Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0008/00085.txt

Text File | 1991-06-24 | 35KB | 564 lines

$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.

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