The Ethnographic Novel and Ethnography in Colonial Algeria

Abstract

c 2003 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2003/10004-0004$10.00 How can an awareness of social changes be captured in novels, while remaining invisible in the works of other observers such as sociologists and anthropologists? Abdelwahhab Khatibi described Algerian novels published between the end of the Second World War and the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954 as “ethnographic novels.” He writes, “[These novels] arise out of an objective situation dominated by the problems of everyday life. . . . In this sense alone the novel is witness to its era; in a period of oppression and in the absence of an independent national press, it can play the role of informant ( informateur ).” 1 In this paper, we consider this “informant,” the Algerian ethnographic novel between 1945 and 1954. These novels sometimes represent an awareness of change in Muslim society, even if the nature of such change is not completely spelled out. We will examine how such representations differed and where their limits lay through a comparison of the Algerian Muslim novel to colonial ethnography. The colonial Algerian case is particularly interesting in that it was the early fieldwork site for an exceptional ethnographer and towering social theorist, the late Pierre Bourdieu. We will find that the realist “ethnographic” novel form is incommensurable with the kind of ethnography carried out by Bourdieu; but as novels moved away from the unified narrator and toward narrative ambiguity, they represented new “structures of feeling” 2 that went uncaptured even by Bourdieu’s sophisticated ethnography.