I used to tell villagers during my stay that I very much liked being there, and that I thought Ighil Oumsed very beautiful, and its people very welcoming, nice and interesting. This, though true, became a running joke. Women especially, when introducing me to their relatives and friends, would never fail to make me repeat these judgements, which never failed to get an incredulous laugh back. People felt flattered at my observation, as they generally did at my ‘scientific’ interest in their village, but they never quite believed that I was not just being polite, seeing that I had quite clearly come from the one place – Europe – where everybody wanted to go. Village girls, in particular, liked to stress that people might be nice to me now while I was still a foreigner, but that I should just wait a bit until I became truly Kabyle and lost the prestige attached to me (and my considerable naivety): then I would see how ‘nice’ people really were…