The Ethnographic Novel and Ethnography in Colonial Algeriation of Malek Bennabi’s Ahwal...

The Ethnographic Novel and Ethnography in Colonial AlgeriaAuthor(s): Thomas LyonsSource: Modern Philology, Vol. 100, No. 4 (May 2003), pp. 576-595Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/379984 .Accessed: 06/05/2011 13:49

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How can an awareness of social changes be captured in novels, whileremaining invisible in the works of other observers such as sociolo-gists and anthropologists? Abdelwahhab Khatibi described Algeriannovels published between the end of the Second World War and theoutbreak of the Algerian War in 1954 as “ethnographic novels.” Hewrites, “[These novels] arise out of an objective situation dominatedby the problems of everyday life. . . . In this sense alone the novel iswitness to its era; in a period of oppression and in the absence of anindependent national press, it can play the role of informant (

infor-mateur

).”

1

In this paper, we consider this “informant,” the Algerianethnographic novel between 1945 and 1954. These novels sometimesrepresent an awareness of change in Muslim society, even if the na-ture of such change is not completely spelled out. We will examinehow such representations differed and where their limits lay througha comparison of the Algerian Muslim novel to colonial ethnography.The colonial Algerian case is particularly interesting in that it was theearly fieldwork site for an exceptional ethnographer and toweringsocial theorist, the late Pierre Bourdieu. We will find that the realist“ethnographic” novel form is incommensurable with the kind of eth-nography carried out by Bourdieu; but as novels moved away fromthe unified narrator and toward narrative ambiguity, they representednew “structures of feeling”

2

that went uncaptured even by Bourdieu’ssophisticated ethnography.

1. Abdelwahhab Khatibi,

Le Roman maghrébin

(Paris: Maspero, 1968), p. 28. Unlessotherwise noted, all translations from the French are mine.

2. See Raymond Williams,

Problems in Materialism and Culture

(London: Verso, 1980).

The Ethnographic Novel and Ethnographyin Colonial Algeria

T H O M A S L Y O N S

George Washington University

I wish to thank the editors of this issue for helpful comments on an earlier versionof this essay.

16-Lyons_MP100.4 Page 576 Tuesday, September 2, 2003 16:33

Thomas Lyons

„

Ethnographic Novel and Ethnography

577

The novelist was an important spokesperson for nationalism notonly in Algeria but everywhere under European colonialism. Indeed,as the preeminent modern work of the imagination, the novel canhelp to define communities that are based less on commonalities ofgeographic location, language, or customs than on imagination.

3

Butthe conjuncture faced by Algerian intellectuals was in some respectsunique. Algerian Muslim writers faced a double bind in that their ed-ucations were fostered by the metropole, but they were excludedfrom colonial institutions. This predicament is part of the reason Al-gerian novelists came to be guided by aims similar to those of Euro-pean ethnographers and addressed themselves to much the sameaudience.

If European ethnographers cared little about novels, indigenouscolonial novelists, in contrast, often made explicit reference to the so-ciological nature of their writings and professed to have the sameaims as ethnographers. Khatibi’s description of the genre that pre-dominated from 1945 up to the Revolution of 1954–62 as the “ethno-graphic novel” is more than merely a description after the fact. Thesenovelists themselves often compared their works to sociological trea-tises. R. Zenati, co-author of the 1945 novel

Bou-El-Nouar, le jeune Al-gérien

prefaces his work by declaring that it is “an unedited depictionof family life in Muslim society in Algeria. Above all, it is a sociologi-cal study of the problem of Algeria, a problem that incontestablyturns on the ‘native question.’ ”

4

In turn, the ethnographic validity ofa novel could be one standard by which to judge it, at least for Alge-rian Muslim readers. A nationalist attack against the Berber novelistMouloud Mammeri’s

Colline oubliée

(1952), for instance, criticized itsreliance on “false ethnic data [

données ethniques

].”

5

The “ethnographic novels” arose in Algeria from their authors’exposure to international literary forms in an apartheid-like climatethat excluded Muslim intellectuals from colonial scholarly institutions.These factors led to a convergence of the purposes and the truthclaims of ethnographic novels and those of ethnography. By “truthclaim” I mean the institutional and cultural basis, in the broadestsense, on which the validity of a text, whether literary or scientific,may be judged. The particular truth claim attached to ethnographyensured that Algerian Muslim writers’ purposes could take shape only

3. See Benedict Anderson,

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spreadof Nationalism

(London: Verso, 1983).4. Cited in Philippe Lucas and Jean-Claude Vatin,

L’Algérie des anthropologues

(Paris:Maspero, 1975), p. 63.

5. Mustapha Lacheraf, quoted in Lucas and Vatin, p. 231.


M O D E R N P H I L O L O G Y

578

in a novel, rather than in an expository work. In other words, ethno-graphic novels were written partly in response to the lack of institu-tions authorizing the discourse of Algerian Muslim intellectuals.

Foucauldian analysis traces the scientific enunciation (in medicine,psychiatry, criminology, etc.) to the social and disciplinary institutionsthat make it possible.

6

Edward Said places European literary worksand social description together as part of the discursive formation ofOrientalism.

7

The truth claim of Orientalist literary works rests onthe same colonial power relations that underwrote other forms ofOrientalist knowledge. Whence does the authority of the AlgerianMuslim writer derive? Significantly, many important works from thisperiod were written in French, and most were published initially inParis. A French-language elementary and secondary school system hadbeen standardized throughout the country, as part of Jules Ferry’scentralized administration of public education after 1870. French-language schools were particularly widespread in the eastern KabyliaBerber region—for the Muslim population more per capita than any-where else in the territory, though well below the number providedfor the Europeans.

8

The disproportionate investment in schools in Ka-bylia, Patricia Lorcin argues, can be traced to nineteenth-century landsequestrations that left the population more displaced and urban-ized, and hence amenable to French schools, than anywhere else inthe country.

9

Indeed, both the literary movements and the growingnationalist movement in this period were led by Kabyles.

10

The driving force behind these educational provisions, however, wasnot the

pied noir

community of European settlers, but the governmentin Paris under the Third and Fourth Republics. The Blum-Violette Billintroduced in 1936, for example, had as its goal the assimilation andeventual French citizenship of the Muslim population. It was guidedby the laudable ideal that “Muslim students, while remaining Muslim,should become so French in their education, that no Frenchman, how-ever deeply racist and religiously prejudiced he might be . . . will anylonger dare to deny them French fraternity.”

11

But while assimilationwas viewed enthusiastically in Paris, the Blum-Violette reform bill met

6. See Michel Foucault,

The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language

,trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972).

7. See Edward Said,

Orientalism

(New York: Basic, 1978).8. Patricia Lorcin,

Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in ColonialAlgeria

(London: I. B. Tauris, 1995).9. Ibid., p. 227.

10. See Paul Silverstein, “Trans-Politics: Islam, Berberity, and the French Nation-State” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology, 1998).

11. Alistair Horne,

A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954–1962

(London: Macmillan,1977), p. 37.

One Line Long


Thomas Lyons

„


579

stiff resistance from the European settlers and was never enacted.Right up to the Revolution, the settler community excluded educatedMuslims from public life and institutions in Algeria, and in particularfrom higher education and administrative posts. As late as 1956 fewerthan eight out of 864 higher administrative posts in Algiers were heldby Muslims.

12

Any reform effort from Paris was nullified by the

piednoir

Algerian Assembly (at least until its dissolution in 1956). At leasttwo early colonial novels by Muslims bore witness to this contradic-tion between educational equality in theory and apartheid in fact.The hero of Chukri Khodja’s novel

Mamoun

(1920) dies disappointedin his efforts to be integrated into European society after winning ascholarship to study in Algiers.

13

Bou-El-Nouar, the hero of the Zenatibrothers’ 1945 novel, similarly enters European society in Algeria viaa scholarship to a lycée, and is similarly disappointed. He ends up tak-ing refuge in France, “far from those who are prejudiced by race andreligion”!

14

A Muslim intellectual in Algeria hence could not describe his or hersociety or diagnose its problems by means of an authoritative ethnog-raphy. The social institutions to “back up” such a work, or indeed toallow it to be created in the first place, were reserved for Europeans.The situation was similar for literary institutions—publishing houses,magazines, literary circles. French-language literary institutions werereserved for Europeans, while literature in Arabic, when tolerated bythe authorities at all, was more or less reserved for religious writings.

15

These conditions help to explain why the most significant Muslim Al-gerian novels of the time were published not in Arabic in Algeria, butin French in Paris.

16

While some novelists such as Kateb Yacine andRachid Boudjedra took up exile in France, and others like MouloudFeraoun, Mohammed Dib, and Mouloud Mammeri did not leave Al-geria, all of them separated themselves from their maternal languagein order to write about the nascent nation of Algeria.

But if the apparatus to disseminate these authors’ ideas could notbe found in Algeria, did they retain any authority at all at home? Aspost-Romantic works of art, novels derive their authority in part fromtheir authenticity and originality. As works of fiction, novels need not,

12. Ibid., p. 34.13. Described in Christiane Achour, ed.,

Dictionnaire des oeuvres algériennes en languefrançaise

(Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990), p. 215.14. Ibid., p. 61.15. The most anthologized Arabic work from this period is in fact an Arabic transla-

tion of Malek Bennabi’s

Ahwal al-Ba’ath (Conditions de la renaissance)

, an essay on revi-talizing Islam, written originally in French (See Lucas and Vatin [n. 4 above], p. 228).

16. Many were published at Editions du Seuil under the editorship of a trans-planted

pied noir

novelist, Emmanuel Roblès.



580

of course, make claims to being based on any experience at all, unlikeethnographies, which as works of “fact” must do so. The realist novelnevertheless claims a basis in the author’s own experience as forciblyas any factual account. As Khatibi notes, for the ethnographic realistnovel the accurate description of everyday life, based on primary ex-perience, is an end in itself. This is particularly true of a common typeof colonial novel, the bildungsroman, or the autobiographical novelof childhood and education, in which the hero moves from the pri-vate and local world of the family and the village to the school and,finally, out into the wider world. By mixing memoir-like detail aboutthe family with an outsider’s ethnographic commentary, the author ofthe bildungsroman makes a claim for the unique experiential basis formemoir and commentary alike. The validity of the author’s memoriesand of his or her ethnographic insights each rests on the validity of theother.

17

Under encouragement from Paris and near-total exclusion withinAlgeria, then, Algerian Muslim writers produced novels that sharedcertain purposes and truth claims with social science exposition, inparticular ethnography. But these constraints that drove Algerian Mus-lims to the novel form rather than to scientific writing should not beseen as purely negative. By immersing themselves in European litera-ture while struggling to depict their non-European world and criticizecolonialism, these writers were able to make important contributionsto world literature. The “colonial novels” from Algeria best known tothe world today are two by Albert Camus:

The Stranger

(

L’Étranger

,1942) and

The Plague

(

La Peste

, 1947). However, these two novels, asis well known, say little of relations between the Muslim majority andthe European minority in Algeria.

18

In contrast, the Algerian Muslimnovel allowed readers a glimpse into the inner world of native Alge-rian society.

From a stylistic point of view, the Algerian Muslim ethnographicnovels had one thing in common: the narration was “voiced” for anoutside reader, in fact for a European.

19

The works examined here are

17. Paradoxically, in later modernist novels the taken-for-granted insider status of theAlgerian novelist vis-à-vis his French-reading public may allow him to abandon theserhetorical devices of establishing the truth of the experience. Alternatively, the mod-ernist writer may deliberately try to prevent the transparent absorption of the insider’sexperience by the outsider-reader. See, for example, Kateb Yacine,

Nedjma

(Paris:Seuil, 1956).

18. See Rosemarie Jones, “

Pied-noir

Literature,” in

Writing across Worlds: Literature andMigration

, ed. Russell King, John Connell, and Paul White (London: Routledge, 1995);see also Peter Dunwoodie,

Writing French Algeria

(Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), chaps. 5–7.19. Thomas Lyons, “Ambiguous Narratives,”

Cultural Anthropology

16 (2001): 832–56.


Thomas Lyons

„


581

realist, in that the world depicted is meant to be accurately reflectedin the text. Yet within the realist framework an ambiguity of voicingallows the novel to express “the unexpressible,” that is, changes thatare sensed but cannot be expressed.

20

I will focus on the novelist Mo-hammed Dib’s depiction of famine as an implicit critique of colonial-ism. I do not argue that authors’ anticolonial stances determined theformal properties of their novels. Indeed, perhaps the reverse is true:the techniques themselves made possible certain kinds of anticolonialexpression.

While Algerian Muslims wrote for European audiences but calledupon the truth claim of primary experience, for which literary realismwas the most obvious vehicle, European ethnographers in Algeriacalled upon science—a form of discourse at a remove from primaryexperience. European ethnographers had the backing of a century ofscientific inquiry into native society (the so-called Arab Bureaus) aswell as the genre of the scientific treatise to clothe their words in ob-jectivity. In fact, though all ethnographic observations are collected atsome specific place and time and under specific circumstances, eth-nography can avoid narrative altogether—but this has consequencesfor the kind of world depicted in ethnography.

E T H N O G R A P H Y I N C O L O N I A L A L G E R I A

Most ethnography in this period differs little from the ethnographicwriting that preceded it. Much of it heavily relies on research under-taken by the so-called Arab Bureaus and dating as far back as the1840s.

21

Moreover, ethnography in Algeria is similar to that describedby historians of colonialism elsewhere in the world. Joseph Despar-met’s two-volume study

Coutumes, institutions, et croyances des indigènesde l’Algérie

appeared originally in Algerian Arabic in 1913, and inFrench translation in 1939.

22

It remained the standard ethnologicalreference work.

23

Influenced by Durkheimian notions of collective rep-resentation, Desparmet sought to catalog and explicate “facts of the

20. See Jonathan Culler,

Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty

(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univer-sity Press, 1974).

21. Jacques Berque, “Cent vingt-cinq ans de sociologie maghrébine,”

Annales

3 (1956):299–302.

22. Joseph Desparmet,

Coutumes, institutions et croyances des indigènes de l’Algérie

(Al-giers: Imprimateur “Typo-Litho” and J. Carbonel, 1939).

23. The translators add in the preface to the 1939 French edition, “Doubtless, andespecially regarding the urban centers, some things have greatly evolved (

évolué

) sincethe beginning of the century. However, . . . what the author says remains entirely truefor a great part of the population” (Desparmet, p. 7).



582

folkloric order.”

24

Like colonial ethnography elsewhere, Desparmetsets indigenous society along a temporal dimension running fromprimitive through barbaric to modern:

25

“The ethnographer capturesin motion the functioning of the human mind at an intermediate stageof development between savage and civilized life.”

26

With this tempo-ralizing tendency came the tendency to see the colonized people’spresent as Europe’s past. Desparmet writes that Kabylia is “a rudeand primitive society, in the image perhaps of our France at the mo-ment, in the tenth century of our era, when the obscure rudiments ofthe feudal system were sketched out.”

27

As elsewhere under Europeancolonialism, native mores could be understood in terms of Europe’spast and criticized in terms of its present. Like British ethnographersin India, Desparmet and other colonial French ethnographers playedparts of indigenous society off one another, denouncing native societyfor its oppression of women and enshrining the cultural differencesbetween Berbers and Arabs.

28

A keenly felt imperative for the ethnographer in colonial Algeria, aselsewhere under colonialism, was the task of preserving and describ-ing customs before they slipped away—the task of antiquarianism, or

passéisme

. The antiquarian impulse shaded off into the folkloristic oneof describing “life and customs” or “everyday life,” which led ethnog-raphers to emphasize differences in customs, especially along theArab/Berber split. Coexisting with this particularistic impulse was anopposing one: to typify all of Algeria, or even all of North Africa, asdisplaying a uniform culture. This latter goal sometimes betrayed thenatural scientist’s desire to formulate nomothetic laws of culture.Desparmet concludes, for instance, “I can attest that the facts of folk-lore are in general the same from one end of the territory to theother. . . . Beyond this, if the confirmation of witnesses is to be be-lieved, a number of customs pertaining to birth, marriage, and deathcan be found, with striking resemblances to each other, essentiallyeverywhere.”

29

Despite the institutional obstacles we have seen that faced AlgerianMuslim writers, not all ethnographies in the colonial period were writ-ten by Europeans. As Lucas and Vatin write, “under French influence

24. Ibid., p. 6.25. See Johannes Fabian,

Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object

(NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1983).

26. Desparmet, quoted in Lucas and Vatin (n. 4 above), p. 208.27. Ibid., p. 204.28. See Partha Chatterjee, “Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonialized Women: The

Contest in India,”

American Ethnologist

16 (1989): 622–33; Lorcin (n. 8 above).29. Desparmet, quoted in Lucas and Vatin, p. 55.


Thomas Lyons

„


583

there developed a properly Algerian school of ethnology, mostlyKabyle, consisting of

francisés

who had passed through the mills of the[Algerian] École Normale Supérieure [Teachers College].”

30

Two ex-amples of this “properly Algerian school” from the 1930s are of par-ticular interest, for they show the constraints upon social analysis byFrench-educated Muslims in Algeria. The following passage is from a1939 reader for pupils in French-language elementary schools:

Look at the engraving children. Do you see the little houses of a French village, the houses with no windows of a Kabyle village, or the tents of a douar? No, you see tall houses with many windows, a big street, a beautiful square with a lovely mosque. . . . Look at the square: children are playing, people young and old are walking about; two men are sitting on a bench; ladies are chatting with each other. A rich native (

indigène

) is leaving the mosque; he gives alms to a poor Arab sitting in front of the mosque. This poor man is called a beggar; he is begging. Children, this engraving represents a town.

31

Lucas and Vatin rightly classify this didactic passage as a kind of eth-nography for children. It is perhaps the ultimate example of an “alien-ated” description of one’s own society

32

—although what is “exoticized”or “alienated” is not the douar or the Kabyle village, but the town. Tothe extent that such crypto-ethnographic descriptions were the com-mon currency of French-language instruction in native schools, theFrench-language novelists we are considering here must have beenexposed to them. Such “ethnography” would in that sense have hadfar more influence than any produced for the benefit of scholars.Moreover, it is remarkably similar to the sentences from French read-ers that shaped French fiction writing such as that of Albert Camus.

33

Only occasionally in the Algerian case does this instruction get repre-sented directly in the novels, as in the opening passages of Dib’s

LaGrande Maison

(1952), where the pupils intone a reading about “ourmother country France.”

34

The author of this reader, Mohamed Soualah, also produced a two-volume study,

Native Society of North Africa

, the second volume of whichdealt with “mores, customs, and institutions.” Its stated aim was to

30. Quoted in Lucas and Vatin, p. 212.31. Ibid., pp. 212–13.32. See Jacqueline Kaye and Abdulhamid Zoubir,

The Ambiguous Compromise: Lan-guage, Literature, and National Identity in Algeria and Morocco

(London: Routledge, 1990).33. See Renée Balibar,

Les Français fictifs: Rapport des styles littéraires au Français na-tional

(Paris: Hachette, 1974).34. Mohammed Dib,

La Grande maison

(Paris: Seuil, 1952), p. 20.



584

depict family and social life “with sincerity,” as well as “the transfor-mations undertaken by the French, not without strong resistance,upon indigenous institutions.” It was prefaced by an explanation ofexactly for whom it was intended and why. Soualah intended his text-book “to interest pupils of all ages in the original features of nativesociety and the contributions made by Arab civilization to humanprogress: a fruitful scheme wherever it has been carried out. Consci-entiously applied, it can enlighten young intellects, destroy many aprejudice, and seal a union of hearts in this country where so manyraces jostle together.”

35

In other words, the sociological study, like thereader, was intended for schoolchildren and teachers. In fact, primaryand secondary school teaching were two of only a few white-collarjobs, with the authority they conferred, open to Muslims (similar tothe situation faced until recently by African-Americans in the South).In order to depict Algerian colonial society outside the domain of theschool textbook, however, some Algerian intellectuals chose to aban-don sociological writing altogether.

P I E R R E B O U R D I E U I N A L G E R I A

Perhaps the most sophisticated, and certainly the best-known, ethnog-raphy to have been carried out in Algeria before independence is thatof the preeminent French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu. WhenBourdieu conducted his fieldwork, social anthropologists were lessconcerned with ethnographic method than they are today. Except inthe government report that was his first fieldwork, Bourdieu did notdocument the exact nature of his fieldwork experiences and theircontradictions, as many anthropologists would now. Much of Bour-dieu’s fieldwork took place during the Algerian war, as part of a large-scale, French-government-funded research project carried out between1958 and 1960. Nevertheless, it belongs to the era we are investigat-ing, in that Bourdieu’s purpose was to characterize “baseline”—that is,prewar—Algerian, and in particular Kabyle, society.

Bourdieu’s published ethnography falls into two methodologicaltypes. The economic part of the study involved a team of Europeanand Algerian research assistants interviewing 190 randomly selectedAlgerians; the results, along with a detailed description of Bourdieu’smethods, appeared as

Travail et travailleurs en Algérie

36

and are sum-marized in several other works. The introduction to

Travail et travail-leurs en Algérie

justifies the validity of the survey method amid wartime

35. Quoted in Lucas and Vatin, p. 214.36. See Pierre Bourdieu et al.,

Travail et travailleurs en Algérie

(Paris: Mouton, 1963).


Thomas Lyons

„


585

conditions. Informants were given a standard questionnaire, but theirreactions ranged from open resistance to what Bourdieu claims wasfull confidence in the interviewer. “In an atmosphere of police inqui-sition and psychological warfare, the interviewer must always expect asuspicious reception.”

37

Bourdieu fully recognizes the way the colonialsituation permeates his sociological research and makes it possible.“The relation between interviewer and interviewee is built upon thebasis of the objective relationship of domination between colonizingand colonized societies.”

38

He is sure, however, that his interviewersobtained the full confidence of many of their subjects: “No matterhow conventional they are in our eyes, words and gestures such asgreetings, a handshake, a smile are here signs of recognition; break-ing with the reciprocal avoidance and the dissymmetry of customaryrelations, these [gestures] are almost miraculous”

39

in gaining the trustof informants. Moreover, the survey could well have been interpretedas part of the anticolonial struggle: “The researchers insisted theywere part of a study intended to describe the living conditions of Al-gerians. In a revolution . . . everyone knows that to describe is to de-nounce.”

40

Bourdieu makes a final ringing plea for the importance ofthese interviews despite the colonial context. The ethnographer must“restore to other men the meaning of their actions [

le sens de leurscomportements

], one of many things the colonial system has robbedthem of.”

41

Indeed, Bourdieu and his students produced a sympatheticand, under the circumstances, nuanced and elaborate picture of theaspirations and the economic realities of Algerians.

The remainder of Bourdieu’s ethnographic writing is based on afascinating collection of facts, proverbs, and insights about traditionalKabyle life, but it is not clear exactly where or how they were acquired.His best-known work about this fieldwork,

Outline of a Theory of Prac-tice

(1972), alternates between description of Kabyle practices and adissection of “objectivist” perspectives in social science. (The data werecollected during the war but not published until 1972.) Narrative, inthe sense of temporality, is absent. The narrative “I” of the ethnogra-pher, a device, however artificial, that grounds the events in experi-ence, is absent from the text.42 This marks Bourdieu’s text as a genre

37. Ibid., p. 261.38. Ibid., p. 258.39. Ibid., p. 264.40. Ibid., p. 262.41. Ibid.42. See Mary Louise Pratt, “Fieldwork in Common Places,” in Writing Culture: The

Politics and Poetics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1986).


M O D E R N P H I L O L O G Y586

fundamentally different from the ethnographic novels of AlgerianMuslim writers, which appear grounded in firsthand experience in-terpreted for an outsider even when they are not written in the firstperson. In Bourdieu, by contrast, even anecdotes that seem to beabout particular Kabyle persons are narrated in a timeless presenttense. A marriage in the “house of Belaïd,” described in order to show“practice as strategy,” does not actually take place.

The spouses belong to the house of Belaïd. . . . The girl’s father [Youcef ] is totally excluded from power. . . . (An only son, and moreover, “son of the widow,” he has kept in a marginal position all of his life. After a period of army service and then agricultural labor abroad, he takes advantage, now that he is back in the village, of his favorable position. . . .) These are some of the elements which must be taken into account in order to understand the internal and external political function of the marriage. . . . This marriage, arranged by Ahmad and Ahcène, the holders of power—as usual without consulting Youcef . . . —reinforces the position of the dominant line.43

Note that every sentence is in the present tense.44 It is not clear whenthis marriage took place, if it took place, or if Bourdieu witnessed itor not. In this sense Bourdieu’s ethnographic writing is reminiscentof modernist texts written in the present or imperfect tense or in sen-tence fragments with no time-ordering verb forms at all.45 The time-less nature of Bourdieu’s anecdotes, proverbs, and aperçus stylisticallyparallels his notion of the habitus, “systems of durable, transposabledispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as struc-turing structures” that act outside of human agency.46 “The habitus isthe product of the work of inculcation and appropriation necessary inorder for those products of collective history, the objective structures(e.g., of language, economy, etc.) to succeed in reproducing them-selves more or less completely, . . . in the organisms (which one can,if one wishes, call individuals) lastingly subjected to the same condi-tionings.”47 Since Bourdieu never describes actions by identifiable in-dividuals in a real time and place, it is quite easy to conceive instead

43. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (CambridgeUniversity Press, 1977), pp. 49–50.

44. Only occasionally did Bourdieu “faithfully record what he had seen and experi-enced” as such. See Jeremy F. Lane, Pierre Bourdieu: A Critical Introduction (London:Pluto, 2000), p. 118.

45. See, for example, the works of Claude Simon; for an Algerian example, seeRachid Boudjedra, Topographie idéale pour une agression characterisée (Paris: Denoël,1975); see also Lyons (n. 19 above).

46. Bourdieu, Outline, p. 72.47. Ibid., p. 85.


Thomas Lyons „ Ethnographic Novel and Ethnography 587

of “structures . . . reproducing themselves.” At the same time, Bour-dieu’s own role in recording events and constructing ethnography isnot stated.

F E R A O U N V E R S U S B O U R D I E U

Now that they have been overshadowed by these theoretical conclu-sions, Bourdieu’s actual descriptions of the Kabyle house and the“enchanted,” premodern economic relations of Kabyle Berbers48 arenot usually assessed for their correspondence to any particular soci-ety. But given, as we have seen, a framework in which Muslim intellec-tuals were denied access to scholarly institutions, is there any way toguess at what these intellectuals’ perspective might have been on thesame phenomena? And can we do so without implying some kind ofprivileged access of our own to the reality?

Feraoun’s Le Fils du pauvre (1950), the paradigmatic ethnographicnovel, details Kabyle daily life, both as background and sometimes inthe form of asides of outright sociological analysis. An assimilationistbefore the war and a personal friend of Camus, Feraoun clearly writeswith the purpose of enlisting the sympathy and understanding of theFrench readership for life in Kabylia. As well as nineteenth-centuryrealists such as Honoré de Balzac and Alphonse Daudet, Feraoun wasinfluenced by the École d’Alger, European writers in Algeria in themidcentury, such as Camus and Emmanuel Roblès. However, hewrote that “neither . . . Camus nor any of the others have come tounderstand us sufficiently.”49 In struggling to make outsiders under-stand Kabylia, Feraoun created the “founding novel of North Africanliterature in the French language.”50

In the very first sentences of the novel Feraoun’s “bird’s-eye view”mimics the nineteenth-century realism of Balzac: “The tourist whodares to penetrate into the heart of Kabylia will admire, whetherthrough conviction or through duty, the marvelous scenery and thepoetic countryside, and will feel an indulgent affection for the customsof the inhabitants.”51 This opening “tourist’s” perspective develops

48. Ibid., and Pierre Bourdieu, Algeria 1960, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1979).

49. Cited in Robert Elbaz and Martine Mathieu-Job, Mouloud Feraoun, ou, L’emer-gence d’une littérature (Paris: Karthala, 2001), p. 6.

50. Ibid., p. 11.51. Mouloud Feraoun, Le Fils du pauvre (Paris: Seuil, 1954), p. 12. Compare the open-

ing lines of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet: “In certain provincial towns there are houses thelook of which inspires a melancholy equal to that inspired by the most somber clois-ter, the most barren field or the most dismal ruin.” Elbaz and Mathieu-Job state that



into the childhood memories of the Kabyle schoolteacher FouroulouMenrad (an anagram of the author’s name). But these memories areretold from precisely this outside, tourist’s perspective. The novel isframed as a notebook that Fouroulou is writing describing his child-hood; Fouroulou the adult narrator and Fouroulou the child hero arenever fully identified, because of the narrator’s alignment with an out-side reader.52 This distancing is what permits Fouroulou the ethnog-rapher, as it were, to emerge.

The reader looking for Bourdieu’s oppositions, symbolic structures,and enchanted economic relationships is hard-pressed to find tracesof them in Feraoun’s novel. This could conceivably be because Fera-oun omits or misrecognizes Bourdieu’s cultural systems as fully natu-ral, or may find them unworthy of explicit representation. The authoris, after all, himself a Kabyle, hence a subject of Bourdieu’s analysis,and may misrecognize his practices in the same way as did Bourdieu’sinformants. Of course, to dismiss Feraoun’s text in this way begs thequestion of the validity of Bourdieu’s ethnography itself. In any case,Bourdieu’s theory of practice posits that these structures are notspelled out, but are at most implicit, in practice. Moreover, the “en-chanted” economic practices are already in the throes of disintegra-tion. Hence we must go beyond a surface reading to find them inliterary representation.

Let us look more closely at some of the places Feraoun’s ethno-graphic novel and Bourdieu’s ethnography might be comparable. Theplacement of the loom against a certain wall in the Kabyle house is inBourdieu’s analysis governed by an entire system of oppositions.

In front of the wall facing the door . . . stands the weaving loom. The opposite wall, where the door is, is called the wall of darkness, or the wall of sleep, the maiden or the tomb. . . . A number of indices suggest that these oppositions are the center of a cluster of parallel oppositions the necessity of which never stems entirely from technical imperatives and functional requirements.53

Feraoun too alludes to the position of the loom in his child protago-nist’s aunts’ house.

52. Elbaz and Mathieu-Job, pp. 14 ff.; see Michael Silverstein, “Metapragmatic Dis-course and Metapragmatic Function,” in Reflexive Language, ed. John A. Lucy (Cam-bridge University Press, 1991).

53. Bourdieu, Outline, p. 135.

Feraoun surely read Balzac, but Feraoun’s “realism of the Kabyle object,” which mustbe explained to the French reader, does not resemble the “ideological realism” of Bal-zac; see Elbaz and Mathieu-Job, p. 36.



In fact, weaving is a tedious job but it doesn’t require a lot of room. The loom is stretched vertically between two poles, a little bit away from the wall. It can stay that way as long as one likes. My aunts would spend the odd moment there. They would sit their backs against the wall, threading the shuttle through the threads and carding it with an iron comb. It’s an occupation that doesn’t prevent conversation.54

The placement of the loom in this passage from Feraoun seems atmost a practical one. The significance of the wall against which theloom is placed is not mentioned. If the underlying system of opposi-tions presumed to function in the Berber house is nowhere in evidencein Feraoun’s description, however, this may not invalidate Bourdieu’sanalysis. As Bourdieu himself stresses, the systematicity of the Kabylehouse is a kind of description that is possible only at certain placesand times; it is the kind of structure that is laid out by an informantto an inquiring ethnographer (and recall that none of Bourdieu’s eth-nographic descriptions imply firsthand observation of Kabyle prac-tices). Feraoun’s loom, in contrast, is mentioned in passing in anarrative about more important things. It begins to seem difficult toestablish whether a text like Feraoun’s bears out or contradicts Bour-dieu’s theory.

A second example is found in Bourdieu’s essay “The Disenchant-ment of the World,” an essay based on results of the government sur-vey of economic attitudes. Bourdieu argues that misrecognition of thereal exchanges that are the basis of the traditional Kabyle economy isnecessary for that economy to function.55 Under pressure from amoney economy, these enchanted economic relations—such as gifts,corvée, and joint ownership among family members—begin to fallapart. Their true nature as exchanges, which had been there all along,is revealed. “The breakup of the extended family is both the pre-condition for the rationalization of the domestic economy and ofeconomic conduct in general, and also the product of that rational-ization,” Bourdieu writes. It is part of the Kabyle “adaptation to theeconomic system.”56

As it happens, a household breakup forms part of the plot of Filsdu pauvre. The hero’s father and uncle are compelled, after his grand-mother’s death, to divide their home in two, at the urging of theirwives. Almost immediately after the grandmother’s death, “my auntdid not delay in stealing [from the collective stores], my mother in see-ing her do so and telling my father about it. He in turn did not delay

54. Feraoun, p. 59.55. See Bourdieu, “The Disenchantment of the World,” in Algeria 1960.56. Ibid., p. 46.



in putting his hand in after her. As it happens it was a jar of driedmeat from the previous Aid.57 . . . The storm finally broke. It wasclear that everyone dearly wanted the property split up and had hadenough of trying to live together in a house from which all trust hadbeen banished.”58 Here the process of household breakup seems tohave little to do with any general process of economic disenchantment.Events that might be analyzed in terms of larger economic forces aretold instead in terms of personalities in the family. The story of Fou-roulou’s family breakup is in some sense narrated ethnographically,in that it is addressed to an outsider, but it remains unconnected toany extrafamilial economic and historical forces. In Bourdieu, on theother hand, the dynamic of the particular personalities involved is ir-relevant. Bourdieu abstracts a causal factor out of multiple events offamily breakup, each with its own private reasons. Indeed, because themoney economy is the underlying, misrecognized truth of the “en-chanted” familial-relations-based economy, Bourdieu’s theory imposesa teleology of social change on events of family breakup. While thisteleology is not contradicted by Feraoun’s narrative, it is nowhere inevidence.

These two examples show that even where Feraoun seems to depictthe same phenomenon of Kabyle life as Bourdieu, his emphasis is dif-ferent. And these two kinds of description are quite literally incom-mensurable. Each way of describing the phenomenon seems to referit to a different set of ultimate causes—sociological causes for Bour-dieu, and the irreducible personalities of his characters for Feraoun—but each says nothing about the validity of the other.

This incommensurability is not due merely to the literary nature ofthe novel—the individual characters and the plot, as against the lackof this literariness in Bourdieu’s ethnography—that is, his absence ofcharacters and his atemporal, natural-scientific rhetoric of “structures”and “processes.” To be sure, as a modern cultural form, the novel isbiased toward a view of the world based on individual subjectivity,like certain other forms such as biography and the memoir.59 Fe-raoun’s novel, insofar as it is a tale about particular people, is fromthe start a kind of description very different from Bourdieu’s ethnog-raphy and suffers from certain limitations of the “ethnographic real-ist” form. In addition, Bourdieu presents a set of dispositions that are

57. An annual festival in which an animal is sacrificially slaughtered.58. Feraoun, p. 59.59. This bias of ours to look for individual subjectivity in the novel is certainly part

of our own “horizon” in hermeneutical terms, the conditioning we bring to reading thenovel.



entirely “other,” and incommensurable with Feraoun’s character de-scriptions, because they are determined by sociological conditions notrecognized by the actors themselves. Here Bourdieu employs his no-tion of the habitus, taken to encompass a human’s disposition to act,the acts themselves, and the objective conditions that determine andare determined by those actions—“Making a virtue of necessity,” inother words.60 Bourdieu’s approach (as that of other sociologists) isindeed akin to that of modernist writers who sought to display theunrecognized forces underlying their characters’ behavior. Feraoun’srealist narrative cannot describe such structures in the same way. Itmaintains the rigorous distinction between inside and outside, be-tween me and not-me. Social forces that depend on misrecognitions,or that occur somewhere between the “inside” of dispositions to actand the “outside” of objective conditions—such as Bourdieu’s notionof economic enchantment—cannot be directly depicted in Feraoun’srealist narrative.

On the other hand, Bourdieu’s own descriptions are notorious, firstof all, for doing without any kind of active conscious agency in theway the Kabyle peasant obeys the dictates of the habitus and, second,for avoiding all mention of the wartime context in which his field-work took place. Bourdieu admits that colonialism made his researchpossible, but this insight is not reflected in the research itself. In par-ticular, the enmity (or lack thereof ) of Bourdieu’s interviewees towardthe colonizers and their participation (or lack thereof ) in the upris-ing—in something that might change their objective conditions ratherthan reproduce them—are possibilities not allowed for in Bourdieu’srepresentation. Because the realist novel foregrounds the individualhero, on the other hand, the utter lack of agency with which Bour-dieu’s Kabyle peasants operate is impossible.

I have argued that the ethnographic novel was a form of expressionequivalent in some sense to the social and political writing that wasdenied to native Algerians under colonialism. Our contrast betweenFeraoun and Bourdieu, however, shows that the straightforward nar-ration of realist ethnographic novels, though undeniably a way ofrepresenting society, cannot readily be compared to the most sophis-ticated forms of ethnography. If we focus merely on this kind of real-ist representation, we will be forced to conclude that realist novels andBourdieu’s ethnography are simply incommensurable. For a morefruitful comparison of representations in novels and ethnographies,we must take account of differences in techniques of representationin the novels themselves.

60. Bourdieu, Algeria 1960, p. 16.



I N D I V I D U A L A G E N C Y A N DAW A R E N E S S O F C H A N G E

Gayatri Spivak gives a suggestive program for postcolonial literarystudies: novels allow us to imagine “the heterogeneous agency of thecolonized.”61 Certain novels that appeared in Algeria at the sametime as those by Feraoun attempt to depict this agency in new ways.Agency, at least for the hero, is to some extent presupposed by thetraditional novel form. The hero or identification figure must not befully opaque in motivation. In Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneuticalterms, we must be able to “take seriously as true” the hero’s motiva-tions. Sometimes the only agency the hero is able to exert is aware-ness on some level of social change; but even such minimal agencydistinguishes the novel from social science writing of the time, whichtends to efface individual agency completely.

One novel contemporary with Feraoun’s Fils du pauvre, still moreor less within the bounds of realism but explicitly expressing an aware-ness of change, is Mohammed Dib’s early masterpiece, La Grandemaison.62 Set in Tlemcen during the famine of the late 1930s, thenovel is a tender and nostalgic reminiscence, but also a denunciationof the colonial system. The plot is nothing more than a series ofvignettes of one family’s daily struggle against starvation—indeed, adescription of everyday life, but of a particular kind. It is never clearexactly how much food is available to the family, but it appears toaverage less than a small piece of bread per person per day. As in Filsdu pauvre, the main character in this novel, Omar, is a young boy.Hence little of the wider world beyond the household and Tlemcenappears; the only adult political figure Omar knows, a labor orga-nizer, is in the colonial prison for the duration of the novel. But theconstant hunger of the characters is itself, of course, a denunciationof the colonial system. Dib’s writing may have been influenced by andmay stand in intertextual opposition to Camus’s effacement of the na-tionalist position in works like La Peste, where the effect of calamityon the Arab population is hardly mentioned.63 Dib also read Frenchand non-French classics and was particularly influenced by VirginiaWoolf, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and theRussian writers.64

61. Gayatri Spivak, “How to Read a ‘Culturally Different’ Book,” in Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory, ed. Francis Barker (Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 133.

62. Dib, La Grande maison (n. 34 above).63. Ena C. Vutor, Colonial and Anticolonial Discourses: Albert Camus and Algeria (Lan-

ham, Md.: University Press of America, 2000).64. Jean Déjeux, Mohammad Dib: Écrivain algérian (Sherbrooke, Canada: Naaman,

1977), p. 10.

One Line Long



La Grande maison is realist in its narrative style, somewhat likeChildhood (1913–14), Maxim Gorky’s novel about his own childhood.But in some of the most dramatic passages in the novel, there aresudden intrusions of narrative ambiguity. The narrative seems toenter Omar’s stream of consciousness, and a struggle arises to putsomething into words.65 Whether this struggle is undertaken by theauthor/narrator or by Omar is unclear. This passage is characteristicin its mixture of narration and the ambiguous representation of con-sciousness: “But why are we poor? Neither his mother nor any of theothers could give an answer. And yet that’s what had to be found out.Sometimes some of them would decide: It’s our destiny. Or even: OnlyGod knows. But is that an explanation? Omar did not understandthat they clung to reasons like that. No, an explanation like that clar-ified nothing. Did the grownups know the real answer?”66 There isno omniscient narrator to answer these questions. The identity ofthe questioner himself is unclear, because of the ambiguity betweennarration and representation of consciousness.67 This ambiguityforcefully underscores the fact that the question posed has no answer(though a nationalist reading of the text would make the answer theoverthrow of the colonial system). The answer may indeed lie not justoutside Omar’s consciousness, but outside the world, as it can be de-picted in the bird’s-eye narrative view, altogether. In certain respects,this narrative ambiguity can also be found in the most sophisticatedrealist novels, such as those of Gustave Flaubert, who, as JonathanCuller puts it, has created “a text which no one speaks.”68 But in Dibthe unspeakable sentences arise from the intolerable situation ofcolonialism.

Hence a fundamental theme of La Grande maison is the inadequacyof expression itself within the world depicted in the novel. In anothertelling scene, as the townspeople flood fearfully into the streets afterthe first sounding of an air-raid siren in Tlemcen at the beginning ofWorld War II, the boy feels fear, but also some kind of elation rebornin him: “A newfound meaning of everything, forgotten before butsuddenly remembered, came upon the townspeople. The whole thingwould have seemed ridiculous even a day ago. The people of Tlem-cen had given the word; they had come out into the streets with acommon accord: it would be easy to think they had something of thehighest importance to say. But everyone was waiting for somebody to

65. See Lyons (n. 19 above).66. Dib, La Grande maison, p. 117.67. See Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Lan-

guage of Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).68. Culler (n. 20 above), p. 110.



speak first; and that of course never happened.”69 The child’s per-spective is crucial: Omar, and perhaps no one else, is able to perceivehow the Second World War may or may not bring about a newfoundsolidarity and sense of collective strength in the people. However, theincreased solidarity Omar may sense among the townspeople cannotbe expressed. The siren brings the people together, but someone mustspeak first.

We can begin to see here the application to Algerian novels of Ray-mond Williams’s dictum that “structures of feeling” expressed in ar-tistic works often precede more visible historical events and politicalmovements in a society. The very inchoateness of the inexpressible“something” in La Grande maison may betray the extent of the gulfbetween colonial institutions and a growing consciousness on the partof the people. Dib once more expressed this inexpressible somethingin the sequel to La Grande maison, which appeared in 1954. In L’In-cendie, the peasants find themselves faced with “events, but what werethese events, these forebodings, formless and so to speak faceless, thisuncertainty in which no clear signification shone? Cries? But comingfrom where? Warnings? But who had called them out?”70 These name-less somethings resemble Bourdieu’s descriptions of social forces that,as it were, reside both inside and outside the individual.

Dib’s novel differs from Feraoun’s in the way it represents society,chiefly due to its artful use of ambiguous voicing. While certain imagesin Feraoun are ambiguously voiced, such ambiguity is the uninten-tional by-product of the narrator’s simultaneous alignment with hischaracters and with the outsider-reader. Dib, on the other hand, is anovertly nationalist writer. Like the works of modernist Algerian writerKateb Yacine,71 Dib’s novel of protest against colonialism does notpermit an easy alignment with its French readership. This enmity of ananticolonial writer toward the potential readers of his works is new,and arises in circumstances having little to do with, for instance, thesurrealists’ attitudes toward their audience.72 But anticolonial writersmay nevertheless employ stylistic techniques similar to those of othermodernists in expressing this attitude.

Comparison of novelists like Feraoun and Dib, writing in French inlate colonial Algeria, on the one hand, and contemporaneous ethno-graphic writing, on the other, reveals the close tie between the limitsof social analysis that can be undertaken by a writer and the modes of

69. Dib, La Grande maison, p. 184.70. Mohammed Dib, L’Incendie (Paris: Seuil, 1954), p. 160.71. See, for example, Yacine (n. 17 above).72. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (Paris: Gallimard, 1949).



representation available to him. Realist narration in which the unitaryperspective is maintained unambiguously throughout is quite literallyincommensurable with description of a society in which the strength ofsocial norms resides in their being misrecognized, as with Bourdieu’seconomic enchantment. Changes that everyone senses but no one canarticulate cannot themselves be articulated in the novel without re-course to ambiguous narrative techniques. On the other hand, eth-nography that lacks narrative may efface the context in which it wascreated and may bias analysis toward agentless structures workingthrough interchangeable individuals. Bourdieu’s Kabyle peasants seemalien to us partly because they are never part of a humanizing narra-tive that would include Bourdieu himself; Bourdieu and his subjectsare never brought together in a single narrative. In novelistic terms,Bourdieu’s writing on Kabylia lacks “heroes” whose motivations we“take seriously as true” and who are on a par with the narrator. Inturn, Bourdieu, the most sophisticated ethnographer of the time,failed fully to represent the depth of nationalist sentiment in Algeria.Certain novels that were part of international literary currents re-stored that agency and represented social changes that lay under thesurface of prerevolutionary Algerian society.


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The Ethnographic Novel and Ethnography in Colonial Algeriation of Malek Bennabi’s Ahwal...

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