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Ethnography
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El Ghorba

From Original Sin to Collective Lie

Abdelmalek Sayad

This article offers a socio-analysis of the discourse and strategies of one young emigrant from rural Kabylia to disclose the social conditions that simultaneously triggered and obfuscated the springs of mass emigration from Algeria to France during the post-war decades. Drawing on Kabyle mythical tradition, the informant produces a folk model of the mechanism whereby emigration is produced and reproduced in which the alienated and mystified experience of exile (`el ghorba') plays a pivotal role. The collective misrecognition of the objective truth of emigration is maintained by the whole group: the emigrants select the information that they bring back when visiting their home village; former emigrants `enchant' the memories they have kept of France; and the candidates for emigration project onto `France' their most unrealistic expectations. Such symbolic collusion is the necessary mediation through which economic necessity can exercise itself and emigration perpetuate itself even when the material forces that gave rise to it turn out illusory or vanish.

Key Words: emigration • misrecognition • social strategies • crisis of rural society • Algeria • Kabylia • France

Ethnography, Vol. 1, No. 2, 147-171 (2000)
DOI: 10.1177/14661380022230714
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