An Empire of Facts

Colonial Power, Cultural Knowledge, and Islam in Algeria, 1870-1914

Inbunden, Engelska, 2009

AvGeorge R. Trumbull IV,New Hampshire) Trumbull IV, George R. (Dartmouth College,IV Trumbull, George R.

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An Empire of Facts presents a fascinating account of the formation of French conceptions of Islam in France's largest and most important colony. During the period from 1870 to 1914, travelers, bureaucrats, scholars, and writers formed influential and long-lasting misconceptions about Islam that determined the imperial cultural politics of Algeria and its interactions with republican France. Narratives of Islamic mysticism, rituals, gender relations, and sensational crimes brought unfamiliar cultural forms and practices to popular attention in France, but also constructed Algerian Muslims as objects for colonial intervention. Personal lives and interactions between Algerian and French men and women inflected these texts, determining their style, content, and consequences. Drawing on sources in Arabic and French, this book places such personal moments at the heart of the production of colonial knowledge, emphasizing the indeterminacy of ethnography, and its political context in the unfolding of France's empire and its relations with Muslim North Africa.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2009-11-19
Mått156 x 234 x 19 mm
Vikt640 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieCritical Perspectives on Empire
Antal sidor328
FörlagCambridge University Press
ISBN9780521516549

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Introduction: 'Sa Vie Etrange Autour de Nous'; 1. Writing like a state: the question of anthropology and the colonial origins of politicized ethnography; 2. The lies that empire tells itself when times are easy; 3. 'Au Coin des Rues Diderot et Moïse': the ethnography of the esoteric and the politics of religious sociability; 4. 'Les Mauvais Génies Dans Tous les Contes de Fées': the ethnography of popular religion and the fashioning of Algerian primitivism; 5. 'Have You Need of a Model, He Will Furnish One on Command': the gendering of morality and the production of difference in colonial ethnography; 6. Discipline and publish: militant ethnography and crimes against culture; Conclusion.

'A richly rewarding analysis that demonstrates convincingly how constructions of cultural knowledge about late nineteenth century Algeria by colonial anthropologists, explorers, and aspirant writers stigmatized entire communities as, at once, inherently criminal and desperately in need of civilization through colonization. In his focus on influential, yet amateur ethnographers - figures whose observations and representations of Algerian social practices typically owed more to orientalist literature than to scientific enquiry - George Trumbull compels us to reconsider the connections between the transmission of ethnographic 'knowledge', the politicization of colonial identities, and the consolidation of colonial states. The result is a clinical dissection of why and how French men and women came to think as they did about colonial Algeria, its culture, its religion, and its people.' Martin Thomas, Exeter University and author of Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914