"Dechiffrer le silence": A Conversation with Germaine Tillion

Introduction

Cermaine Tillion (b. 1907) is unquestionably one of the most significant figures in contemporary French thought. A number of recent works devoted to her exceptional life experience and writings have brought her to the attention of a large public.¹ Emblematic, she is also unclassifiable. As an ethnographer on an international mission to the Aurès region of Algeria from 1934 to 1940, Tillion gathered notes to inspire two later works on Maghrebian societies, notably on the condition of women in the Mediterranean world. Le harem et les cousins² and Il était une fois l'ethnographie constitute the most astute and insightful analyses of this geographical area in print today.

Historical circumstances brought Tillion into direct contact with the major events that marked the twentieth century. Active in the French Resistance from June 1940, she was arrested in 1942 and deported to Ravensbrück. From the moment of her deportation, Tillion devoted herself to learning the concentration camp system, and she began sharing her knowledge of its terrible logic with fellow prisoners as early as 1943. Ravensbrück, the text emerging from this experience, is much more than an examination of the functioning of the concentration camp. This work is an indispensable introduction to approaching and reappropriating modern ("urban") social mindsets.

Following the Second World War, Tillion hoped to engage in a thorough study of deportation and Nazi crimes, but the pressing entreaties of professor Louis Massignon³ compelled her to return to Algeria in 1954, at the outbreak of the war. She remained faithful to herself and reflected on the context of her surroundings before making an effort to improve things by attacking the very source of the problems she observed: the severe impoverishment of the rural populations as they moved to the city. Her writings on this phenomenon she termed "clochardisation" are crucial to an understanding of this pivotal period in the history of Algeria (see L'Afrique bascule vers l'avenir).

Since she is an intellectual in close touch with the complexities of social realities, Germaine Tillion has often been a misunderstood and even controversial figure. But her growing renown in her native France and abroad bears witness to the pertinence of her critical perspectives and the precision of her historical analyses. She presently holds the position of honorary Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

Saliha Abdellatif

Anthropologist and former student of Germaine Tillion

( trans. by Alison Rice )

The following interview with Germaine Tillion was conducted by Alison Rice (University of California, Los Angeles) on 22 November 2002 in Saint-Mandé, France.

Women: "La femme exerce un pouvoir à travers son fils"

AR: I would like to begin with a subject that plays a significant role in current debates, given its location at the intersection of questions about Islam and its practice, Muslim women and their position in the family and in society. This topic is also central—in your analysis in Le harem et les cousins, for example—to the phenomenon of urbanization in Algeria during the twentieth century. I'm referring to the veil, an important symbol because of its multiple meanings and because of the misunderstandings that have emerged in Western countries with respect to it. In your work, you disengage this symbolic object from its religious connotations and focus on it as a social and historical phenomenon. Could you tell us how and why the donning of the veil accompanied the movement of the women from the Aurès mountainous ranges to the city in Algeria?

GT: When I was first in Algeria, between 1934 and 1940, there were women from the country who never wore the veil. In the country, no man who was not a cousin was allowed to set foot on the family territory. Unveiled women were allowed to come into contact with male cousins, but as soon as they ran the...