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Okay, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very, very much, all of you for turning out on a wet evening, a horrible wet evening, for coming to this talk. This is organized this evening by the Society for Algerian Studies in conjunction with the LSE Middle East Program, who are kind enough to. To give us their hospitality for holding talks that we arrange. My name's John King. I help to run the Society for Algerian Studies. And just before I go on slightly further, I will say, please think about taking advantage of this membership form that my colleague has dished out. By being a member of the Algerian Studies, you get practically nothing, or almost nothing, because all our lectures are free and open to the general public, and we never have any intention of making them otherwise. So you can come to those. Anyway, you will get a certain amount of information from our mailing list. If you feel inclined to buy the Journal for North African Studies on an individual subscription, you will get it for £32 a year instead of the astonishing £99 a year that Taylor and Francis currently charged private individuals, which might be attractive to you. But most importantly, you just help the Society keep going, tick over, continue to organize these things. And I should say that Hugh, who's going to speak tonight, actually founded and set up the Algerian Society two decades and rather more ago. And his intention then was, at a time when there was virtually no academic study of Algeria and British universities to provide a forum where some sort of lectures and talks and seminars about Algeria could be held. That situation is not quite so dramatic today. There are people in history departments and politics departments in the UK studying in Algeria, so it's not quite such a drastic lack as it used to be. But nonetheless, we think we fulfill a function keeping Algeria in particular, and I suppose one could say to an extent, the Maghreb in general, in the focus of academic attention in the United Kingdom. So do think about it. Do join. It's not much for a student, as you can see, if you happen to be a student. And we'll try and keep you informed about what we do, and we promise to go on doing it. Okay, Hugh is going to talk after that. There'll be questions and answers. Please make sure your phones are silent should you feel the indomitable urge to tweet about the meeting. The hashtag is lseroberts, all one word. Hugh, I should say, is. As well as being the founder of the Society, he's the Edward Keller professor of North African and Middle Eastern History at Tufts University. And before he. He's done many, many things in his career, but before that he was the founding director of the International Crisis Group's Middle East Program, North Africa Program, based in Cairo, and he's published a number of books and tonight he's going to talk in terms of his latest book, Berber Government the Kabil Polity in Pre Colonial Algeria, published by IB Tauris, which is on sale here for the absolutely astonishing price of £15, considering it's going to cost you £62 around the corner in Waterstones if you don't buy it now. So I'd advise you to do that as well. And Hugh, I'll hand over to you.
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Thank you very much, John. And may I first of all say how grateful I am to the Society for Algerian Studies for hosting this event and for the Middle East Centre at lsc. And I have to say how very grateful I am and how much I appreciate the work John has done and Zinep Laloin and Dermot Murphy, the members of the Societies Committee. I think it's really a great achievement that the Society still exists 22 years and more after it was set up and I've been living abroad for the last. I forget how many it is, 15 years, 14 years. And it's a source of enormous satisfaction to me that the Society is still going and it's down to John and Zineb and Dermot and Bill Simpson for ensuring that it's still going strong. I gather I have 40 minutes, which is roughly one minute for each of the years I've spent thinking about this subject and producing this book. I understand that my function is not, of course, to tell you all about the book that would obviate the imperative necessity of your buying it. I have to engage in a kind of intellectual flirtation with you, I think, tease you a little, tell you something about the book, but not too much, since I'm thoroughly jet lagged, having only recently arrived from Boston, I may not display the fine sense of judgment in this matter that the occasion calls for. However, let me nonetheless indulge my own urge to tell you something about the book and I'll try to stop myself in time before I've told you too much. The book really falls into two parts and in a sense consists of two distinct arguments. The first argument is about the nature of what I call the cabio polity, which is my way of translating what might in French be called la cite cabio. And the term cite is used by the greatest of the 19th century French ethnologists, Emile Masqueray in his study of Cabio, and also Shawia and Mazabi political organization. And the first part of the book is really an exercise in what one could call historical anthropology, historical political anthropology. It's bringing history into the elucidation of issues that, in my view, a historical anthropology has not really satisfactorily explained. And I'm basically arguing for the need for history to supplement anthropological approaches in order to grasp the truth of the matter. And this part of the book is a reconstruction of Cadio political organization as this existed, as I understand it, at the moment of the French conquest, which in Kabylia, certainly for Greater kabylia, occurred in 1857, that's to say, 27 years after the French conquest of Algeria got underway with the invasion and the assault on Algiers itself. And this is an argument, therefore, that looks at a number of different elements of the historical reality of Kabyl society. A key element in the argument is the discussion of the nature of village organization in Kabylia. And the key term in the caviar political vocabulary is Thadarth. And I argue that we need to go much deeper than writers and observers have gone in order to understand the logics of the Kabil village or Thaddarth. That's the point I'll come back to. And in particular, in discussing the forms of settlement in Kabylia, I look at variations, something that I think has been almost entirely ignored. The variations in the forms of settlement in Kabyl society. And focus in the argument arrives at a proposition that amongst a particular element of the population in Greater Kabylia, known as the Igawan, the population of the high Jujura Mountains, who are in important respects distinct from the rest of the Kabil population, that this element of distinction is closely connected with the peculiarity of the amongst the Igbo. And this is a point that I believe no one has previously made. And it's a part of the argument. I will go into that a little more thoroughly in a moment. Second crucial issue is the issue of law, and I argue that this is a matter also that has required fresh thinking and in part because of the presence within the literature of a number of mutually exclusive views of this, in other words, a controversy that has never been fully resolved. And the third set of issues are the issues relating specifically to political organization. The character of the fajmath, which is the Kabil form of the Arabic word jama, meaning the assembly primarily of the village, but also historically existing or occurring, being held at other levels on a more occasional basis, particularly at the level of the arsh, that's to say, the community of a number of villages, forming a politically sovereign entity. And in connection with the elucidation of the assembly, the Thajmath in capital political organization, I devote a lot of attention to an issue that, in my view, has never been fully understood or explained, the role of what are known as sfuf. Swuf is the plural of saf, or pronounced sometimes sef, in Kabilia, which is in fact an Arabic word meaning array or row or alignment. And it's the term used to refer to political divisions, political alliances, or you could call them, as the 19th century French authors did call them, political parties. These are, in a sense, rudimentary political parties. And an important element of my argument is that where a great deal of the writing on Berber political organization has completely failed, in my view, to explain and indeed to understand and to explain, this has been a major lacuna and unresolved problem in the study of Kabylia. And my book has the ambition to grasp this nettle and get to the bottom of what these things were and how they operated and why they mattered. The second half of the book is really just straightforward history, and you could say it's political history, but it's political history that encompasses the religious and the economic and the. In part because Kabyal society, at this stage in its history and at this stage in its development, the political was not clearly separated from the religious. The political was not separated from the social or the economic. But my view here is that the political is primary, and so the second half of a book is political history, and it's oriented by the concern to explain the Kabbal polity as presented in the first half of the book. And the key feature of the explanation I offer is that it brings the Ottoman regency into the discussion. Most of the academic discussion of Kabylia, of the Kabil, if you like, example of Berber political organization, entirely abstracts that discussion from the historical context of Ottoman Algeria. The Ottoman regency lasted for over 300 years. Kabylia is not a remote region. It's not a region or a society existing a long way away from the center of Ottoman power. Kabylia is just down the road from Algiers. Of course, distances are much shorter than they used to be. If you drive out of Algiers today, you're in Kabylia within an hour, 150 years ago. It may take you. It might take you a day or two, but all things are relative. The fact is that Kabylia is close to Algiers, and there's evidence that there was a significant Kabyl element of the population. Of Algiers from early on in the Ottoman era, and that there was an interaction between the regency, between the population and economy of Algiers itself, but between the authorities of the regency and the political leaderships in Kabylia from early on. And this interaction was intense and multifaceted. And therefore, in my view, it is absolutely indispensable to understand that evolving relationship in order to understand how the political organization that the French looked at, observed in the 1850s came into being. And in bringing the Ottomans into this story, bringing history into this story, I am, of course, offering an alternative to the original French view that was a kind of ahistorical, one might, I think well say a racial theory of Berber organization. The Kabyles had their remarkable organization, which the French observers were inclined to admire, and if not, indeed, marvel at seeing in it aspects of a kind of republican, republican principles. In certain respects, I don't think they were hallucinating on that. There's aspects of the original French view that I'm inclined to endorse. The problem is that it got muddled up with all kinds of aspects of the French view that were fantasies or hallucinations. And one of those hallucinations was that the Kabyls were not really Muslim. I considered that certainly, whatever they may be now in the 1850s, they certainly were Muslim, and that the French were hallucinating in thinking that the Kabyls were anti clerical or secular in the way that all good French men and women are. But they were also hallucinating in supposing that this admirable form of political organization was something that had always existed and could be explained, therefore, in terms of La Jennie Berbert, in terms of the Berber racial genius. This is, of course, an explanation that ignores history. And when one brings history in, that racial theory disintegrates, in my view. So let me. One other point is that I argue in the second half of the book that what the French were looking at in 1857 and the years thereafter, far from being something that it had existed for centuries and centuries and centuries, if not millennia, had actually achieved the form that they were observing very recently, and that it was actually something that became perfected in a course of very acute conflicts, nothing more than a century earlier. And so an important part of the second half of the book is really quite a detailed examination of what was going on in the 17th and 18th centuries. Okay, perhaps I should stop there and leave you all to buy the book, but I will go into this, into a little bit more detail. One thing this book does is belatedly deliver on a promise, a promise I made, I think, originally in 1991 when I gave a lecture to our sister society. I don't know whether the Moroccan society still exists, but I gave a lecture to it in December 91 on the theme of perspectives on Berber politics. And I c' est caduc, I'm afraid, C' est caduc. All good things come to an end. And I argued then that there were two perspectives in the modern European or modern Western literature on Berber politics. There was the perspective that had achieved its most brilliant expression in the work of the late Ernest Gellner in his development of an exposition of what one we can call the segmentarity theory of Berber politics. That basically is a sociological theory that basically says order is maintained in Berber society through the balance and opposition of kinship groups, that the population consists of tribes that are subdivided. This is where the word segment comes in. A segmented, rather like an orange, is segmented into a number of clans. Each clan is segmented into a number of lineages, et cetera, et cetera. They're all roughly equal in size and weight and therefore can balance each other. So there's a kind of equilibrium theory of order. And this is necessary because the society that exists up in the mountains, beyond the reach of the central power, the machsen, in the case of Morocco, the Sultanate, and lacks any specialist order maintaining mechanisms of its own. This is Gellner's theory, and therefore it's thrown back onto, if you like, its sociology, its social structure, which is a kinship structure. But fortunately, this generates a balance and opposition logic or mechanism which succeeds in maintaining order. And this mechanism is lubricated by the mediating functions of religious specialists, the marabtin, or in Morocco is then known the Igoraman. And this is, in my view, a very sociological theory of politics. And its crucial premise is that the society in question has no political institutions. It is totally devoid of them. And this is where I parted company with Ernest Gellner, having learned a great deal from him as a result of discoveries I made in Kabylia, doing fieldwork there, as I said earlier 40 years ago. I can't believe the time has gone so fast, but there we are. I found myself doing research in the Jojo mountains, and I found that Kabul society most definitely had, and still has, but certainly had then, institutions that were clearly long established. It had the village assembly, the fajma. It still had, as I found in the mountains, Sufuf. It had a panoply of, if you like, secondary institutions that were what made the Primary ones function. And I argued in this lecture to the Moroccan Society in 1991 that in fact, far from the history of ideas about the Berbers being one continuous story, linear development towards ever increasing sophistication, culminating in Ernest Gellner, we actually have two quite different visions of Berber politics in the literature. And that the 19th century vision of the French ethnologists in Algeria, Hanato and Letourneur Emile Masqueray and their successor in Morocco, Robert Montaigne, who was unquestionably in the line of dissent from the Algerian 19th century ethnologists, it's quite clear they look at Berber politics in terms of the Jamal, the thatchmath, in terms of political institutions, and they say so they're not, of course, oblivious to the fact that kinship is an important element of the society, but they do not reduce politics to social structure. They are mindful of and focus on the role of institutions. And from this point of view, what Ernest Gellner did, and I think in one way you could say he was being very modest, was to in a way understate the originality of what he did. He kind of burst into a realm of discourse previously monopolized by the French, brings in a radically different theory, and very modestly suggests that this is just a development of earlier French ideas, when in my view, it was. Wasn't at all. It was a radical departure from them. So we have these two traditions or perspectives. I call the original one the historical institutional or the institutional historical perspective, and the segmentarity theory pioneered by Gellner following the work of Evans Pritchard on the Bedouin of Cyrenaica and so on, as the sociological. Structural. Structural, sociological perspective. And my view is that one cannot understand Kabyl history, Kabylia today, or what Kabylia was 150 years ago, in terms of the structural sociological vision pioneered by Gelner in the very different context of the central High Atlas of Morocco. Kabylia is a very different society from the society predominantly of transhumant sheep herders and goat herders, of the central. This and its different context, its different relationship to the central power, its different economic life, have actually led it to having a very different political tradition. And the book situates itself, in other words, in the tradition of the 19th century Institutional historical perspective, and argues that this perspective was in a way thrown over, abandoned in the wake of Gellner's brilliant promotion of this rival, but that it shouldn't have been abandoned. And the book, in a way seeks to revive this earlier perspective by resolving the problems in it that the 19th century theorists were unable to resolve. And in my view, the two most important problems that the 19th century theorists were unable to deal with was one, the problem of the sufuf, as I mentioned earlier, the actual logic of political competition within the fajmath, within village society and the society of the arsh, the larger units. And the other problem, of course they stumbled over and got wrong or didn't manage to get right at any way was the question of the relationship of politics to religion. There was this tendency to downplay religion or even write it out of the picture altogether and hallucinate Kabyls into being good trans Mediterranean auvergnat, full of anti clerical first principles. All this of course was wishful thinking and completely untrue. And this problem of fantasizing the Kabils into being non Muslims at this juncture in their history, as I say, whatever they may have since become, is another issue which I won't go into tonight, is clearly linked to the question of law and is one of the reasons why the issue of understanding law in the context of pre colonial Kabylia has also remained an unresolved problem. Okay, now I suggest perhaps I don't need to explain every bullet point, but I consider this matters for understanding contemporary Algeria because as as some of you may know if you've read my stuff on contemporary Algeria, I've been knowing it for a long time that the much bemoaned opacity of Algerian politics is in part a function of the fact that onlookers don't really have the right glasses to understand Algerian politics. It's a big problem of opacity is in the eye of the beholder. And that the biggest problem element of that is simply outsiders ignorance of Algeria's own political traditions. And that if we really want to be able to get to a point where we can broadly speaking understand what's going on in Algeria, we need to understand the continued salience of Algeria's traditions. And my argument in respect of Kabylia is that not that Kabylia is the sole source of Algeria's political traditions, but it is one source and an important one. Kabyls were participants in the setting up of the Ottoman regency in the 16th century. And of course, as I'm sure most if not all of you know, Kabyls played a major role in the national movement and in the war of liberation. They were among the most important artisans of the Algerian state, even if a lot of them ended up disliking what they helped create so Kabylia is not marginal. It's actually fairly central to Algerian history. Sometimes I think the Kabyls have an exaggerated sense of how central their region is and the tendency perhaps to downplay wrongly, the importance of the Constantinoir and of the Orani, not to mention the other parts of the Al Jerwa. But they are certainly a big part of the story, and therefore understanding the Kabyl tradition is a contribution to understanding the role of tradition in Algerian politics and therefore dispelling the opacity that bedevils our attempts to follow it. Okay, let me move on. I think I've actually already covered all that. For those of you who are unfamiliar, and I perhaps ought to make some allowance for non Algerians and non specialists. This is where Cabylia is, and as you can see, it's just down the road from Algeria. You can see roughly where the Jojoura Mountains are. They are the highest part of the region, and they are the home of this particular element. I referred to the Igiwawan. This is looking. I don't know, this doesn't seem to come up very well, but we're looking south across Greater Kabylia with the Igawan to the left of the picture. This is on the left of the picture. We have the first villages of a very important confederation called the Aytherathan, and they are the Northern Igg. Iggwan is a term that is defined in different ways by different authors, but in my view, the Aithirathan are among the Igiwan element of the society. So this is just. This is a map that is using the Tamigawan in a more restricted sense. Sense. But in my view, in terms of the sociology of Kabylia, we could say that the Eithyrathen, Eithfrausen, Aithyachya are all, in a sense, part of the Igawan grouping in a more extended sense. And what this element of the population has in common, these pictures really aren't going to succeed, are they? Do they look as bad at the back as they look alright from the back? Really? Oh, really? Okay. Well, this is what the Igawan district looks like. You have the Jojoura Mountains running roughly west to east and then curving around to the northeast in a crescent and a series of parallel ridges running north from the main spine. And these ridges are inhabited by the Igawan. And this is the most densely settled part of the North African countryside outside the Nile Delta. The population density of Kabydia is really quite staggering. And it's even more staggering today than it was when I first went there. And this is a very different society from the central High Atlas, where you have low population density. And there is an enigma here. What has permitted this society, this region, to sustain such a high population density? And the answer is that to a considerable extent, it's the extraordinary development of intensive craft manufacture that permitted the society unable to sustain itself through agriculture. Agriculture, of course, was part of its portfolio of activity, but it was the commercial craft manufacture for the market, the fact that Kabylia exported its artisanal output that enabled it to sustain extraordinary population density. And this only could happen because of the perfection of political arrangements. A remarkable economy came into existence and a remarkable polity came into existence in order to constitute the necessary framework for that economy. And that's an important theme of the book. Okay, these are more Igiwon on their ridges. And. Yeah, I really. I'm doubtful that the. That you can see anything here, but you claim to be able to anyway. These are just sort of images of the central Hyacinth. Sorry, the central Hyja Jura. Now, let me just say something. I have, what, another 15 minutes or so?
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Thereabouts.
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Okay, let me just say something about the village, because this is an element of the book that is, of course, there's always a danger writing about Kabylia that you're recycling other people's what has already been said. This is a sort of trail that many, many boots have tramped along, and it's become rather muddled. And one element, not the only element in the argument of the book that is novel is my argument that we need to take account of the variation in settlement patterns in Kabylia in order to understand elements of the dynamics of Kabyl history and society. And if we look at this table, I'm basically arguing that there are three different forms of settlement pattern in Kabylia. There are the small villages that consisting normally. This is western northwest Kabylia. You'll see that the average size of the small village of the in the northwest of kabilia was 118 inhabitants. This is as of the 1860s. This is from the data provided by the 19th century author Sanaton Laturna. These were very small units of settlement, and they were kinship groups. Unquestionably, in these small villages in the northwest, the village was coterminous with a lineage. If we look at the central and eastern Jurajua and the Akfadu district, we see that the average size of the population of a Thaddarth was four times as big. 471 as opposed to 118. We're looking at very, very much bigger units of residence. So a village is different in the. It's immeasurably bigger. It is not simply one lineage. It is actually usually four or five clans and sometimes as many as 20 lineages, if not more. The point I'm making here is that the Igawan Thaddart, the big village of the Jojore, and in the 1860s, Hanato and Rathona, found over 20 villages that had a thousand inhabitants. And that probably was an underestimate. These are not kinship groups. These are villages that are not constituted by a population united by ties of kinship. Kinship, therefore, is not the premise of political unity. The village may call itself, as its name, the sons of X. More often than not, it will call itself by a topographical term, the fountain of the. Of the wild figs, or the. All kinds of different topographical terms are used just as often, if not more often than. Than genealogical terms. But the point is that kinship is not the unifying principle of the village. Some other principle is. And this is where political organization is in fact, the explanation of the ability of the population to live in such villages that are not, where unity and harmony is not predicated on kinship. Okay, we have this intermediate element, this category that is actually in globes, the greater part of Kabylia, where a quite different kind of settlement was the norm, neither the small of 118 people or the big one of, on average, 500 or if not more people, but where the tradition was a number of small settlements constituting a larger settlement by associating with each other, having a single assembly as their unifying governing body. And this was known as a tufik, tufic, meaning association in this context and in this case of the Tulfic, once again, the overall unit is not a kinship group. The subunits are kinship groups, but the political unit as such, embodied in the membership of a common assembly. Representation of a common assembly is not a kinship unit. And so we're looking at a population, very dense population, the bulk of which, as of the middle of the 19th century, is living in units that are not kinship groups. Where, in other words, kinship has been transcended by a different principle. And that is a very important element of the. If you like, the foundation of the argument of the book, what else can I tell you? Now, if you insist that you can actually see this picture quite well, it'll give you some idea of the density of population. These are Igawaon Villages. These are villages of Ethu Aqash and the Ayth Yeni, the Aythyeni on the horizon, the Aitv Aqash and the Ayatuasif along this ridge here. Phenomenal density of population these days. It's hard to tell where one village ends and the next one begins. And these are classic Igiwon tribes. Okay, I want to say something about how I got onto this line of thought. When I first went to Algeria in 1972, the last thing I wanted to do was spend my time looking at Berbers. As a good British socialist, I thought, that's a terribly neo colonial thing to be looking at. What I'm interested in is development. And of course, Algeria at that point was widely seen, with some reason, as a model of a developing Third World country. There was a good deal of ink spilled on the Algerian model, and not without reason. And I lived there at one point and I taught there. And what I was interested in was, what on earth is Algerian socialism about? What makes it tick? Is it completely false? Is there something in it? What's going on? And. And my ambition in pursuing those questions was to actually find out what was going on on the ground. I didn't want to spend my time listening to intellectuals and theorists and reading government legislation and all that sort of thing. I actually. I wanted to do field work. And I started working on the agrarian reform, which was the big issue in the early 1970s, and did this for three years until I decided that actually I'd spend three years bashing my head against a brick wall in the mistaken belief that I would sooner or later find the Algerian who would open the door for me and authorize me to do fieldwork. And when I finally had a meeting with. Through the intervention on my behalf of distinguished Algerians, I finally was able to meet President Boumadien's top advisor for the agrarian reform, who was extremely charming. He received me at the presidency and said, look, Ramadan has just begun. This isn't actually the ideal moment. We can't have a cup of coffee. We can't even have a cigarette. Why don't you come back in a month? So I went back in a month. And that proved to be decisive for me, because in the meantime, quite unexpectedly, I'd been invited to a village in the High Jujura. And this village really was where my work on Kabylia really began. And this village is a village called Athwava, and it's a village high up in the mountains. It's about as remote a village in Kabylia, as you can find. And it's a very remarkable village because not only is it remote and therefore relatively, at that time, unevolved, one saw many long standing traditions still functioning. The tradition of the thajmath of the village, regular, regular meetings of the village assembly, all kinds of traditions, very vigorous and in good shape. This was also a village where people felt able to talk openly about certain things, in part because it's a village with an extremely remarkable war record. It was a village that was a major center of the National Liberation army of the revolution in Kabylia. So the people of Eithwavan, they had a kind of robust attitude to the regime. And at least in their own home, in their own village, they were quite prepared to talk about things that in the towns where I spent quite a lot of my time, nobody would be willing to talk about for fear of being. For fear of the walls that have ears and so on. And this is where I found people of my age willing to talk to me about local politics. And it just so happened that at that time, the summer of 1975, there had been local elections. And in the commune that this village belonged to, the new mayor came from Aithwaven. And therefore all the young men in Aethwaven had a lot to say about this. For or against, depending on their factional allegiances, depending, in other words, on which suf they belong to. And it was there that I found out that the Sufuf was still alive, still functioned, if in a different context from the pre colonial period. And I found that the Fajmath functioned as a political institution, that the decisions of the village in relation to local elections. Who are we going to vote for? This was all discussed and decided by the village assembly after a debate had taken place. In other words, it was there that I discovered that Kabilian political institutions existed and functioned. And I began to think along non galenarian lines in understanding Kabil politics. And I went back there the following year and I had a number of adventures because. Because at this time Algeria was undergoing the crisis over the Western Sahara. The regime had, in response to this situation, had encouraged the formation of vigilance committees in every village. Every village in Kabylia had a comite de vigilance. There was a certain amount of paranoia, in other words, in the air. And my presence in the village was not to the liking of everybody. And since I was doing this on the basis of simply visiting friends and listening to their. Whatever it was, was they wanted to talk about, I was doing this, in other words, without any authorization whatsoever. The question arose, would I be able to do this for very much longer, or would I, in fact, sooner or later, get arrested and be deported? And things came to a head where at one point, when I was staying there, there was a very serious prospect of the gendarmerie paying a call on my hosts and confiscating all my notebooks. And so the prospect of my eventually writing a book on this subject was preserved by the quick thinking of my host mother, who gathered all my notebooks, which were full of extremely compromising detail on local politics, put them in a plastic bag, and took them down to the garden and buried them under the potatoes and the cabbages for the rest of my stay, tactfully remembering to dig them out again when I finally left. And so I had an exciting time of it. And I remain enormously grateful to the villagers of Athwavan, their tolerance of my presence, the support of my host family. But also, I can't help thinking the Algerian authorities must have been vaguely aware of what I was up to, and they didn't interfere with me. So I feel I want to be grateful to them as well. That's where I basically began to have this different view from the segmentarity theory. And you can see that this is the High Georgia that is actually the valley. The village at Waban is here. And it was a bastion of the revolution. It was one of the very few villages where the legendary Colonel Amirush was willing to spend the night. He felt comfortable there. He felt safe there. There's another view of it. So it's a remarkable village. And I think that I had an incredible stroke of luck meeting young men of my own age from there and being invited by them back to that village. And that is actually where I stayed in the village, the neighborhood known as the Quarter of the People, lower down the Valley, or as they like to call themselves, the People of the Panorama. It's a more positive way of putting it. Okay, so this is what a thajmath looks like. It's an institution. One of the reasons why Ernest Gellner was dismissive of political institution among the Berbers is that in the central hiatus, when a particular group wanted to have a council, they would meet, but they would meet in the open air. They had no building or anything. In Kabylia, the Thajmath usually is a building. It's open at both ends, and inside, it's rather like the House of Commons. You have a row of seats on one side and a row of seats on the Other side and the sufuf are aligned, are arrayed opposite each other, and debate therefore tends to be binary. The political division is. The logic of the jabbar is a binary logic. There are only ever. There are sometimes more than two sfuf in a village, but at the next level up the arsh, there's only ever 2. The logic is a binary logic. And this is where. This is Fajmath, at a very well known village, Athlasan of the Aythyane. I don't know whether you can see that at all, but that's, that's the inside of the fajmaf. And can you actually see the people sitting there? No, it's. No, it doesn't work. I'm sorry about this. Anyway, this is the picture from which the COVID of my book is taken, showing a meeting of a plenary session of an assembly in the open air. The thing is quite complicated. In many cases, and particularly Athwavan, you would have the limited council that meets every week and still meets every week to this day, discussing routine affairs, hearing reports, considering litigation, resolving disputes and so on, making a decision about this or that village matter, and then when a need for it arises, calling a plenary session known as the avara, that is attended by all adult males. And this is an avara. And as you can see, all the men are sitting around, there are little boys in the front of the picture learning what manhood consists of by listening to their elders. They don't of course speak, but they listen to, to their elders. And there is a kabil, man of honor in his burnous, addressing his peers. And this is what was the norm and hasn't yet completely disappeared from the region. I think that I have now exhausted my 40 minutes and not covered all the ground. I meant it meant to cover perhaps the subsequent conversation. Can you want to wrap up?
- [43:26]
A
I think we. We can give you another five.
- [43:28]
B
You can give me another five.
- [43:29]
A
If you want to run quickly over closing points, I will.
- [43:32]
B
Having said something about the thatchmath and the sfuf, I'll leave that there. I think one thing I should mention is the question of law, because. And to demonstrate why I felt it necessary to make my contribution to that debate. The French 19th century view tended to counterpose Berber customary law to Islamic law, to the Sharia. And they made a big thing of what they called urf as custom or customary law, and saw this as a contradiction. And it was a major premise of the view that the Kabyls and more generally Berbers, there was a tendency to generalize from the Kabyl case once they had misunderstood it, and to suggest that the Berbers were not really Muslims or only very superficially, because they didn't accept the Sharia and had their own customary law. Now, the fact of the matter is that the Sharia are not the sole source of law for the most pious and rigorous Muslims. There's nothing unusual in the Muslim countries for law also to be derived from custom, customary law. Urfi law is a category of law in countries where there isn't a single Berber. So there's a category of allure in Egypt. There's nothing unusual about this. The French were getting the wrong end of the stick and running a very long way the wrong way with this stick. And Urfi law is something that is found in the non Berber areas of Algeria, to look no further. So there was this major mistake right at the outset. Second mistake was given that the laws that govern Kabyl village were known locally as the Kanun. There was another conclusion that French 19th century writers jumped to was that kannoun came from the Latin canon and was evidence of the mysterious survival over one and a half millennia of traditions that originated in early Christianity during the Roman period or the Byzantine period, or what have you. And what this overlooked was the fact that Kanun law is a feature of Ottoman law. And Kannun, therefore is a term in frequent use in the Ottoman legal practice and system. And that if the Kabil started referring to their own village local bylaws as articles of a qanon, they were almost certainly doing this in imitation of Ottoman practice, rather than because they had managed the feat of vaguely remembering Christian practice of 1500 years earlier, when not much of Kabylia was actually inhabited. So there's those sort of obvious problems. A more interesting and more recent problem is the problem created by Pierre Bourdieu in his argument that in reality the Kabyls have only one code. They only know one code, the code of honor. And he has, in my view, introduced a great deal of confusion into discussion of the question of law by suggesting that the Kanun, the existence of which he is aware of and acknowledges, can in effect, be dismissed and ignored as having no real substance in reality. In reality is a term that frequently crops up in Bourdieu. There are various things that don't exist in reality, and then there are the things that do exist in reality. And this is all a rather arbitrary way of privileging the things he wants to privilege. And so, basically, in his version of the logic of Kabul society, honor is everything. Honor is all. I regard this as a fantasy, another fantasy. And I think that in fact what he does is to distract us from the much more interesting hypothesis. It's the hypothesis I put forward my book and seek to illustrate that the question of law in Kabul society in the pre colonial period was a problem, and that it was problem precisely because there was tension between two different sets of principles, one of them being the code of honor. The need of every lineage of every family to preserve its honor, to defend itself, and if necessary, to exact revenge against slights, including the vengeance for deaths incurred in vendettas. That is of course, an antisocial principle. It's a principle necessary to the integrity and survival of families in their self respect. But it's conducive to disorder and the need of the village, particularly amongst the Igawwin, to preserve order. And what we find in my view is precisely a conflict and a tension between these two different codes. Both existed in reality. And the problem of resolving the tension between them was one of the main items in the business of the jama, the thajma of a Kabil village. And it managed it. And one of the things I do in my book is to explain how it managed to this compromise. And I think that it's a pity that Bourdieu could only see one term of the two, because it seems to me that one of the most remarkable aspects of Kabyl politics in the pre colonial period, and it's an element that hasn't totally disappeared, was the ability that the Kabul society developed that other societies in the Maghreb didn't develop because they weren't faced with the same problems, the ability they developed to handle conflicts of that kind in their local self government. And so in my view, there's an important point that needs to be elucidated about the whole question of law in Kabul society. And that's something I have sought to do in the book, amongst other things. I got 30 seconds minus. Minus seven minutes. So that's. I think I'm going to have to leave it there. The. Simply to say that. Yeah, simply to say that. Regarding the second half of the book. An important element of the discussion in the second half of the book, following on from the role the Kabiels played in actually the creation of the Ottoman regency, is the fact that from a great deal of the period following the constitution of the Ottoman Regency, Greater Kabylia was dominated by a dynasty known as the Aethel Qadi, also known as the Kings of Cuckoo, les Roi de Cucu, which is a slight misunderstanding of what they really were. And they had their counterparts to the east in La Petite Kabili, in Lesser Cabilli, the other side of the. The Soman Valley, in the rulers of Qala Nath Abbas, you had two, if you like, principalities. Perhaps the most accurate way of referring to them would be two emirates or two sultanates. But emirate, perhaps is a more accurate term, where the dynastic principle is actually the dominant organizing political principle at the level of the region. It's not an egalitarian, democratic principle at all. It's a dynastic hierarchical principle, which is one of the reasons why the idea that democratic republics had existed for centuries and centuries is actually inconsistent with the known facts. But what is very interesting about the history of Greater Kabylia is what happens following the end of the Kingdom of Cuckoo. And an important element of the history that I tell in the second half the book is the story of how the dynastic principle in the high mountains is finally ended and replaced by a democratic principle. And this happens in the course of the 18th century. And it's what, in my view, perfects Kabyl political organization in time for the French to marvel at it when they come across it in the 1850s. And that's why I talk about the cabio polity as the French saw it as being something that had actually only come into the form they observed very recently. And that's a measure of how important it is to integrate the history of this issue into the political anthropology of this issue. Without the history, one is liable to misunderstand a great deal. Thank you very much for your attention.
- [52:28]
A
Thank you very much. We'll have questions and answers through me, please, and hopefully say who you are before asking your question. I'm going to cheat, capitalise on the position of sitting here and ask your first question. And I'm actually going to start at the top of the sheet you just put up on the board, which will sort of enable you to go on, hopefully, because I. I'm interested to know, when did the French. The sort of theorization that Kabyles were different and in some way more amenable to cooperation with French colonization. At what sort of date did that get underway? I asked this because, as you know, I did a certain amount of work on earlier 19th century Algeria, sort of all the French documents of the Abdelkader period. And it doesn't really come up there. It doesn't come up before. Before 1848. And so when did it take off? Did they have any success in recruiting people to come to their side? How did it play into the 20th century and into Kabil Arab relations?
- [53:40]
C
And.
- [53:43]
A
You know, I mean, I'm probably to ask this from my research at one end and from the other end, the fact that around the corner, for me, there is an affable Algerian cafe run by two chaps in their 40s, said and Abdurrahman, one of whom identifies himself as a Kabir and the other one as an Arab. They speak to each other in French and they say they perceive no difference whatsoever between them. But I feel this is discour to some extent. And of course, in the middle of this, how did you know the French recruiting people, was this to some extent turned upside down and on its head in Kabylles playing a part in the revolution?
- [54:23]
B
Yes, the Kabyle, and not just the revolution, but in the national movement from the 1920s onwards, if not earlier, but the role of the Cavills in the Etoilend African, in France, in the ppa, the Partie du Peuple Javian, and for that matter, in the other currents, the Union Democratique de Manifest Algerian. The Kabyls were very actively involved in the national movement as well as the national Liberation war. So all that, in a way, refuted some of the expectations of the more unrealistic French commentators. I think what happened was that, if you like the. The Kabyl myth, as it's often quite reasonably called, really takes off from the initial interest in the really quite remarkable forms of political organization that the Kabyls had, which the French start noticing really only in the 1840s and 1850s, and really are very struck by in the course of the campaign to conquer the region definitively in 1857. It's from there that the idea that there's parallels between Kabyl organization and republican political principles. And I don't think that was nonsense. Government in Kabylia was res publica. It was the affair of the people. At the time the French are observing Kabyl society, the dynastic principle has gone in the high mountains incarnated in the dynasty of the Aethel Qadi. They are history at that point, they're gone. So government is res publica. The fajmath of every village is a representative assembly. Every lineage has its Tamim, has the man who answers for it. Tamim being a Kabil, variation of the Arabic word vamin, meaning caution or guarantor, caution in the French sense. The person who vouches for so These are representative assemblies. The French seeing them as having a kind of republican aspect. We're not hallucinating there. Where they start to hallucinate is a. In thinking that this is exclusively Berber, when in fact Arabic speaking populations of other mountain districts in Algeria also have the jama'. At. If you look at what exists in the much less abundant literature on the mountains of eastern Algeria, one will find that the society also had villages, usually smaller than those of the Iguan, but they had villages and they had. Each village had its jemaa. In other words, the idea of a degree of representative self government was present in non Berber populations as well as Berber ones. So the French didn't see that they wanted because they were looking for elements of the population that could support the French colonial enterprise. They were looking, they were hoping to find Algerians they could assimilate. The idea that was that we can assimilate you if you already resemble us in certain important respects. We therefore have an interest in. This is where wishful thinking takes over and particularly the idea that if they're republican they must be virtually anti clerical, they must be non Muslims. All this was a fantasy. I think that it is consolidated in the course of the 1860s and 1870s with people getting very enthusiastic and getting carried away with these notions which importantly Hanato and Latourneur didn't share and didn't endorse. They're much more, much calmer and realistic about these matters. But the enthusiasts the Kabilo feel get carried away with these notions. I'm not going to say more because it's not really what my book is about. May I point out that Ibtoris has already published years ago a first class study of this question by Patricia Imperial Identities which is precisely about how the French developed this myth about the Kabyls in particular and the Berbers in general. And I can only recommend you all to those of you want to follow this up to look at that book. It's recently been republished by the University of Nebraska Press I think and is an excellent study of this.
- [58:59]
C
Definitely.
- [59:01]
D
Pardon my gross ignorance on the subject. Non special subject.
- [59:07]
A
I just want to find out identify yourself there.
- [59:10]
D
I'm a. One might say alumni of the college name is Upani the I just wondering when was the Islam introduced in North Africa and is the Arabic spoken by North African is similar to the main Egyptian variety and the third is Kabilia. It seems to me from whether this is a caption of before the caption we call it Kabila. It's sort of A you see group of people, you see, filling to same gene pool or something like that.
- [59:58]
B
The term, the name Kabilia, which is the. My anglicization of la Cabilie, which is the French term, which is derived from the Arabic Kabail, which is the plural of Kabila. Okay, so, and the reason for this is that the people of the towns, Algiers and the other smaller towns, Clemson in the west, Nidroma in the west and so on, Mila and Jel and so on. These, they would refer to the people of the mountains as Al Qabayl, meaning the tribes. Kabil is of course, the standard word for tribe in most Arab countries, not all. And interestingly, it is not actually the term used for tribe in Algeria. It's a term known to everybody. And they would refer to the mountain populations as al Qabayl, as distinct from the Bedouin.
- [60:44]
D
Even in India we use the word kabila.
- [60:46]
B
You do?
- [60:47]
D
Yes, do.
- [60:49]
B
So there's that aspect. Islam, of course, came to North Africa not long after it came. I mean, it came to Egypt and then was spread west by Akbar Ibn Nafi is a great drive west across Libya, Libya, Tunisia and Algeria to the Atlantic. And that's towards the end of the seventh century, around 680 of the Christian era or the Common era. And so the Arabis, the Islamization of North Africa proceeded really in a very dynamic fashion. And Berber speakers were important elements in the process. Although there was also a strong Berber reaction against the Arab Sunni, the Sunni Islam of the Arab conquerors. Because as you're probably aware, at the time of the Umayyad Empire, the Umayyad Empire was seen very much as being an empire that deviated from the principles of Islam insofar as it privileged the Arabs. It was an Arab empire more than, or at least as much as an Islamic one, and therefore provoked reactions. And some of these reactions occurred in the Maghreb where you. You find Berbers embracing Islam but embracing a non Sunni version of it. And you get Kharijism and Ibadism and so on. But these are all taking us away from my subject, if you don't mind my saying so. I hope that at least answers your main question.
- [62:12]
A
Let's go to the gentleman, the far back in the green T shirt.
- [62:20]
C
Thank you for such an interesting talk. My name is Jonathan Harris, Just I'm starting off with a PhD in geography at the University of Cambridge, and my subject's the homeland geopolitics of the Berber diaspora, mostly in France. So I've got a kind of Twofold question. One's that you mentioned that these political institutions are still in existence and still functioning. I wondered if you could comment on ways in which they are still functioning. I'm thinking of the recent movement des Arches after the print au Noir. And also when I saw the title of your book, Berwa Government and Cabiopoliti in pre colonial Algeria, I instantly thought this might have political implications for the group seeking the auto determination or self determination of Kabylia. I wonder if you could comment on how you.
- [63:26]
B
Did I hear you right? For the autonomist current, Is that what you meant? Yes.
- [63:30]
C
Okay, so the autonomous current and the movement des Arosh.
- [63:36]
B
Well, for those of you, the Arush is. Is the Arabic plural of the word arsh, which is actually the term usually translated as tribe in the context of Algeria, interestingly, rather than Kabila. But the Berber plural is simply Arush. It's not Arush. Arush is the Arabic. But both terms are used. And the point is that in 2001 they're developed in Kabilia. Very remarkable, very rapidly constituted protest movement that had a janus like name. It had two names and one name was the Arush, or Arche, to use the cabriole version, which suggested that this was a movement that was tribal in character and backward looking, traditionalist. The other name was forward looking, the citizen movement, Le Movement Citoyen. And this was a movement that developed in response to a dreadful series of events. Riots suppressed by the gendarmes employing shoot to kill tactics in which something like 125, 128, I think it was, young Kabyls were shot down in an utterly unprecedentedly brutal way that nothing like this had happened in Kabylia since independence. And this movement developed as a way of. Of it was a very intelligent thing that happened. Veterans of the Kabil movement, Berber cultural movement, organized this movement in order to give the angry young men an alternative to getting themselves killed by the gendarmes. They were engaging in kind of suicidal rioting. And it was their older brothers, if you like, or their fathers. It was people who were in their 40s or even early 50s who set up this movement in order to give the teenagers and guys in their twenties an alternative to getting themselves killed. And it's why this movement became known as the Arush. Is a very complicated story, and I can't tell it now, but I can tell you where you can find out that story, because I've already told it. And that is in the first report I ever wrote for the International Crisis Group. Which was published in June 2003 called Unrest and Impasse in Kabylia. And it goes into the nature of this movement in great detail and explains why the name the movement acquired this Janus like pair of names actually is a very mystificatory. But this movement was, as I explain in this report, structured by Kabil traditions, in particular the tradition of the Jemaa. And that's one of the reasons why it initially exhibited some dynamism, but subsequently got into all kinds of difficulties. Because the tradition of the Jema' is a tradition that is equal to the business of governing a village on the basis of routines. But running a movement with political ambitions in a novel context, that's not something that the politics of routine local government can necessarily help you with. So there was a downside to these institutions informing the structuring and behavior of this movement. And that's all really gone into in quite a lot of detail in the ICG report. On the other question. Yeah, there's a Given the failure of the capital political parties that have been legalized in the region since 1989 and the introduction of a new constitution, and they've clearly failed to deal with the region's problems and provide satisfactory political perspectives for the population of the region, there's been a development of a kind of radical alternative, which is a movement for autonomy. And you asked me what is the implications of my analyses for the autonomy movement? Well, my book. My book ends in the 19th century. It doesn't pretend to have a sort of payload for contemporary caviars wondering what they should do next, what they should try next. What I actually where I think the analysis of the book book will play into contemporary cabial debates is more in relation to the question of identity rather than the question of autonomy. I think that the point here is that I point out that whereas the 19th century French observers were above all impressed by Cavill political organization, what is seen as the specifying the identifying specificity of the Kabils today is their language is Thamazir, the Berber language and the various cultural traditions and for that matter, inventions vehicled by that language, particularly of course, in music, not only poetry. And now in fact, you're getting fiction written in this language and so on. So there's been a shift from the political to the identity and the linguistic. The language as the sort of focus of the Kabyl self image. And there's been a confusion about this because at the same time, a good deal of the energy that has gone into the identity agitation has actually been animated by a democratic aspiration and a democratic critique. Critique of the Algerian form of government. And the connection made between the two is the belief that the language, or more generally, culture agitation, is inherently and intrinsically democratic in nature and in implication. And I point out, I permit myself to point out that in fact, events over the last 30 years have not borne out that thesis. The Algerian government has, step by step, made concessions to the identity demands, up to and including recognizing Thamaziyath as a national language, without becoming substantively more democratic at all. And I suggest that to my readers, whether they want to have to have this suggested to them or not, that the idea that there's something intrinsically democratic about the Berber identity is in fact a recycling of the 19th century Kabyl myth and there isn't necessarily a connection, and that it's not accidental that some of the most vigorous advocates of the identity question have been very much associated also with the expression of hostility towards Arabophone Algerians and also the militant expression of a secularist vision and a secularist identity. In other words, 100 years on, elements of the Kabil myth seems to be actually achieving a certain purchase on reality. And that's a complicated issue, but it's not one I wish to really go into any further tonight. Thank you. Dermot Murphy, Society for Algerian Studies. Hugh, extremely interesting. We'll talk more about that later. My question is, what do you think was blinding Pierre Bourdieu to what was in front of him? Why was he contributing to the myth? And what, if anything, would you save from his work? Let me start with your last question.
- [71:41]
A
Can I put in an interjection before you start, Hugh, which is, I think you're an extraordinary, courageous man. You've challenged the spirit of Ernest Geldner on his own ground and taken Pierre Bourgieu to toss. Heavens, who's next?
- [71:53]
B
I think I'll leave it at that. Let me mollify whoever needs mollifying and moderating my own aggressive theses by saying that I very much admire Bourdieu's article on honor. I think his essay Le Sens d', Honneur, the Sentiment of Honor, is a beautiful essay and a major contribution to the understanding, not just of the Kabbiels itself, based on his work on Kabili, but it's valid for the Maghreb in general, I'd have thought, and certainly for Algeria in general. He's not wrong about the importance of and the nature of the sentiment of honor. He's wrong in giving it a monopoly in relation to the Question of law. That's where he's wrong. He's claiming too much for it and. But I very much admire that essay. I also admire a good deal of his work on other questions. For instance, his book Le De. I have a great admiration for that book. And of course the work he did with colleagues. Travailer, Travaileur, Renal, Giri. This is very good sociological work. So I don't want anyone to think that I've got it in for Bordieu as such, but I think that he got key elements of Kabilia wrong. He got the honor thing very right. But I think he in a way thought that that was all he needed to understand Kabir in general and why he went wrong about this. In my view, it's my hypothesis. I can't pretend to have researched this exhaustively. He was researching Kabilia during the war and a lot of the work he did actually was interviewing Kabiels in the regard groupment camps, not in their villages. Quite a lot of the detailed vocabulary of honour and the numerous very beautiful terms employed. The phrases that are part of the whole discourse on honour he was getting from people he was interviewing who had already been uprooted from their villages and regrouped by the French army down from the mountains. That's one element. And the point is that where he did do work in the villages, these villages are under French occupation. This was the worst possible moment to see the logic of Kabyl self government. The Jemaa, if it still functioned at all, functioned as on French orders. The French army would say, right, you know, announce, making fresh announcements to the population. Here are some more do nots or do's. I mean, it was all under French domination or under the domination of the other side, where the Jemaa would be in effect an emergency jemaa, not consisting of representatives of the lineages in the traditional routine, but in those villages where the FLN was in control, they would tell the village who their jamaa now was. It would be five sound people with the right politics named by the FLN from the village. It wouldn't be outsiders, but it would be the FLN saying, right, this is your Jemaa, and it would be an emergency jemaah of just five men. And so this was all a situation that was totally exceptional. It was the worst possible moment to study Kabir politics as normally operative. And I think that he didn't make sufficient allowance for that.
- [75:21]
A
Adel.
- [75:26]
E
Thanks very much. Adel Hamezi, a D field student at St. Anthony's College.
- [75:30]
B
Thank you.
- [75:30]
E
Very much. For a fascinating presentation, you refer to rudimentary political parties. I was just wondering whether you could shed light on maybe rudimentary economic institutions of sorts, if there were any. And how sort of land rights, ownership, arboriculture sort of played a role in the legal framework that you referred to. And just a sort of very quick second point, when you refer to equilibrium, theory of order and sort of order maintaining mechanisms, are we referring here in this sort of segmentary, sort of tribal or clan fusion fission?
- [76:04]
B
Is that what we're getting at? Yeah. Yes. I'm talking about Gellner's theory that the society is a kin. The social structure is a kinship structure at each level of the pyramid tribe, clan, sub clan lineage, sub lineage, family, household, or however many levels there are, it may vary. The various segments are roughly equal size, they balance each other. This is how order is maintained. And with the holy men, the igoramen or the marabtim, lubricating things. And that's. You could call that theory associated with theory of political equilibrium. And I'm saying that doesn't work for Kabylia. Rudimentary political parties. You wanted rudimentary economic forms which. Okay, the system of land tenure is a system which. I was prevented by my publisher from going into as much detail. They said, no, no, no, we don't want this. Take it out. And of course, one has to take some things out. So fair enough. They allowed me much more, many more pages than they originally agreed to. But this is not a simple issue. It's essentially. There are essentially three forms of landed property in Kabir. Traditionally, there's the territory of the tribe Arsh, and within that there would be each other. Each village would have its own specific part of that territory, the orchards of olives and figs and so on. The main, because arboriculture is a major, a very important element of agricultural production in Kabylia, the other element being horticulture. These are held, as in Kabydia, they call it Lemluk. It's mulk or milk is the term. It's just a variation on the Arabic. This is a form of private property that one should not confuse with private property, typical of a modern capitalist economy, because this private property is a variation on the common property of the fabric. In other words, should a family become extinct because of some calamity, their land reverts, reverts to common property of the village, and the village then decides how to reallocate it. The other element of tenure, of land tenure in Kabylia is the land that is commons. The term used is meshmel, and this refers to the woods, the forest, water, courses. In other words, all this is available to all families. However, access to the meshmel regulated by the Jemma because particularly at pasture land, there are rules about when you can access particular pastures. This is something that is regulated. So we have arsh as the territory of the tribe, which is a condition of the existence of the particular common land of each village. The common land of the village is, if you like the basic form, a variation of which is Lemluk, but which can revert to common ownership in the event of the proprietors disappearing, which of course sometimes would happen. Proprietors, in the event of a major feud, a lineage might decide to leave the village completely. That did happen. Its land would revert to the village. And then you have meshmel, the common areas where the old women go to collect firewood and where the flock of sheep and goats. And my understanding, this is not something I've looked at in the modern period at all, but my understanding from when I was spending time in Aydhuavan in particular, was that these catarists still operated. And one of the things that the independent state has signally failed to do is to get a grip on the whole issue of land tenure and the categories organizing land tenure in Algeria. There's great deal of confusion about who owns what. And this is something that, as I understand it, the Algerian state has not been able to get control of. Does that answer your question?
- [80:28]
F
Thank you very much, Michael Willis from Oxford University. Thanks very much, Hugh, for a great lecture. If I can tempt you to comment on more recent history and politics, again, I know a lot of people have. I'm just fascinated by this, particularly the two aspects of post independence or even perhaps earlier Algerian political traditions that are often attributed to the sort of history that you're talking about. The two things in particular is this tendency which you refer to very briefly, towards duality. There's bifurcation thinking, Kabili itself, two main political parties, the rcd, the ffs, there are many other factions. If you look after what happened in 2001, what seems to be a fairly pronounced tendency towards bifurcation and also a second tendency, this quite unusual hostility towards strong individual leadership, but in Algeria really quite marks it out from the rest of the Arab world. Do you see these as linked into the sort of things you've been talking about? You can sort of draw a line if you wanted to, backwards. Or do you see these as really unconnected and the products of forces and things that happen much later. Thank you.
- [81:45]
B
That's quite a lot of spin on that ball there, Michael. On the dualism, bifurcation thing, I don't buy Bourdieu's thing about the dualistic psychology of the Kabyls. I think he's sort of running away and getting lost with something there. But clearly there's been a. I think that the tradition of SAF politics in Kabilia is enormously important. And it's. I go into a good deal of detail about this in the book. My understanding of the logics of SAF politics in the period in the 17th and 18th centuries. I spend a lot of time on it and I offer explanations of it. And I believe that it's so important that in a way that is part of the Kabyl tradition and that it's one of the reasons for Kabyl restiveness and then dissidence in relation to the regime of the. Of the single party, so called. As we you all know, the party of the FLN really wasn't a party. It was a facade. It wasn't in power. It was a facade for those in power. But it was intensely irksome to Kabyl society because they were used in their own tradition to having open political disagreement and competition, even in the pre colonial period. I think it's an important, important fact about Cavili. And so you can understand that as soon as the regime introduces this new constitution with Article 40, I think it was saying Association d' un Carretatre Politique, a very ginger sort of, very sort of gingerly permitting political pluralism. It's inevitable that Kabibi will produce more than one party in that it will, if will produce alternatives to the fln, but more than one. I think it's kind of. It's inevitable that that will happen. But the problem is that just as the FFS was an offshoot of the fln, the RCD was an offshoot of the ffs. And the degree of political invention involved arguably has proved insufficient. Does that satisfy part of your thing? On the other, the question of the egalitarianism, the hostility to strong leaders, that's also very much part of the Kabil tradition in that the. In the political organization of pre colonial Kabilia and in villages right up until now, the man who presides the Thajmath, the Amin is not the village boss. He doesn't call the shots. He simply presides. He's a respected man in the village. Amin means the person in whom trust is placed. He is not someone able to dominate. His job is to hold the ring, to chair the discussion and to try to ensure that at the end of the day, however vigorous the arguments, village unity is not gravely impaired. The forceful characters in the Kabbal polity are the leaders of the Sufuf. The head of the Safran Saf is, if you like, the person who is the is a energetic and powerful figure rather than the person who presides the Tajmat. And I don't regard this as a peculiarly cavil thing. I think it's the logic of the JMMA Wherever you find the jama' at and you find the jama' ah in Arabophone mountain districts and you find it amongst Arabophone transhumant tribes. So it's it's. But it's something that it's. It is, it seems to me, a corollary of the tradition of the cema, not something that's peculiarly cabbial.
- [85:59]
A
Hugh, thank you for finishing up such an excellently prompt moment to enable me to wind up before 8 o'.
- [86:06]
B
Clock.
- [86:07]
A
I'm afraid there really isn't time for any more. I'm just going to back announce Hugh Roberts, who's come all the way from Boston to talk to us and we're extremely grateful.