Are There Tribes in the Ballot-Box?. The Sociology of an Electoral Enigma (Algeria )

Why, after more than a century of breaking off-from the collapse of the Turkish Makhzen to the the colonization of settlement, from the disintegration of the tribe to land dispossession, from colonial domination to the triumph of nationalism, from socialism to islamism-has the tribal fact proven to be of such importance in Bouteflika's Algeria? How can we account for this "resurgence" of tribalism in a country whose various communities have suffered from by far the greatest degree of destruction in North Africa? Are we dealing with a tenacious persistence of the tribal or with the awakening of a dormant tribalism? If certain subjects are easily exhausted once touched, others demand on the contrary to be regularly revisited. The problem of tribal relations with the state belongs to this second category. This text proposes a dual thesis: the interpretative perspective, opposing itself to the assumptions put forth by the dominant paradigms, is used first to demonstrate the salience of tribalism without the tribe. The analysis then goes on, surpassing theoretical metonyms, to show the prevalence of political clientelism and electoral corruption, the hybridization of the three repertoires presiding over the fabrication of politics under authoritarianism.