts, which incorporates considering their writing supports, the ways in which the manuscripts are stored or kept and to what extent these often-improvised manuscripts are cherished by their authors or regarded as ephemeral. Thirdly, through interviews with Ajami literates, this project seeks to explore Ajami medicinal manuscripts as a contemporary living practice which is inseparably linked to esoteric and occult sciences and to understand the authors’ motivations to carry on with this specific tradition of manuscript production.
People
Principal Investigator: Jannis Kostelnik