Academic literature on the topic 'Ethnology, algeria'

<p><em>In the globalized world, work presents itself as a nub of actualization of intermixed relations of domination. How does the ethnological analysis study such intermixed relations? To answer the question the first part of the paper compares the anthropological approaches that Pierre Bourdieu and Gérard Althabe designed in the key period of decolonization. They both broke with colonial ethnography through the analysis of relations of colonial domination in the field of work. Bourdieu’s approach is structuralist and he combines ethnography and sociological analysis to display the symbolic structure of the social positions. Althabe’s ethnologic approach is constructivist and tries to show the production of social relations by the power of imagination. </em></p><p><em>In the second part of the paper three researches are briefly presented: prostitution in the brothels of Potosi in Bolivia, the job of the highly qualified women of University of Canton in China, work in the building industry in Oran in Algeria by way of a return to the Bourdieu’s work. In these very different situations, the analysis lays stress on the means by which the social agents build their social relations.</em><em></em></p>

La bijouterie auresienne connait actuellement une mutation profonde, processus qui s'inscrit d'ailleurs dans le bouleversement des modes de vie et de pensee ruraux traditionnels en algerie. Les effets de la mode et des techniques nouvelles empruntees a d'autres milieux, concourent a l'edification, tant chez l'artisan que chez le consommateur, d'une vision nouvelle de leur realite culturelle. Comment s'operent ces changements? qu'en advient-il de la bijouterie et des bijoutiers auresiens? l'etude traite successivement des "traditions-innovations" au plan des bijoux (matiere, techniques, types) et au plan du travail des bijoutiers (conditions de travail, outils, techniques)
Nowadays, aurasian's jewelry is meeting with a profound change (or mutation). However, in algeria, this process enters the upset of ways of rural and traditionnal life and thought. The results of fashion and new technics (taken from others countries) suggest to craftmen and customers a new look on their cultural reality. How these changes are now taken place? what about the aurasian's jewelry and jewelers? this investigation concerns the "traditions-innovations" examinated on a level with jewels (matter, technics and types) and on a level with jeweler's work (conditions of work, tools, technics)

The second French colonial empire (1830-1962) challenged soldiers, scholars, and administrators to understand societies radically different from their own so as to govern them better. Overlooking the contributions of many of these colonial officials, most historians have located the genesis of the French social theory used to understand these differences in the hallowed halls of Parisian universities and research institutes. This dissertation instead argues that colonial experience and study drove metropolitan theory. Through a contextualized examination of the published and unpublished writings and correspondence of key thinkers who bridged the notional metropolitan-colonial divide, this dissertation reveals intellectual networks that produced knowledge of societies in North and West Africa and contemplated the nature of colonial rule. From General Louis Faidherbe in the 1840s to politician Jacques Soustelle and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in the 1950s, a succession of soldiers and administrators engaged in dialogue with their symbiotic colonial sources to translate indigenous ideas for a metropolitan audience and humanize French rule in Africa. Developing ideas in part from a reading of native African written and oral sources, these particular colonial thinkers conceived of social structure and race in civilizational terms, placing peoples along a temporally-anchored developmental continuum that promised advancement along a unique pathway if nurtured by a properly adapted program of Western intervention. This perspective differed significantly from the theories proposed by social scientists such as Emile Durkheim, who described "primitivity" as a stage in a unilinear process of social evolution. French African political and social structures incorporated elements of this intellectual direction by the mid-twentieth century, culminating in the attempt by Jacques Soustelle to govern Algeria with the assistance of ethnological institutions. At the same time, Pierre Bourdieu built on French ethnological ideas in an empirically grounded and personally contingent alternative to the dominant structuralist sociological and anthropological perspective in France.

Approached as an interdisciplinary study, this dissertation considers colonial knowledge from a number of different angles. First, it is a history of French African ethnology viewed through a biographical and microhistorical lens. Thus, it reintroduces the variance in the methods and interpretations employed by individual scholars and administrators that was a very real part of both scientific investigation and colonial rule. Race, civilization, and progress were not absolutes; definitions and sometimes applications of these terms varied according to local and personal socio-cultural context. This study also considers the evolution of French social theory from a novel perspective, that of the amateur fieldworker in the colonies. Far from passive recipients of metropolitan thought, these men (and sometimes women) actively shaped metropolitan ideas on basic social structure and interaction as they emerged. In the French science de l'homme, intellectual innovation came not always from academics in stuffy rooms, but instead from direct interaction and dialogue with the subjects of study themselves.

Dissertation

The chapter examines the success of the forms of psychological warfare deployed during Opération Pilote. A key element of Servier’s plan was to recruit peasants to undertake a crash training programme in the COIN centre at Arzew, so that they could be secretly reinserted in the douars to act as future political leaders. The first cohort proved to be of mediocre ability, and their placement in the douars, known to the FLN, proved to be perilous. The army turned to other techniques of mass brainwashing of the rural population, who were either subjected to propaganda teams or, at Warnier in the Chelif, placed in ‘re-education’ camps. Anthropology, promoted by Servier, was marginalized since army officers could not be rapidly trained in the necessary language and ethnology skills, and instead the army relied on behaviourist theories of conditioned reflexes and mechanical forms of mass indoctrination by repetition of slogans. The prefect, and some officers, were deeply scathing of the impacts of such brainwashing techniques. By August 1957 Opération Pilote was wound down but, despite its major failure, was promoted by top commanders as a great success, and was rapidly expanded across Algeria. The claims made for the experiment were supported by dubious forms of psychological mapping that claimed to plot the success of ‘pacification’.