Over the course of French colonization, the French state violently displaced Indigenous Algerians from their traditional homelands while demolishing ancient cities for French settlement. The consequent distortions of Algeria’s historic rural-urban foodways continue through the postcolonial era: intense rural-to-urban migration, a socialist commitment to agrarian reform, and recently, the contradictory pressures of globalization. The historical co-constitution of the casbah and the countryside from the precolonial to the postcolonial era has thus been shaped by enclosures that blur the rural-urban linkages. My research explores conflicting paradigms of land and nature ‘governance’, in particular resistance to contemporary land enclosures. I am interested in the Algerian agrarian question of food sovereignty in relation to these enclosures. As this question does not conform to a clear rural-urban binary, it too does not neatly fit within modern state boundaries: the Maghreb–the countries of northwest Africa–has been and continues to be shaped by migration of people, ideas, and politics.
I spent this summer between Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia and established relationships with potential interviewees for ethnographic fieldwork across urban and rural sites. I was able to connect with the inheritor and custodian at the Bibliothèque de Manuscrits Lmūhūb Ūlabīb in Bejaia, Algeria, who shared with me a number of precolonial manuscripts on agriculture. I stayed in the medina of Sousse, Tunisia and researched the morphology of traditional Islamic cities in relation to city planning, endowment systems (waqf), and protected commons hinterland (hima) that traditionally sustained cities. Gaining an understanding of precolonial foodways along with an observational study of the medina revealed how colonialism has altered the traditional city–and yet, how resilient it is. By identifying archives, meeting future interviewees, and gaining a historical perspective on rural-urban foodways, I will be prepared to write my IRB application and begin dissertation fieldwork.