Berber Government: The Kabyle Polity in Pre-colonial Algeria (Library of Middle East History)

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The Berber identity movement in North Africa used to be pioneered by the Kabyles of Algeria. But a preoccupation with identity and language has obscured the truth that Kabyle dissidence has been rooted in democratic aspirations inspired by the political traditions of Kabylia itself, a Berber-speaking region within the north of Algeria. The political organisation of pre-colonial Kabylia, from which these traditions originate, used to be well described by nineteenth-century French authors. But their inability to provide an explanation for it encouraged later theorists of Berber society, such as Ernest Gellner and Pierre Bourdieu, to dismiss Kabylia’s political institutions, notably the jema‘a (assembly or council), and to scale back Berber politics to a function of social structure and shared religion. In Berber Government, Hugh Roberts, a renowned expert on North Africa, explores the remarkable logics of Kabyle political organisation and the extraordinary degree of autonomy it possessed in terms of both kinship divisions and the religious field. This book further offers a pioneering account of the social and political history of Kabylia all the way through the Ottoman period and establishes a radically new solution to consider the complex place of the Kabyles in Algerian politics.

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