Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Glossary
- Acronyms & Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Massinissah's Children
- 2 The Republic of Martyrs
- 3 Shifting Centres
- 4 The Theft of History
- 5 The Centres of the World
- 6 Speaking in the Name of the Village
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Tables & Figures
- Appendix 2 Texts
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - The Centres of the World
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Glossary
- Acronyms & Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Massinissah's Children
- 2 The Republic of Martyrs
- 3 Shifting Centres
- 4 The Theft of History
- 5 The Centres of the World
- 6 Speaking in the Name of the Village
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Tables & Figures
- Appendix 2 Texts
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality. Concepts like ‘nation’, ‘society’, and ‘culture’ name bits and threaten to turn names into things. Only by understanding these terms as bundles of relationships, and by placing them back into the field from which they were abstracted, can we hope to avoid misleading interferences and increase our share of understanding.
(Wolf 1982: 3)One of the reasons it took me so long to find my way around the village was the simple fact that at the beginning I was not left to spend much time there. Arezqi, who had carefully prepared my arrival, had set up trips to various neighbouring villages and towns, where he had fixed appointments with all the experts on Berber matters he could possibly summon. Most of these ‘experts’ resided in the towns in the valley. To arrange the appointments, Arezqi had activated a large part of his innumerable and very extensive networks, ranging from those established through shared political commitments and work to those based on kinship – which might, in any case, be partly identical. My lack of interest in these ‘experts’, whose names I could not remember and whose function I did not understand, did not seem to bother him in the slightest; nor did the fact that I never actually had the occasion to talk to any of them, as if the physical meeting in itself carried all the significance (which it did, as I realised later).
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- Chapter
- Information
- Village MattersKnowledge, Politics and Community in Kabylia, Algeria, pp. 97 - 121Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009