ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the construction of ethnic and religious subjectivities in post-colonial France and North Africa. It explains that the desire and efforts to construct binary oppositions between Mosque and State have been ambivalent and have led to unintended consequences. The chapter demonstrates that, rather than being erased in the social reproduction of the French and North African nations, alternate categories of ethnic and religious belonging are continually mobilised by a variety of groups for the engendering of social totalities and hierarchies constituted largely through bodily practice. It focuses on how these dynamics are played out in the construction of a transnational Berber (Amazigh) polity across the Mediterranean. The appropriation or privatisation of public sports spaces involves the demarcation of categories of belonging and local identity. As much a tool of national integration within the metropole, sports practice was instrumentalised as part of a larger 'civilising mission' within the French colonial periphery.
