An Empire of Facts
An Empire of Facts
$45.00
USDAn 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.
- Draws on French and Arabic sources to shed new light on the centrality of the colonial encounter in Algeria to French debates about Islam and secularism
- A major contribution to the history of colonialism and Islamic studies
- Will appeal to scholars of colonial history, colonial and post-colonial studies, French history, African studies and Islamic studies
Reviews & endorsements
"Trumbull has compiled a remarkable study of knowledge and power in the premier French colony in Africa, examining Algeria, Algerians, and the practice of Islam through ethnographies composed by French professionals and amateurs during the Third Republic." -David Robinson, The Journal of the Interdisciplinary History
"In this dense, elegant, and erudite volume, George R. Trumbull IV provides a history of French 'republican' anthropology in colonial Algeria between 1870 and 1914." -Emmanuelle Saada, The Journal of Modern History
Product details
December 2009Paperback
9780521734349
328 pages
228 × 152 × 15 mm
0.52kg
18 b/w illus. 1 map
Available
Table of Contents
- 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.
