From the mountain sanctuary to the nation

Abstract

Reflecting on a long itinerary of research in the Aurès begun in the 1970s, and the significance today of the ‘high’-cultural model of nationalism advanced by Ernest Gellner (which drew on Weberian sociology in principle and the example of Algeria empirically), this article considers the historical roots and the long-term consequences of the incorporation, via the Islamic reformist (islah) movement of Abdelhamid Ben Badis and his followers, of local cultural producers and local social spaces into an Algerian nation-state politically defined by the hegemony of the National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale (FLN)). Close examination of local and familial strategies for the accumulation and reinvestment of spiritual capital reveals both the local importance, beginning in the 1930s, of linkages to the emerging national sphere and the absence, at a national level, of competition for religious and cultural legitimacy that would contest the imposition of a uniform, hegemonic vision of national community. The reformist movement itself would suffer from the monopolisation of control after independence by the FLN party-state. While the limitations of this model, and the artificial consensus it created, were subsequently revealed in the obstacles to a critical intellectual life and the more radical disaffection of younger generations, it seems that there were few or no other ways, in the 1930s–50s, to articulate local society and national aspirations effectively.