$Unique_ID{COW00085} $Pretitle{244} $Title{Algeria Chapter 2C. Structure of Society} $Subtitle{} $Author{LaVerle Berry} $Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army} $Subject{women family social society algerian french members new rural government} $Date{1985} $Log{Algerian Women Voting*0008502.scf } Country: Algeria Book: Algeria, A Country Study Author: LaVerle Berry Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army Date: 1985 Chapter 2C. Structure of Society As with other peoples of the Maghrib, Algerian society has considerable historical depth behind it and has been subjected to a number of external influences and migrations. Fundamentally Berber in cultural and racial terms, this society was organized around extended family, clan, and tribe and was adapted to a rural rather than an urban setting before the arrival of the Arabs and, later, the French. An identifiable modern class structure began to materialize during the colonial period. This structure has undergone further differentiation in the period since independence, despite the country's commitment to egalitarian ideals. Preindependence Society Before the coming of the French in 1830, the people were divided between a few ancient cities and a sparsely settled countryside where subsistence farmers and nomadic herdsmen lived in small, ethnically homogeneous groups. Rural patterns of social organization had many common features, although some differences existed between Arabs and Berbers and between nomads and settled cultivators. They did not form a cohesive social class because individual behavior and action were circumscribed by the framework of tribe or clan. In the cities the heterogeneous population formed into groups along lines of ethnic origin. Although great social distance separated the few wealthy and wellborn townsmen from the masses, most people identified themselves by their ethnic or religious group rather than by class or economic standing. Urban society thus formed not a single stratified system but a number of groups, each with its own social hierarchy. Under Ottoman rule, three kinds of elites were identifiable: the Turkish aristocracy, the tribal leaders allied with the Turks, and the religious notables. A small mercantile bourgeoisie existed, but the Turkish rulers did not permit it to attain status or power. Social organization in the rural areas depended primarily on kinship ties. The basic kinship unit was the ayla, a small lineage, the members of which claimed descent through males from a common grandfather or great-grandfather. The male members of such a group maintained mutual economic obligations and recognized a form of collective ownership of pastoral territory or agricultural lands. Several ayla formed the larger lineage, the members of which traced their origin to a more remote male ancestor. Beyond these lineages were the patrilineal clans in which kinship was assumed but could rarely be traced; and tribes were aggregations of clans claiming common or related ancestors or of clans brought together by the force of circumstance. Sharing a common territory, name, and way of life, the member units of a tribe had little political cohesion and tended to accept the authority of a chief only when faced with the danger of alien conquest or subjugation, particularly among the Berbers. Among settled and nomadic Arab groups, tribes and their components were arranged along a gradient of social prestige. The standing of an individual depended on his membership in a ranked group; tribal rank depended on the standing of the highest ranking lineage of each tribe. The shurfa (nobles allegedly descended from Muhammad) and marabouts, venerated for their spiritual power, held the highest ranks. Affairs of mutual interest to all the clans were administered by the clan heads under the leadership of a qaid (tribal chief), who exercised nearly absolute authority. Settled Berber groups were notably democratic and egalitarian. The community, an aggregation of localized clans consisting of a cluster of hamlets or a village inhabited by a single clan, was governed by a jamaa composed of all adult males. Social stratification of the kind found in Arab groups did not exist in Berber villages. French rule and European settlement brought far-reaching social changes. Europeans took over the economic and political life of the country, monopolizing professional, large-scale commercial, and administrative activities, exploiting the agricultural and other resources of the land, and remaining socially aloof. The small Algerian middle stratum of urban merchants and artisans in the cities was squeezed out, and landowners of the countryside were dispossessed. A rapid increase in population, coupled with alienation of cultivated and pastoral lands by colonials after the end of the nineteenth century, created tremendous pressures on the cultivable land. Displaced villagers and tribesmen flocked to the towns and cities, where they formed an unskilled labor mass ill-adapted to industrial work, scorned by Europeans, and isolated from the kinship units that had formerly given them security and a sense of solidarity. This urban movement increased after World War I, and after World War II large numbers also migrated to France in search of work. The Kabyles were the principal migrants; during the 1950s as many as 10 percent of the people of Kabylie were working in France at any one time, and even larger numbers were working in cities of the Tell. Europeans made up a separate sector of society, and the European-Algerian dichotomy was the country's basic social division. The top echelon of the country included a few Algerians who had amassed land and wealth, a few respected Arabic scholars, and a few successful professionals. There had never been an indigenous landowning aristocracy of any importance, however, and French colonials did not want an Algerian middle class competing with them for jobs and status. The small groups of prosperous Muslims never numbered more than about 50,000. Moreover, they lived in quarters of the cities separate from the Europeans and seldom intermarried with them. After the beginning of the twentieth century a new Algerian merchant group began to intermarry with the old upper-stratum families. Less conservative in their outlook, they were less preoccupied with investment in the land and less averse to violating Islamic strictures by lending money for interest. Their children were educated in French schools, at home, or in France to become a new Western-oriented elite made up of lawyers, physicians, pharmacists, teachers, administrators, and a small scattering of political leaders. The opportunity for social mobility, however, remained extremely limited-on the eve of the revolution only a scattering of the jobs requiring professional or technical skills were held by Algerians. The peasant migrants to the cities tended to gather in separate quarters according to their ethnic origin, and certain peoples became associated with selected occupations. But overcrowding and housing shortages often forced persons of a given tribe or village to scatter throughout a city, and solidarity of the migrant groups decreased. Nevertheless, many migrants persisted in retaining contact with family members. Nomadic clans no longer holding sufficient flocks or territory had to accept the humiliation of sedentary existence, the process of sedentarization usually starting with the settling of a few nomadic families on the outskirts of a town with which they had maintained trading relations. Accepted eventually as part of the community by the original inhabitant clans, the former nomads often assumed as their own one of the traditional ancestors or saints of the community. Residential propinquity usually did not, however, overcome the social distance between traditional cultivators and former herders, for each looked down on the way of life of the other. The Revolution and Social Change After generations of gradual change under the French, the war of independence struck Algerian society with cataclysmic force, and victory introduced other important social changes. The influence of the war permeated the society in both country and city and at the personal, familial, and local levels. Individuals developed new perceptions of themselves, their abilities, and their roles through wartime activities. Women, accustomed to a sheltered and segregated life, found themselves suddenly thrust into revolutionary militancy. For many, the war offered the first opportunity ever for independent activity in the world beyond the home. Many young people struck out independently of their families and elders, and new leaders emerged, chosen more for personal traits than for social position. The often brutal fighting, stretching across much of the country for nearly eight years, disrupted or emptied many rural villages. The deliberate French policy of resettlement of rural populations gathered more than 2 million villagers in French-built fortified settlements called regroupment centers. The total number of Muslims displaced by the war can never be accurately known, but Algerian authorities place the figure at more than 3 million permanently or temporarily moved. In 1965 some 2 million people remained in the centers. By 1972 their numbers had decreased markedly as some of the centers closed, but several centers became permanent settlements. As a result of these displacements, a sizable portion of the population lost their ties with the land on which their ancestors had lived for generations and consequently with the social groups the land had supported. Families found themselves separated from fellow clan members and extended family members. The housing supplied by the French was suitable for the nuclear family rather than the traditional extended household, and persons who had formerly lived by subsistence farming became accustomed to functioning in a cash economy. The disappearance of small communities of kin made impossible the social control by reputation and gossip that had formerly existed. Instead, residents of the French relocation centers began to develop feelings of solidarity with strangers who had shared a common fate. The destruction of the old communities particularly affected the lives of women, sometimes in contradictory ways. Released from the restraints imposed by family scrutiny, women from rural villages, where wearing the veil was rare, adopted the veil voluntarily as a means of hiding themselves from the public eye. Traditional relations between the generations were overturned, and class differences were submerged. The young could adapt to the new ways, but the old were ill-equipped for change and so relinquished much of their former prestige and authority. In addition, rural people for the first time came to know and desire such items as beds and shoes, and interest in comfort and consumption began to replace the frugality that had characterized traditional village life. Toward a Modern Society At independence Algerian society was very different from what it had been at the beginning of the struggle for liberation. War-derived criteria of prestige had entered the social reckoning, and those who had participated actively in the fighting or suffered loss because of it became eligible for special benefits or consideration. The exodus of Europeans in 1962-63, however, left a society composed primarily of illiterate peasants and sizable numbers of urban laborers. It is estimated that less than 1 percent of the 1964 population had belonged to the middle and upper classes during the 1950s. The educated persons remaining in the country were far from sufficiently numerous to staff all the positions in government and industry vacated by the Europeans. During the colonial period the country's most significant social distinctions had been those that separated Europeans from Algerians. The Europeans had covered a range from great industrialists through middle-class businessmen, professionals, and farmers to unskilled industrial workers. The Algerian population had also covered a significant range, from well-to-do business and professional families to landless rural laborers. Distinctions, however, were blurred by the disabilities and discrimination suffered during the war by all Algerians and by the ideological emphasis on the unity of the Algerian people. The removal of the European community permitted the appearance of the rudiments of a modern class system in which probably the most influential group consisted of the French-trained technocrats, civil servants, army officers, and senior functionaries of the National Liberation Front (Front de Liberation Nationale-FLN). The few indigenous industrialists did not have great influence, but the bureaucrats and technocrats who managed the government and its expanding enterprises began to form a conspicuous and highly influential group that was to contribute the upper-echelon personnel for the public administration and the state enterprises of Algeria. Education more than any other single factor became the criterion for membership in the new elite. The Boumediene government was dedicated to the creation of Islamic socialism and held that, because early Islam in Algeria had its own egalitarian tendencies (as seen in the collectivism of the Berbers), no contradiction was involved. The pursuit of socialism since the 1960s, however, has produced its own rich assortment of social contradictions and tensions. The Boumediene government at times was criticized for its state capitalist tendencies because of its single-minded pursuit of industrialization, which led to the emergence of a prosperous and reasonably competent elite. After 1968 Boumediene gradually brought more and more educated young bureaucrats and technocrats into government service until by the late 1970s they formed part of an administrative and managerial elite who staffed the government ministries and planned and operated the state industrial sector. Largely in control of the country, this new social group, nonetheless, shared power with the army and functioned under the supervision of senior political officials. Although the explicit ideology of the government discouraged formation of social classes, this relatively wealthy and powerful elite seemed to represent an important barrier on the road to an egalitarian society. The technocrats and bureaucrats tended to be modernizers influenced by Western ideas. In general, they subscribed to the modernist view of Algerian society, which holds that rational design, as opposed to acceptance of fate or divine will, is desirable, and that material success is acceptable. The modernists believe that all members of society, including women, should participate actively to change the environment to suit the needs of society and its members. In socialist-oriented Algeria the concepts of the nation-state, self-determination, and state planning have come to the fore among members of the elite, and local loyalties and family ties are of lessening importance in comparison with loyalty to such modern organizations as the political party and the labor union. They also believe that the social environment should be conditioned through a planned economy and social security measures. Aside from the bureaucratic and technocratic elite, other broad social categories were discernible in the 1980s. One of these was a middle class consisting of employees of state industrial and service enterprises; small businessmen and shopkeepers; professionals, such as teachers, physicians, and lawyers; and artisans. Except for businessmen, this stratum increased greatly after independence, moving to help fill the void created by the departure of the French and by the demand for services and skilled labor in the postindependence economy. Residing mostly in the cities and larger towns, the middle class was by Algerian standards relatively well-off. An urbanized working class had similarly come into being over the last few decades, finding employment, for example, in state and private industries, construction, public works, and transportation. As with the urban middle class, this group grew constantly in size after 1962 as a normal consequence of economic expansion. Another sizable group also found in the cities was composed of the unemployed. A substantial portion of them were young males, many being migrants from rural areas who were often forced to settle in squalid housing. Usually monolingual in Arabic, without job skills, and possessing only a primary education, the migrants and the unemployed in general survived on the largess provided by the state welfare system. Finally, there were the rural agricultural workers, including small and medium-sized landowners, landowning and landless peasants, and those who worked on large state farms. Some members of this class benefited from land distribution in the 1970s and early 1980s (see Land Use and Ownership, ch. 3). Others, such as medium-sized landowners who survived land redistribution and the formation of large agricultural enterprises, reportedly were enjoying a measure of prosperity and favored government investment in roads and services in rural areas. In the mid-1980s clear guidelines for behavior and belief did not exist for the millions of Algerians caught between a tradition that no longer commanded their total loyalty and a modernism that did not satisfy their psychological and spiritual needs. This dilemma especially affected the nation's youth. Educated young women were pulled between the lure of study and a career and the demands of their husbands and fathers. Young men were torn between conflicting models of cultural behavior and achievement, between demands for fluency in modern Arabic as well as in French, and between devotion to Islam and the secularism of modernization. Above all loomed the reality of youth unemployment. Staggeringly high and with no real solution in sight, unemployment was a prime factor accounting for the boredom, frustration, and disillusionment that characterized the young generation. Some observers saw in this situation a potential for future unrest and opposition to the government. Another aspect of the psychological dilemma facing Algerians was a problem of cultural identity. Because colonialism so thoroughly altered or destroyed precolonial institutions and values, the country faced the task of recovering and rebuilding its national identity. Both Boumediene and Bendjedid recognized the imperative of this task. Beginning in 1970 an officially sponsored "cultural revolution" was launched to restore historic monuments and to develop the means to communicate cultural themes via radio, television, the press, libraries, and museums. In realms such as economics and politics where the past offered no guidance, new structures were to be devised in keeping with the theory of the 1962 Charter of Tripoli (see Independent Algeria, ch. 1). Other aspects of the cultural revolution included the substitution of Arabic for French and the elimination of foreign teachers and foreign content from the educational establishment-all part of an intentional policy of constructing an Algeria distinctive in personality and proud of its heritage and achievements. Although by 1985 the "cultural revolution" was 15 years old, its achievements were hard to measure beyond the dimensions of language and the classrooms. The program had largely suffered from neglect and lack of funds for projects involving monuments and archaeological sites, museums, the arts, and the publishing industry. A national seminar on the history of the Algerian revolution was successfully organized in 1981, however, and in late 1983 Bendjedid issued a renewed call for serious attention to cultural affairs and to the recovery and recording of Algerian national history. The Individual, the Family, and the Sexes Tradition-oriented life, which in the mid-1980s was still found in much of the countryside, revolved around the family. Family loyalty overrode other obligations to the extent that personal life was stifled by the social life of the family, which was the alpha and the omega of the social system. French colonizers strengthened rather than weakened the position of the family, for by refraining from tampering with it they permitted it to become the Muslim bastion and refuge. A basic social principle affecting both the individual and the family was a kind of opposition between the sexes that made gender one of the most important determinants of social status. Seclusion of women was not universally practiced, but men and women constituted largely separate societies, each with its own values, attitudes, and perceptions of the other. This relationship between the sexes was the source of some tension. The socialist doctrine of equality and the freedom of action experienced by many women during the war conflicted with the traditional practice of the subservience of women. Boumediene's regime, emphasizing a return to orthodox Islam, did not encourage further progress toward feminine emancipation, but the ideologies animating the revolution and the experience of wartime freedom remained with many women. French films and mass publications also spread Western ideas. Women who felt cheated of the greater freedom that independence was to bring continued to press their cause with the Bendjedid government but without notable success. Family and Household Before independence the basic Algerian family unit, particularly in the countryside, was the extended family consisting of grandparents, their married sons and families, unmarried sons, daughters if unmarried or if divorced or widowed with their children, and occasionally other related adults. The senior male member exercised undisputed authority, making the major decisions affecting the family welfare, dividing land and work assignments, and representing it in dealings with outsiders. Spanning two or three generations and numbering perhaps 40 to 50 persons, this patriarchal family was organized on the principle of succession in the male line. Each married couple usually had its own room opening onto the family courtyard and prepared its own meals. Women spent their lives under male authority-first that of their fathers, then of their husbands-and were expected to devote themselves entirely to activities of the home. Children were raised by all members of the group, who passed on to them the concept and value of group solidarity. Members of a single patrilineage lived in one compound and shared the work on the family's common land. The lineage expressed solidarity in the sense of honor shared by its members, in mutual aid, and even in the clinging together of members who had gone to the city to find work. Among Berber groups the honor and wealth of the lineage (consisting of land, flocks, women, and children) were so important that blood revenge was justified in their defense. In recent years, particularly since independence, there has been a trend toward smaller family units consisting only of a man, his wife, and their unmarried children. The tendency has been for separate units to form at the marriage of a young man who could afford to set up a household for himself and his bride or, on the death of the head of an extended family, for male members to break off into separate households. In addition, there has been a developing tendency for wives to leave the household to perform labor seasonally or for a longer period, thus forming a new unit. The trend toward the smaller nuclear family has affected the extended family structure in both urban and rural areas, although it is more pronounced in the former than the latter. A 1975 rural housing survey found the nuclear family unit more prevalent than the extended family by a ratio of 10 to seven. A survey of urban areas two years later found that the nuclear family, not the extended, was the rule, the reverse of the situation in 1962. This change occured gradually in response to such factors as increased urbanization and the development of wage labor. In the mid-1980s smaller families were especially favored by the young and the better-educated, who wished to live in separate quarters, have fewer children, and in general to run their lives independently of the will and supervision of others. Familial ties of loyalty and respect were not in question, although they tended to loosen. Rather, it was a matter of rearranging family relationships with respect to living space and decisionmaking. Marriage was traditionally a family rather than a personal affair and was intended to strengthen already existing families rather than to establish new ones. The mass media have popularized the notion of romantic love, but it has had little influence on marriage arrangements. Because the sexes do not ordinarily mix socially, young men and women have few or no acquaintances among the opposite sex. Parents arrange marriages for their children, finding a mate either through their own contacts or through a professional matchmaker. An Islamic marriage is a civil contract rather than a sacrament. Consequently, the representatives of the bride's interests negotiate a marriage agreement with representatives of the bridegroom. Although the future spouses must, by law, consent to the match, they usually take no part in the arrangements. The contract establishes the terms of the union and outlines appropriate recourse if they are broken. Men and Women In Algeria women are traditionally regarded as weaker than men in mind, body, and spirit. The honor of the family depends largely on the conduct of its women, particularly of sisters and daughters; consequently, women are expected to be decorous, modest, and circumspect. The slightest implication of unavenged impropriety, especially if publicly acknowledged, can irreparably damage the family's honor; female virginity before marriage and fidelity afterward are considered essential to its maintenance. If they discover a transgression, men are traditionally bound to punish the offending woman. Girls are brought up to believe that they are inferior to men and must cater to them, and boys to believe that they are entitled to the care of solicitude of women. The legal marrying age is 21 for men, 18 for women. Upon marriage the bride often goes to the household, village, or neighborhood of the bridegroom's family, where she may be a stranger and where she lives under the critical surveillance of her mother-in-law. A great deal of marital friction centers on the difficult relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. Because a woman begins to gain status in her husband's home when she produces sons, mothers love and favor their boys, often nursing them longer than they do the girls. The relation between mother and son remains warm and intimate, while the father is a more distant figure. Women compensate for the emotional shortcomings in their submerged adult lives through their relations with their sons, who often remain in or near the parents' household. Concern for the purity of women leads to a marked restriction of their activities. Most of their adult lives are spent behind their courtyard walls or visiting other women in similar courtyards. It is considered improper for a woman to be seen by men to whom she is not related, and in many areas women wear a veil in public. Veiling is less common in rural areas than in urban localities. In the countryside women often take part in heavy work, and in the clan-associated village environment women passing on the streets will only allow themselves to be seen by kin. In cities, however, women take little part in economic life, and the anonymity of urban existence ensures that a woman in the street will be seen by strangers. The French colonizers actively opposed veiling because they viewed it as a symbol of the mistreatment of women and of precolonial cultural values, which they sought to undermine. In reaction to French pressure, Algerians stubbornly clung to the practice and after independence actually increased its use. Paradoxically, however, this development also resulted from the increased freedom enjoyed by women. The purpose of the veil was to provide mobile seclusion, and the more frequent entry of women into public situations called for an increased incidence of veiling. Within the confines of the traditional system there was considerable variation in the treatment accorded women. In Arab tribes women could inherit property; in Berber tribes they could not. In Berber society Kabyle women seem to have been the most restricted. Not only could a husband divorce his wife by repudiation, he could also forbid her remarriage. Chaouia women fared much better. They chose their own husbands and sometimes retained the dowry after divorce. In addition, they were all magicians, learning about magical incantations and the composition of various philters from their mothers. Men respected the magical powers of their wives and treated them accordingly. Often fighting beside their men during the war of independence or maintaining the household in their absence, women achieved a new sense of their own identity and a measure of acceptance from men that they had not enjoyed before. As a result, many women hoped that they would be able to participate as full and equal players on the political and social scene of independent Algeria. Unfortunately, such a prospect was not to be, despite the socialism of the new state that implied more equitable treatment of females. The basic program of the revolutionary FLN did not envision the emancipation of women, and in the period since independence the traditionalists in the country and the government have successfully opposed any significant modification of family roles and structure. Women who sought to break down the barriers to their liberation-and these were mostly the young and the educated-had to struggle against a negative mentality that viewed women as second-class citizens whose lives should be controlled by fathers, brothers, husbands, and a network of social ties and obligations. Any change in the customary role of women was viewed as a threat to men and as a challenge to the accepted social order. Feminists received little help from the National Union of Algerian Women (Union Nationale des Femmes Algeriennes), which has failed to champion women's rights, being under the close supervision of the FLN. In spite of this situation, the status of women, especially those who were educated and living in urban areas, improved at least marginally after 1962, primarily because of a gradual increase in female education, broader economic and social developments, and the willingness or necessity of ever larger numbers of women to risk social ostracism for the sake of gainful employment. The gap between officially recognized rights of any kind and actual practice, however, remained wide. Although women were guaranteed the right to vote and to stand for election, in reality they have exercised these rights only to a limited extent. Moreover, by 1985 only one woman had been appointed to ministerial rank in the government. In terms of employment, 7,000 women were registered as wage earners in the mid-1950s. In 1977 a total of 138,234 women, or 6 percent of the active labor force, was engaged in full-time employment. Corresponding figures for the mid-1980s were about 250,000, or 7 percent of the work force-still a very low percentage. Most women were employed in the state sector as teachers, nurses, physicians, and technicians. Few were found in industry except for textiles. Many were widows or divorcees. The 1985-89 development plan called for a near doubling in the number of employed females. Family Code The real battleground over the status and rights of women has been the so-called family code, a set of legal provisions regulating marriage and the family. Debated between those who want family life to be organized along Western secularist lines and those who favor a family structure in conformity with Islamic principles and ethics, the code was proposed, discussed, and shelved at least three times over two decades before adoption into law in 1984. In one instance, in 1981, the code's provisions provoked vehement opposition from female members of the National Popular Assembly and street demonstrations by women in Algiers, both virtually unheard of in Algeria. [See Algerian Women Voting: Courtesy Embassy of Algeria, Washington] Although some of the code's provisions are more liberal than those of the 1981 version, it essentially reflects the influence of Islamic conservatives, having been drafted by legislators "guided by the Quran and the holy tradition of the Prophet," according to Minister of Justice Boualem Baki. The family is "the basic unit of society," at the head of which is the husband to whom the wife owes obedience. A Muslim woman may not marry a non-Muslim; polygyny is permitted under certain conditions (it is actually extremely rare); and females do not inherit property equally with men. A woman cannot be married without her consent, and she may sue for divorce in specified circumstances, including desertion and nonsupport. Custody of children in divorce cases passes to the wife and her family. The right of a man to divorce his wife by three successive declarations to that end is also recognized. The code grants some new legal protection to women, but at least in the area of divorce it will be difficult for them to break with custom in order to benefit from the new laws. Divorce rates have risen steadily since independence, and divorce still comes much easier to men than to women.