Algerian landing

Abstract

In this fragment of a socioanalytic account of his own social and intellectual formation, the author recounts the motivations, aims, and circumstances of his fieldwork in Algeria during the war of national liberation and the ‘epistemological experiment’ that he embarked upon by simultaneously taking his childhood village as an object of anthropological inquiry. The conditions of his landing in the French colony, the material and emotional parameters of research in the shanty-towns and countryside of a colonial society ravaged by military repression, and the role of delicate ties with informants are recounted, as are the interplay between personal dispositions, intellectual models, and the division and hierarchy between academic disciplines, in an effort to illumine the conversion of political impulses into scientific endeavours. The author’s switch from philosophy to ethnology to sociology emerges as driven by the need to feel useful in the face of harrowing suffering and injustice and rooted in a deep repugnance for the scholastic posture made all the more intolerable in a state of social emergency. The quandaries presented by conducting fieldwork in a situation of war are revealed to be the initial impetus for his abiding concern for epistemic reflexivity. Such ethnography of ethnography can enable the researcher to recover the hidden social and personal springs of her investigations and thereby help convert intuition bred by social familiarity from intellectual handicap to scientific capital.