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Algeria
STRUCTURE OF SOCIETY
As is true of other peoples of the Maghrib, Algerian society
has considerable historical depth and has been subjected to a
number of external influences and migrations. Fundamentally Berber
in cultural and racial terms, the society was organized around
extended family, clan, and tribe and was adapted to a rural rather
than an urban setting before the arrival of the Arabs and, later,
the French. An identifiable modern class structure began to materialize
during the colonial period. This structure has undergone further
differentiation in the period since independence, despite the
country's commitment to egalitarian ideals.
Preindependence Society
During the Ottoman period, before the coming of the French in
1830, the people were divided among a few ancient cities and a
sparsely settled countryside where subsistence farmers and nomadic
herdsmen lived in small, ethnically homogeneous groups. Rural
patterns of social organization had many common features, although
some differences existed between Arabs and Berbers and between
nomads and settled cultivators. The groups did not form a cohesive
social class because individual behavior and action were circumscribed
by the framework of tribe or clan.
In this period, 5 to 6 percent of the population lived in cities.
The cities were the location of the principal mosques and the
major sharia (Islamic law) courts and institutions of higher Islamic
learning. Various Islamic legal schools, such as the Hanafi
(see Glossary) and Maliki
(see Glossary) as well as the Ibadi schools, also had their mosques
in the cities. In addition, cities had public baths and markets,
where goods coming from various parts of the world were traded.
Local military forces were housed in citadels that towered over
urban centers, and the houses and administrative offices of the
Ottoman ruling elite were also located in some of the principal
cities, such as Algiers.
The cities were divided into quarters that were self- contained
and self-sufficient. For security they could be closed off at
night and during times of crises, and their own leading citizens
managed the internal affairs of the quarters.
The heterogeneous population of the cities included men of mixed
Turkish and Algerian descent called Kouloughli Moors, a term coined
by the French to refer to descendants of Andalusian refugees;
Christian slaves from around the Mediterranean captured by Barbary
Coast pirates; and African slaves who worked as laborers and domestics.
The cities also had small Jewish communities that would become
more important under the French colonial system. Many cities had
small groups of Mzab who owned grocery and butcher shops and operated
the public baths, and Kabyles who came briefly to the cities before
returning to their areas of origin.
In the rural areas, social organization depended primarily on
kinship ties. The basic kinship unit was the ayla, a
small lineage whose members claimed descent through males from
a common grandfather or great-grandfather. The male members of
such a group maintained mutual economic obligations and recognized
a form of collective ownership of pastoral or agricultural lands.
Several ayla formed the larger lineage, whose members
traced their origin to a more remote male ancestor. Beyond these
lineages were the patrilineal clans called adhrum by
the Kabyles and firq by the Arabs, in which kinship was
assumed and the links between individuals and families were close.
The largest units consisted of tribes that were aggregations of
clans claiming common or related ancestors or of clans brought
together by the force of circumstance. Sharing a common territory,
name, and way of life, member units of a tribe, particularly among
the Berbers, had little political cohesion and tended to accept
the authority of a chief only when faced with the danger of alien
conquest or subjugation. Tribal confederations were rare in the
modern era but were more common before the nineteenth century.
Among settled and nomadic Arab groups, tribes and their components
were arranged along a gradient of social prestige. The standing
of an individual depended on membership in a ranked group; tribal
rank depended on the standing of the highest ranking lineage of
each tribe. The shurfa (nobles allegedly descended from
the Prophet Muhammad) and marabouts, venerated for their spiritual
power, held the highest ranks. Affairs of mutual interest to all
clans were administered by the clan heads under the leadership
of a qaid (tribal chief), who exercised nearly absolute
authority.
Settled Berber groups were democratic and egalitarian. The community,
an aggregation of localized clans consisting of a cluster of hamlets
or a village inhabited by a single clan, was governed by a jamaa
composed of all adult males. Social stratification of the kind
found in Arab groups did not exist in Berber villages.
The typical Kabyle villages in the Aurès Mountains and the Atlas
around Blida were always built above cultivated lands, on or close
to mountain tops. They were enclosed by walls with doors that
opened inward. The slopes were often terraced to allow the Kabyles
to cultivate olive and fruit orchards and to grow wheat and barley.
The animals kept by the Kabyles grazed on the vegetation that
grew on rocky slopes unsuitable for agriculture. French rule and
European settlement brought far-reaching social changes. Europeans
took over the economic and political life of the country, monopolizing
professional, large-scale commercial, and administrative activities,
exploiting agricultural and other resources of the land, and remaining
socially aloof. The small Algerian middle stratum of urban merchants
and city artisans was squeezed out, and landowners of the countryside
were dispossessed.
The European population increased rapidly in the nineteenth century,
more than quadrupling from 26,987 in the early 1840s to 125,963
a decade later, and reaching almost 2 million by the turn of the
century. This population growth, coupled with the appropriation
of cultivated and pastoral lands by colonials, which increased
sharply in the early twentieth century, created tremendous pressures
on the cultivable land. Displaced villagers and tribesmen flocked
to towns and cities, where they formed an unskilled labor mass,
ill-adapted to industrial work, scorned by Europeans, and isolated
from the kinship units that had formerly given them security and
a sense of solidarity. This urban movement increased after World
War I and after World War II. At the same time, large numbers
of Algerians migrated to France in search of work. The Kabyles
were the principal migrants; during the 1950s, as many as 10 percent
of the people of Kabylie were working in France at any one time;
even larger numbers were working in cities of the Tell.
Europeans constituted a separate sector of society, and the European-Algerian
dichotomy was the country's basic social division. The settlers
who came to Algeria in the nineteenth century included not only
French but also large numbers of Italians and Spaniards who could
not find work in their home countries and came in search of new
opportunities. The expression pieds noirs (black feet),
used to refer to settlers, was allegedly based on the barefoot
condition of many of the impoverished European settlers.
The top echelon of the country included a few Algerians who had
amassed land and wealth, as well as some respected Arabic scholars
and a few successful professionals. An indigenous landowning aristocracy
of any importance had never existed, however, and French colonials
did not want an Algerian middle class competing with them for
jobs and status. Moreover, the Algerians lived in quarters of
the cities separate from the Europeans and seldom intermarried
with them.
In the early twentieth century, a new Algerian merchant group
began to intermarry with the old upper-stratum families. Their
children were educated in French schools, at home or in France,
to become a new Western-oriented elite composed of lawyers, physicians,
pharmacists, teachers, administrators, and a small scattering
of political leaders. The opportunity for social mobility for
these Westernized Algerians, or évolués, however, remained
extremely limited; on the eve of the revolution, only a scattering
of jobs requiring professional or technical skills were held by
Algerians.
The peasant migrants to the cities tended to gather in separate
quarters according to their ethnic origin, and certain peoples
became associated with specific occupations. But overcrowding
and housing shortages often forced persons of a given tribe or
village to scatter throughout a city, and the solidarity of migrant
groups decreased. Nevertheless, many migrants retained contact
with family members.
Nomadic clans no longer holding sufficient flocks or territory
were obliged to accept the humiliation of sedentary existence.
The process of sedentarization usually started with the settling
of a few nomadic families on the outskirts of a town with which
they had maintained trading relations. Accepted eventually as
part of the community by the original clan inhabitants, the former
nomads often assumed as their own one of the traditional ancestors
or marabouts of the community. Residential propinquity usually
did not, however, overcome the social distance between traditional
cultivators and former herders because each looked down on the
way of life of the other.
Data as of December 1993
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