The odyssey of reappropriation

Abstract

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE i A prolific writer, playwright, poet, linguist, and anthropologist of his native Kabylia and of the range of Berber-speaking populations, Mouloud Mammeri was born in 1917, the son of the mayor of his mountain village and a traditional poetic bard (anusnaw). He was schooled in Algiers, Rabat, and Paris, where he graduated in literature from the Sorbonne in 1938. After fighting in World War II, he taught French in the interior of Algeria, published his first essays on Kabyle culture and the colonial question, and earned a growing reputation as a novelist, especially due to his trilogy of 'ethnographic novels', La Colline oubliee (1952), Le Sommeil du juste (1955), and L'Opium et le bâton (1965). He spent the war of national liberation in forced exile in Morocco before coming back to Algiers in 1962, where he became president of the Union of Algerian Writers and a professor of Berber language and North-African ethnology at the University of Algiers. He directed its Center for Anthropological, Prehistorical, and Ethnographic Research from 1969 until 1982, fostering the 'Algerianization' of social research and the development of field studies covering the gamut of regions and ethnicities of Algeria, with a strong focus on Berber oral cultures and interdisciplinary cooperation, despite the growing hostility of the authorities towards anthropological research. In 1985 he founded the Center for the Study of Amazigh Culture (CERAM) and its journal Awal ('the word') in Paris, which Pierre Bourdieu helped baptize with a joint article entitled 'On the Proper Uses of Ethnology' (Bourdieu and Mammeri, 1985). Mammeri is the author of numerous books on Berber language and grammar, poetry, ethnography, and literature, and he was a leading exponent of Kabyle resistance to the forced 'arabization' of his people by