Law and Religion in Grand Kabylia (18th 19th Centuries) : On Legal Cultural Change in Tribal Customary Law

The present thesis aims to analyze the pre-colonial customary law of a North African tribal region, Grand Kabylia. "Law" is not considered in this context as a mere set of norms and rules, but rather emerges throughout a discursive process establishing and shaping social identities. The analysis proceeds in four distinctive steps: After evaluating the classical anthropological theories as well as the colonial images on Kabylia (chap. 2-4), an alternative reading of the sources is suggested, which takes the scriptural culture and the communicative context of Kabyle village assemblies into account (chap. 5).Than, the results are evaluated in the light of recent research on Islamic law (chap. 6). These approaches become unified in the examination of regional discurses on the legitimacy of the customary law (chap. 7). In a final synthesis, the relations between moral demands, religious reformism, and the public sphere of Kabyle villages are discussed (chap. 8). Some examples of the subjects discussed in detail are the re-invention of Kabyle customary law by the French colonial power, the question of female disinheritance among North-African Berbers, the relationship between customary law and village honour (hurma), and a conceptualization of the exchanges between Islamic law and customary law as semantic transfers on the basis of structural analogies. To sum up, the work affords a model for an inter-disciplinary approach with elements of both Legal Anthropology and Islamic Studies to processes of autonomization of the legal sphere inside a rural context