Berber Culture on the World Stage: From Village to Video

3. The Mythical Village

3 The Mythical Village To make known the village is to make known the whole society. —Hanoteau and Letourneux, La Kabylie et les coutumes kabyles (Kabylia and Kabyle Customs), 1872–73 One sometimes wonders whether the anthropologist is perhaps the only one who is not involved in this constant movement from and to the village. —Peter Van der Veer, Nation and Migration, 1995 One of the most striking displays at the April 20, 1993 cultural exhibit in Tizi Ouzou was a model of the Kabyle village Taksebt. Placed on a large table in the middle of its own room and made of plaster of paris, the village was perched atop a mountain, the whole structure measuring perhaps a foot-and-a-half high by two-and-a-half feet long and wide. At the mountain’s crest, a smattering of tiny brown houses were situated on several intersecting roads. Along the bottom ,next to a key indicating that the model had been designed on a 1:1000 scale, were the names of the model’s three creators: M. Hamel, M. Hammami, and K. Mouloud. Taped to the walls of the room in which the model sat were some two dozen posters detailing, in French, the village’s synchronic and diachronic histories. Aside from four cardinal directions written on the sides of the model, the mountaintop village sat alone on a bright blue board, utterly removed from its geopolitical surrounds. The Berber village has been “good to think” across three discursive traditions —colonial, anthropological, and activist—for well over a century. It has been exhibited, miniaturized, staged. It has been cast as an originary locus of cultural identity, visited by singers like Idir for inspiration, and made into a backdrop for diaspora performances and videos. Detached from social process, the village has been turned into a ¤gure of culture that bears witness to a collective Berber heritage. In contrast, the contemporary village, when assessed against this romanticized ¤gure, is increasingly critiqued for its loss of traditional lifeways and values. Like a holograph, the village appears to change according to the viewer’s perspective. It can be alternately idealized or disparaged depending on the angle from which it is viewed. At the same time, neither position is possible by itself: Idealization and critique are interdependent. Three locations have been heavily surrounded by a discourse of tradition and loss: the “Berber House,” the men’s assembly or tajma"at, and the wedding. Through an ethnographic account of the ways these sites operate in one Kabyle village whose population is split between Kabylia and Paris, I suggest that the sites have been turned into repositories of tradition precisely because, through them, the ongoing trans-Mediterranean circulation that characterizes the village is potentially the most visible. By conferring on these three sites a mantle of tradition, the destabilizing dialectic between presence and absence that pervades the village can be temporarily arrested and managed. The Holographic Village: From Contemporary Activists to Colonial Agents During the heady post-independence years of the 1960s, preserving village traditions was not a project that most Kabyles could have articulated. To the contrary: As my interlocutors recalled it, during that period they were seeking to “modernize”their lifeways by, for instance,discarding their wooden dishes in favor of new plastic ware, abandoning their pottery water jugs for jerry cans, or replacing handcrafted silver and enamel jewelry with imported, gold-¤lled necklaces, earrings, and pins. Thirty years later, with the revalorization of tradition instantiated in the music of Idir and promoted by the Berber Cultural Movement, a language of preservation had come to seem natural. Young Kabyle activists regularly mined their own villages and homes in search of old pottery, tools, and clothing to display at the cultural exhibits that were beginning to take place across the region. Their interest provoked their parents and grandparents to look at old artifacts with new eyes. I vividly recall one gnarled older woman showing me with pride a number of jugs and wooden dishes—labeled and carefully stored in her basement—that she had lent to the cultural association in her village for display. Nor were artifacts the only things being revalorized.In a 1992 exhibit that I visited in Algiers, Kabyles turned themselves into signs of culture, reenacting such traditional practices as weaving or churning butter in a living diorama of village life. Similarly, in a 1994 concert by new Kabyle singer Lounis Aït Menguellet in Paris, the stage itself was laid out...