OLAC Record oai:soas.ac.uk:MPI1035220

Metadata
Title:		The work of a midwife
		Documentation of Baga Mandori (Atlantic, NIger-Congo) (ISO 639-3:bmd)
Contributor (recorder):		Frank
Coverage:		Guinea
Description:		This session came about through the initiative of p003 and p002 who proposed that p037 talk about her work as a midwife and her activity of practicing female excision. Owing to the controversial nature of the topic this session is closed to the public. We did this recording at the edge of the soccer field at Dobali during the morning to avoid the windy afternoons.
		This project delivers the first in-depth linguistic documentation of any of the Baga languages spoken in the Basse-Côte region of Guinea-Conakry, West Africa. Baga Mandori (also Baga Ma(n)duri), the focus of this project, belongs to the Atlantic (Niger-Congo phylum) group of languages and is part of the Mel cluster. Baga Mandori represents one of the two linguistic communities – the other being Baga Sitemu – that still use a Baga variety in intra-communal communication to some degree. The language is, however, under pressure by Soso, a Mande language and the dominant lingua franca of the region. This project will employ an immersive research approach, which aims to deliver a diverse and integrated multimedia documentary archive that will combine linguistic documentation with community training and participation. Linguistic documentation will be in the form of a trilingual dictionary (Baga Mandori-English-French), an extensive grammatical outline, an orthography, and annotated and transcribed audio-visual material from a variety of linguistic genres.
		As a note on the nickname in "Nom de terrain": Women are often identified by locality or family in my interviews. When asked interviewees did not provide nicknames as readily as men. The age is also unsure. As orientation she indicated that she was already married when Sekou Touré took power. Let's say she was 20 in 1958, that would give an age around 76. She used to farm the most common crops of this area: grounduts, rice, millet, fonio. She says that in case of the groundnuts, it was her who cultivated them and then her husband went to sell them at the market. She says that she gets a little bit of money for her mid-wife services (this includes female excision). She is not part of a Sèrè at the moment. That is for younger people, but she used to be part of a Séré, called /makissa/ for a few years. She said that she is not initiated. In the interview she used an interesting phrase (in translation from p002) Baga d'ici to differentiate from the other Baga people. She is the mother of p029 and lives with her second husband. Both husbands were Baga from Bitonko (Cherif Camara (Kandoma, near Kolaboui, is where he studied), Soriba Camara.) She is currently limited to Bitonko, but when her husband lived she often went to Kandoma.
		p001 is the main researcher in this project which he runs from the University of Florida. He is emplyed as a Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for African Studies. This is his second language documentation project. In the first documentation project he documented the Atlantic language Nalu (naj) spoken in close proximity to Baga Mandori (bmd).
		Denilson is a nickname taken from a famous soccer player Denilson, although it is not clear to me which one and I forgot to ask. When I asked him about his grandmothers, he told me that he never met his grandmothers. He lives in Kamsar with this brother. He resides mainly in Kamsar. In his own estimation about 10 months, the rest of the time he is either in his home village (2 or 3 weeks, 3 or four times a year) or in Conakry. It is in Conakry where he goes and buys the clothes he sells on the market. He said he goes to Conakry about once a month. Apart from Kamsar where he did most his schooling after grade 10, and where he now lives, he lived for approximately five years 2008-2013 in Dalaba for his studies. Before that he resided in Kanfarandé for grades 3-10. He has been to Labé once for a few weeks.
Format:		audio/x-wav
		video/mp4
Identifier:		oai:soas.ac.uk:MPI1035220
		PD-50029-13
Identifier (URI):		https://lat1.lis.soas.ac.uk/ds/asv?openpath=MPI1035220%23
Publisher:		Frank Seidel
		University of Florida
Type:		Audio
		Video
OLAC Info
Archive:		Endangered Languages Archive
Description:		http://www.language-archives.org/archive/soas.ac.uk
GetRecord:		OAI-PMH request for OLAC format
GetRecord:		Pre-generated XML file
OAI Info
OaiIdentifier:		oai:soas.ac.uk:MPI1035220
DateStamp:		2016-11-05
GetRecord:		OAI-PMH request for simple DC format
Search Info
Citation:		Frank (recorder). n.d. Frank Seidel.