ثقافة النخلة بالمجتمع التونسي : الاستخدامات و الرمزيات

الملخص EN

The date palm stands as a living culture with complex dimensions that begins with what is technical and ends with imaginary abstractions that become with it a symbolic embodiment and a spiritual world that expresses the identity of the groups and societies associated with them.

This proposed article is an attempt to access the cultural world of this symbolic tree from its traditional uses, to its symbolic references as it reflects its position at various levels, within the geographical and sociological context of the south of Tunisia.

Within this methodological walk, the focus was on traditional uses only, and through certain fields, namely crafts, food, cooking and residential architecture, and later attention was paid to the range of ritual, decorative and aesthetic functions as a prelude to standing at its symbolic contents through a process of analysis and interpretation of some of its elements.

Although the ethnographic data that could be collected and presented reveal the richness of the culture that was formed around the palm tree, which secures it from important functions in terms of being a source of economic and social development in the oasis communities in particular, it also refers to its symbolic nature thanks to the sentimental shipments and collective representations it contains.

It makes it a cultural model that forms a bridge between the past and the present and between many groups and society.

Despite the disintegration of the historical contexts of the traditional relationship with the date palm, which means the impossibility of restoring the entire cultural system associated with it, what we were able to observe in terms of handicraft skills, food and culinary traditions, and artistic and ritual practices indicates the continuation and rooting of many of its elements in the collective imagination.

It continues to affirm its vitality, not only by extending and by communicating in the present, but also thanks to its renewal to take new forms compatible with the spirit of the age, as reflected in many modern crafts and artistic works inspired by the date palm.