Discovering Culture Through Interviews

Keeping the Fire Alive: An Interview with Dr Amara Diallo

Dr Amara Diallo is a cultural anthropologist at the University of Geneva. Originally from Senegal, she has spent the past twenty years documenting traditional ceremonies and festivals across West Africa and the diaspora. She spoke to ESLeCollege about how cultural traditions shape identity and what happens when they come under pressure.

You have spent two decades studying cultural ceremonies. What first drew you to this work?

I grew up in Dakar, and every year without exception my family would travel back to my grandmother's village for the harvest festival. As a child I found it — if I am honest — slightly tedious. A long journey, no electricity, the same rituals performed in the same order every year. But when I was seventeen my grandmother died, and the following year we did not go back. And I felt an absence that I could not explain. It was then that I began to understand that those ceremonies had been doing something to me that I had not noticed while they were happening.

What were they doing to you?

They were giving me an address in the world. A sense of where I belonged and what I was part of. You have to understand that I was also growing up in a rapidly modernising city, speaking French at school, watching American films, wearing Western clothes. There was a version of me that was fully cosmopolitan, disconnected from any particular place or tradition. The ceremonies were the counterweight. They said: yes, but you are also this. You come from here. You carry this in you.

Is that connection to tradition always positive? Some people feel trapped by their cultural heritage.

That is a very important question and I want to answer it honestly. No, it is not always positive. Cultural traditions can be used to enforce conformity, to exclude those who do not fit, to maintain power structures that harm people — particularly women and young people. I have documented ceremonies in which these dynamics are very present. I do not think that preserving a tradition is automatically a good thing. What matters is how the community engages with the tradition — whether it is something alive and evolving, or something rigid and coercive.

How do communities manage to keep traditions alive when people move away or the world changes around them?

This is the question I find most fascinating. The most resilient traditions are the ones that have found ways to adapt without losing their essential character. I documented a Senegalese community in Paris that had been celebrating the Tabaski festival for forty years in a city apartment block. They could not do what would be done in Senegal. They had no animals, no outdoor space, no extended family nearby. But they found ways to preserve the spirit of the occasion — the gathering, the food, the prayers, the deliberate slowing down of time. The form changed. The meaning did not.

What is lost when a cultural tradition disappears entirely?

Something that cannot be recovered. Not just the practice itself — but the way of seeing the world that the practice carried. Every ceremony encodes a particular understanding of time, of community, of the relationship between the living and the dead. When a ceremony disappears, that understanding disappears with it. We are left with a description in a book, perhaps, or a recording in an archive. But the living knowledge — the knowledge that exists only in the bodies of the people who perform the tradition — is gone.

What advice would you give to young people who feel disconnected from their cultural heritage?

Ask questions. Specifically — ask the oldest person in your family or community to describe a ceremony or tradition in as much detail as they can. Not a summary. Not the meaning or the significance. The actual physical detail. What did you wear? What did you eat? What did it smell like? Who stood where? What happened first? Those questions unlock something. And the answers are always more interesting than you expect.

Dr Amara Diallo's most recent book, The Living Archive, is available from university libraries.