Fanny Colonna

"He had a very long life, more than a hundred years, and the memory he left in the north of the massif is a measure of this longevity."

"I think he wasn't unique and that over the years, we'll find lots of Baptistes in various regions of the country."

"This local social history remains to be done, and that's kind of the point of this book."

"Baptiste introduced milling to the Aurès, he built mills, he discovered an archaeological cave that bears his name."

"His memory survives in the north of the massif but hardly any further."

"I worked for twenty years in this region, mainly in the south, without ever hearing a local mountaineer spontaneously talk to me about him."

"Those who knew him, in the north, are now between 70 and 80 years old, so I was ultimately lucky and also helped by young colleagues to find their traces."

"I am not talking here about the researchers, to the extreme modesty, the simplicity of the character, his self-effacing end."

"There is also talk of his son, Chérif, of whom we do not know for sure whether his mother is Chaouia or Italian."

"His mother was indeed Chaouia but he does not have the same aura because his life was rather deviant with regard to local values (woman-lover and probably not very sober, unlike his father)."

"He lived there for 70 years and people speak of him with amused indulgence, which says a lot about the tolerance of a society that is considered closed and rigid."

"The Aurès is not at all what one imagines from the outside!"

"They must have met in the mountains by chance perhaps, the first time, both searching for treasure, a sport common in the massif, for which one needs strong legs, imagination and physical courage."

"Twenty years of age separated them and neither seems to have found any treasure."

"I think it was a beautiful and unexpected meeting, between two men fairly free from prejudice and capable of physical and moral prowess."

"He was already very old. So his support was, according to what I was told, clandestine."

"With this book, somewhere between a portrait and a novel, you depart somewhat from the pure sociological approach to which you have accustomed us."

"Each book has its own style of writing, more or less spontaneous, depending on the subject, the sources, and the anticipated readers."

"This one took as long to produce, even longer, given its relative thinness, than exclusively scientific research."

"I have been trying for some time now, for example in Les versets de l'invincibilité (1995), or in Récits de la province égyptienne (2005), to free the actors from the matrix of scientific discourse."

"This last one seems to have broadened my audience, and I very much hope for a co-publication in Algeria.."

"Although roots is not exactly the right term: as a European from Algeria who became Algerian,"

"I don't have roots but attachments, loyalties, and loyalties."

"It is a very special historical destiny, both received but above all chosen."

"The Aurès is the native country of my mother, whose family arrived in Chélia and then Khenchela, around 1875."

"I think that indeed, the Aurès has been for me since 1973."

"I often went to spend holidays with my grandmother and my father also loved this region very much."

"I had the places, the toponyms, the people also in memory and in my imagination."

"I began to work there, the local bibliography in French and English was of the order of a tenth of that on Kabylie and the delay is very far from being filled, while there is little work in Arabic elsewhere."

"I would add that the geography as well as the material manifestations of the culture are especially beautiful, and that many of my anthropologist colleagues envied me this choice, which was barely one."

"It's first and foremost a European name that resonates in the heights of the Aurès massif."

"A miller of Italian origin who, having lived in the region, knows the massif better than anyone."

"If we hadn't known, we would never have guessed that he wasn't from around here."

"I felt as though I knew nothing and was entirely self-taught when I began working on the subject."

"I had grown up in a village, Meskiana, and that rural life had deeply shaped me."

"My father wanted me to learn Arabic, so I attended a Qur’anic school for a while during the holidays, before entering high school."

"I saw how children were taught to think."

"I experienced in my own body what the kuttāb was: the cross legged posture, the role of speech and recitation, the swaying of bodies, the love for the calligraphy of letters on the clay coated tablet."

"My article on repetition (Colonna, 1980b) is precisely an analysis of these techniques used to shape thought."

"I loved the kuttāb; I no longer have my childhood lawḥ (tablet), but I bought one for a dinar during my first fieldwork in the Aurès it appears as a frontispiece in Les Versets."

"I attended the reformist Médersa in my village, and there I clearly saw the difference with the Qur’anic school"

"The teacher’s straight trousers and white shirt, the bench and blackboard, the students seated in rows, the discipline of bodies."

"Both types of education left a mark on me the two bodily postures as well as the revelation of the gap that existed between them."

"Learned Islam has given rise to so many studies! By contrast, the anthropology of Islam as the daily practice of its actors has attracted almost no interest."

"What fascinated me at the outset of this research was that there were no detailed studies of ordinary religious practice."

"For a long time, the social sciences gave an image of the Maghreb as a society Islamized without Islam."

"Despite the production, from the end of the first third of the 19th century, of works on religion, the authors seemed to oscillate mainly between two interpretations of North African societies."

"Religion was omnipresent, or it played no role at all in social construction."

"In the important works of Basset (1961) or Laoust (1920), for example, there is no section on religion."

"Gellner did indeed show that the "saints," that is, the religious lineages, had a dual function."

"Serving as arbiters among the "secular," acephalous tribes, where power is by nature unstable, and as mediators with universal Islam, the city, and the Prince, as descendants of the Prophet and “incarnate Word,” that is, carriers of the uncreated Word of God, the Qur’an."

"As for Masqueray, Montagne, and Maunier prominent names in the early sociology of the Maghreb they belonged to the dominant theoretical tradition of Durkheimian sociology in the nascent social sciences."

"Too honest as observers to deny the importance of Islam, they nevertheless produced theoretical constructions that shifted the focus to other elements of social organization (the city, intertribal pacts, customary law)."

"It is indeed with the tālib that one must begin."

"Dedicated to the learning and memorization and recollection of the Qur’an, he had privileged access to the Word."

"He was present at births, and his presence was also required this time in a group to accompany the deceased."

"He acted as an arbiter in cases of marital disputes and family conflicts."

"In the Aurès, he played a decisive role in the summer pilgrimage ritual, in the cult of the minor saints, and in the sacrifice that was then performed."

"His presence legitimized the ceremony, through the role he played in channeling the sacred."

"He therefore held a liturgical function, something that the schoolteacher would never assume thereafter."