ABSTRACT
I will take as my starting point an apparently minor event-the declaration (in November 2000) of ineligibility of final-year licence (Bachelor’s degree) dissertations in local history and anthropology in the Department of Berber Language and Culture at the University of Tizi Ouzou, an institution created only in 1991 and whose own history is one of a long and difficult struggle for existence. This administrative measure, which sparked a student strike, offers a point of entry for reflection on an enduring cultural fact of contemporary Algeria: the deep-seated refusal to recognise as legitimate (indeed, the de facto prohibition of) any consideration of, and research on, the local, the particular, the ‘singular’. The Tizi Ouzou strike did not attain its objective. It lasted for several weeks and further destabilised an already fragile academic department; in so doing, it revealed itself as only one symptom among many of the country’s malaise in 2001, a malaise which was not specifically ‘Kabyle’ but properly national. It was a preliminary sign of the violent and-in every sense of the word —costly troubles that shook the country in the spring and summer of that year and which persisted into 2002, evidenced in particular by Kabylia’s boycott of the legislative elections in June.
