PDF hosted at the Radboud Repository of the Radboud University Nijmegen The following full text is a publisher's version. For additional information about this publication click this link. http://hdl.handle.net/2066/113330 Please be advised that this information was generated on 2018-07-08 and may be subject to change. зу' WILLY JANSEN WOMENI \Г ч •ν) V(7 \] \S¿) ¿ ь ШШJ LEIDEN - E.J. BRILL WOMEN WITHOUT MEN WOMEN WITHOUT MEN GENDER AND MARGINALITY IN AN ALGERIAN TOWN PROEFSCHRIFT TER VERKRIJGING VAN DE GRAAD VAN DOCTOR IN DE SOCIALE WETENSCHAPPEN AAN DE KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT TE NIJMEGEN OP GEZAG VAN DE RECTOR MAGNIFICUS PROF DR В M F VAN IERSEL VOLGENS BESLUIT VAN HET COLLEGE VAN DECANEN IN HET OPENBAAR TE VERDEDIGEN OP DONDERDAG 29 JANUARI 1987 DES NAMIDDAGS TE 3 Э0 UUR DOOR WILHELMINA HELENA MARIA JANSEN geboren te Bemmel LEIDEN E.J. BRILL 1987 Promotores: Prof. Dr A. BLOK; Prof. Dr J. R. T. M. PETERS For our daughters Amina and Miriam TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES, FIGURES AND MAPS ix ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xi PREFACE xiii The fieldwork xv I THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS 1 Women without men as socially marginal 1 Economic adjustment 7 Women without men as culturally marginal 9 II MAIMUNA. 17 Housing conditions 28 The growth of the town 24 External influences 29 Earning a living 34 III CULTURAL MEDIATORS 43 The mistress of the baths 43 Back-scrubbers 45 Bathing and purification 49 Purity and gender 56 Conclusion 59 IV BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH 62 Washers of the dead 62 Power over the fate of the soul 68 Death and gender 72 V RELIGIOUS AGENTS 79 Servants of the saints 79 The decline of the sisters of the brotherhood. 82 Religion and gender 86 Penance by trance 91 Trance and gender 95 viii Table of contents VI WORKING MAGIC 105 Specialists in sorcery 105 Love with a few hairs Ill Who is the real sorcerer? 120 VII ASSISTANTS IN FERTILITY AND BIRTH 131 Custodians of virginity 131 Guards of the bridal room 135 Advisers on fertility 141 Women who cut umbilical cords 151 From heavenly wages to hard money 155 VIII DISTURBERS OF THE SEXUAL ORDER 160 Courtesans and prostitutes 160 Free love versus conjugal fidelity 165 The proxemics of prostitution 175 Musicians 190 Songs about women without men 196 IX BETWEEN DOMESTIC AND PUBLIC WORK 200 Maids and foster daughters 200 Casual domestic workers 207 Peddlers 211 X GOING PUBLIC 223 Service workers 223 Careerwomen 229 Politicians 232 Daughters of widows 238 Changes in women ' s work 241 XI CONCLUSION 244 NOTES 250 APPENDIX, TABLES 265 GLOSSARY 272 BIBLIOGRAPHY 275 SAMENVATTING 295 CURRICULUM VITAE 301 Table of contents ix TABLES, FIGURES AND MAPS Tables A. Employed residents by economic activity and socio-professional category 266 B. Employed residents by economic activity and sex 267 C. Employed women by sector 267 D. Employed population in Algeria by sex and qualification 268 E. Employed women by age cohort and professional category 269 F. Distribution of income 270 G. Girls in school in Algeria 271 Figures and maps 1. Map of Algeria xviii 2. Map of Maimuna 16 3. Population growth 22 4. Posing on a threshold facing page 182 5. Women in a masculine posture facing page 182 6 . Street in Biskra ± 1900 facing page 183 7. Street in Algiers ± 1900 facing page 183 8. Marital status according to age in Algeria 265 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank the Algerians who helped me for their hospitality, sympathy, humour, and willingness to tell me about their lives. I am especially indebted to my three friends who offered me a home, and who shared their warmth, their time, their joys and their sufferings with me. I truly enjoyed living with them. I am very grateful to Mahfoud Bennoune for his faith in me and for his support at times when the obstacles seemed unsurmountable. Dorothy Bennoune lent me her home and her ear whenever I needed them. Ahmed Ben-Naoum offered help which would have been gladly accepted under other circum­ stances. I have a long-standing debt to Kees Jansen, my father, and to Tugrul liter and Rod Aya for their encouragement at critical moments in my intellectual life. My partner in life skillfully combined involvement with a proper distance. I am thankful to William Christian, who with great skill and speed corrected errors in grammar and style. Students, colleagues and friends have contributed in various ways to the ideas developed here. I appre­ ciate their encouragement, suggestions and help. Finally, thanks are due to Ria de Vos for co-mother­ ing, Marijke Ristivojcevic-Lefering and Lutgard Simons-Roeien for typing the manuscript on a word- processor, André Kalden for drawing the maps and L.W. Bonbrake for showing that writing a thesis can be fun. The following institutions provided research facilities: the Institute of Cultural and Social Anthropology in Nijmegen; the Institut National d'Etude et d'Analyses pour la Planifica­ tion; the Centre de Recherches en Economie Appli­ quée; the Institut des Techniques de Planification et d'Economie Appliquée; and the Centre de Recherches Anthropologiques, Préhistoriques et Eth­ nographiques in Algiers and the Centre de Recherches et d'Etudes sur les Sociétés Méditerranéennes and the Section d'Outre-Mer des Archives Nationales de France, both in Aix-en-Provence, France. PREFACE One early morning in the summer of 1976, Warda calls for me. A few minutes after six we leave the small oasis in Algeria's eastern sand desert to walk the two kilometers to the municipal centre. There will be an instruction session for the heads of the female polling-committees, for the National Charter will be put to the vote. Warda represents her village. She is an illiterate, old peasant woman, married to a man who is mentally handi­ capped. She lives with her eldest son and his family. Warda is a forceful character. For the last seven years she has been a member of the FLN, Algeria's only political party. At the request of the party-cell leader of her village she became the representative for the national women's organ­ ization (UNFA), and for the last few years she has been a member of the municipal council. Yet she is dissatisfied with her political influence. In the council the men will not listen to her, she says, because "men don't like it if women want freedom. They don't like the truth here and I like the truth." She also complains about the village women who do not want to talk with her about socialism and politics. "They only ask what they will get in return." Yet, she has managed to win the confi­ dence of a number of women because of her other skills: she is well known as a midwife and as attendant to the dying. Fatima, another woman at the meeting, has a simi­ lar story. She is a sturdy, illiterate, unveiled woman in her fifties. Since her husband divorced her and her married sons moved away, she lives alone, which is exceptional for a woman in Algeria. Like Warda, Fatima has been a longtime member and representative of the party and the women's organization. She was Warda s predecessor on the municipal council, and thinks that she was turned out because she was too troublesome. The male members of the council say that she was a lesbian but was redeemed by her pilgrimage to Mecca. She has quarrelled with the local party- boss because he refuses to hire a girl to write and read for the women. Fatima has another running dispute with the municipal secretary because he xiv Preface forced the poor to pay for the whitewashing of their houses when the President paid a visit to the region. Fatima protested and refused to pay. At this meeting she starts another dispute, now with Warda, about the futility of working any longer for the FLN or the UNFA. She says the vil­ lage women are right not to join the party or the women's organization. She has worked for years for the party and has never seen anything in return. I met Warda and Fatima while preparing my master thesis in a small Algerian oasis. Their personalities and the matter-of-course way in which they went about doing things Algerian women normally are not supposed to do fascinated me. They moved freely through public space, they went unveiled, they were politically active, they talked to (and even argued with) men who were not their relatives in meeting halls and they earned money. They seemed less hampered by the fact that they were women than one would expect in a society where strict sexual segregation and seclusion and veiling of women are still the dominant norms. I decided then that in my next study I would focus on all those women who do not fit in neatly with the standard picture of Algerian women as demure, secluded, veiled, and powerless victims of men. This thesis is the final result of that decision. It describes the lives of women like Warda and Fatima; only they do not live in a small oasis but in a large, rap­ idly developing town. These women described here all differ from gender norms. Concomitantly, they all occupy a marginal position in the family structure and kinship relations: they are widowed, divorced, or orphaned. They are women without men. Also included are those women who are virtually in the same position because their husband or father is ill, absent or incapacitated. The biographies and other material for this study were gathered from June 1981 to June 1982 in Maimuna, a large town in northern Algeria.