The northern Tuareg (the Tuareg of Algeria) - the nomadic, blue-veiled warlords of the Central Sahara - were finally defeated militarily by the French at the battle of Tit in 1902. Some 60 years later, following Algerian independence in 1962, they were visited by a young English anthropologist, Jeremy Keenan. During the course of seven years, Keenan studied their way of life, the social, political and economic changes that had taken place in their society since traditional, pre-colonial times, and their resistance and adaptation to the modernising forces of the new Algerian state. In 1999,...

This book offers a multidisciplinary approach to the medina, the traditional walled Arab city of North Africa. The medina becomes a concrete case study for comparative explorations of general questions about the social use of urban space by opening up fields of research at the intersection of history, comparative cultural studies, architecture and anthropology. Essays by American, European and North African scholars demonstrate a variety of sources and theoretical approaches now being used in writing historical narratives framed within the city space. They shed light on recent studies by...

The essays in this volume explore the complexities of the relationship between states, social groups and individuals in contemporary North Africa, as expressed through the politics, culture and history of nationhood.
From Morocco to Libya, from bankers to refugees, from colonialism to globalisation, a range of individual studies examines how North Africans have imagined and made their world in the twentieth century.

The eight essays that comprise this collection cover various aspects of social change and contested terrain amongst the Tuareg people Algeria.