On the unconscious anthropology: a social reconsideration of the relation between orientalism and colonialism, exemplified by the algerian ethnographies of Yves Alliaume (1926-1975).

Abstract

In recent decades, several critiques to the model of orientalism proposed by Edward Said have been raised. This paper proposes a reconsideration of the relationship between orientalism and colonialism, taking as an example the ethnographies of the communities of the Algerian Sahara produced by Yves Alliaume in the central decades of the twentieth century. To this end, this work will focus on the notion of the 'Berber' and the status of Islam among local populations to show how the characterization of Algerian society in the colonial period was not based on clearly defined cultural distinctions, but was articulated to a large extent through social considerations. From all this emerges a dimension of North African anthropology that is rarely noticed today, but which was already pointed out at the time by Franz Fanon and which appears recurrently in Yves Alliaume's texts. This social reconsideration can serve to recompose the notion of orientalism within the Foucauldian notion of discourse that inspired it, as well as to explore the complex relationship between orientalism and the practice of coloniality.