Community, the Local, and the State: The Question of Recognition. A Monograph of the Municipalities of Oum El Adhaim (Djelfa) and Ramka (Relizane)

This project is based on the presentation given at the Sixth Congress of the Arab Council for Social Sciences (2023) on constructing a critical theoretical approach to study how social sciences have conceptualized the local in post-independence Algeria. The project draws on accumulated knowledge developed over more than three decades at the Center for Research in Social and Cultural Anthropology in Oran, as well as outcomes from scientific conferences addressing the future of social sciences in the Arab world, public spaces, social protests, and the relationship between groups and society after 2011, in addition to readings from the journal Insaniyat, which published 99 thematic issues by the end of 2022.

The project focuses on examining knowledge produced about the local in a critical way, contrasting it with the central/totalizing perspective, and discussing difference and its recognition in prior social studies. The study also relies on unpublished fieldwork on the relationship between communal and societal situations in Ghardaïa (2009-2016) and lessons from anthropological investigations conducted with local actors during periods of stability and community conflicts.

Previous studies show that knowledge produced on topics such as the national community, youth, school, family, protest movements, kinship systems, national memory, religious references, and mosques often conflicts with indicators from the local context, especially regarding memory, territory, kinship systems, and legitimacy conflicts. Recurrent conflicts in certain regions are not merely circumstantial but show structural elements related to memory, territory, and kinship, with new generational dynamics emerging.

The project emphasizes that a critical approach to the local is necessary to expand the construction of social knowledge, liberate it from “state-centered thinking,” and renew the knowledge of previous generations. It highlights that the weak presence of critical local perspectives in post-independence social studies is linked to the influence of the developmental and ideological paradigm of the 1970s-1980s and the centralizing influence of universities and state discourse, which marginalized recognition of difference and excluded the everyday life of ordinary people from analysis.

Monographic studies of the municipalities of Ouled Djellal (Djelfa) and Ramka (Relizane) show that poverty, geographic isolation, low educational levels, and lack of educational and social resources directly affect school achievement and quality of life, especially in disadvantaged rural areas. They also show that centralized policies often address these disparities in a circumstantial or administrative manner, without considering local specificities.

The project aims to produce qualitative data that allow a reinterpretation of classical works in Maghrebine anthropology, focusing on insufficiently explored topics such as cultural reproduction in local contexts and understanding material and cultural symbolic systems and their norms, independently of central indicators.