Colonial rule and cultural sabir

Abstract

The French policy of ‘resettlement’ of Algerian peasants, designed to undercut popular support for the nationalist war of liberation (1954-62), led to the displacement of one-fourth of the indigenous population of Algeria in 1960. By disciplining space and rigidly reorganizing the life of the fellahin under the sign of the uniform, the French military hoped to tame a people, but it only completed what early colonial policy and the generalization of monetary exchanges had started: the ‘depeasantization’ of agrarian communities stripped of the social and cultural means to make sense of their present and get hold of their future. The devolution of the traditional way of life fostered by forced resettlement was redoubled by urbanization, which caused irreversible transformations in economic attitudes at the same time as it accelerated the contagion of needs, plunging the uprooted individuals into a ‘traditionalism of despair’ suited to daily survival in conditions of extreme uncertainty. War thus accomplished the latent intention of colonial policy, which is to disintegrate the indigenous social order in order to subordinate it, whether it be under the banner of segregation or assimilation. But imperial domination also produces a new type of subject containing within himself or herself the contradictions born of the clash of civilizations: the patterns of behavior and economic ethos imported by colonization coexist inside of the exiled Algerian peasant with those inherited from ancestral tradition, fostering antinomic conducts, expectations, and aspirations. This double-sidedness of objective and subjective reality threatened to undermine the efforts to socialize agriculture after independence, as the logic of decolonization inclined the educated petty bourgeoisie of bureaucrats to magically deny the contradictions of reality as shameful ghosts of a dead colonial past rather than strive to overcome them through an educative and political action guided by an adequate knowledge of the real condition of the peasantry and subproletariat of the emerging Algerian nation.