The Role of Architecture in Society: Structuring of the Family Unit among Moorish Pastoral Nomads of Mauritania

Abstract

Abstract This paper sheds new light on the existence of a multitude of architectural concepts amongst Moorish nomadic herders of Western Sahara. The description and the analysis of its three variations help us to better understand the nuclear family's genesis in this society and the important role of architectures and, more generally, of objects in this process. In the Mauritanian nomadic society, the type of habitation most used and the best known is the tent, the khayma.1 Its most likely heritage is from the progressive arrival of Arab Bedouin tribes into the Western Sahara regions starting in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries AD. (Feilberg 1944). It consists of a rectangular cloth about 7 m by 6 m, made up of strips woven from black wool and the hair of camels (often replaced today by strips of imported cotton cloth) and supported at the centre by the crossing of two long slanted wooden poles, giving the whole a pointed and pyramidal form. The khayma is at the base of the strong metonymical relationship with the family living there,2 benefiting from a privileged status in the Moor's system of representations and in their contemporary identity among the Bedouins and the rest of the population (Boulay 2004). Nevertheless, on-site investigations have allowed us to discover that the khayma is not the only kind of tent used by pastoral Mauritanians.3 There is, in effect, another type, or more precisely another architectural concept, less known and named the benye. This feminine noun, based on the Arab root BNY, expresses the idea of 'build', 'erect' or 'construct'4 and takes the form not of the two long slanted poles of the khayma but rather is based on arcs or stakes placed vertically. Through a careful examination of the three current uses of the word benye - 'secret' shelter of a young couple, double roof 'discreet' of the black tent, light structure for long migrations - we will see how the study of this architectural concept can instruct us regarding the process of forming the marital couple and family in a Muslim society. We will also better understand how, even today, this contributes to the confidentiality and marginality of this important factor and its different known materials in this part of the Western Sahara.