Contenu du sommaire : Dossier : Sexe et sexualités au Maghreb. Essais d'ethnographies contemporaines

This collection assembles ten fieldwork surveys conducted in different countries of the Maghreb (Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania), which seek to shed light on the conditions under which social economies of sexuality may develop, these being more diverse than might be supposed based on the “Arab-Muslim personality”. While refusing to adopt the “Orientalist” perspective (Arab-Islamic sexuality explained by the sacred texts) the “culturalist” perspective (a specifically North African way of configuring sexuality), the “moralist” perspective (societies being menaced by political islam or the “corrupted West”) and the “activist” perspective (as a defence of individual freedom, notably sexual, feminism, or political Islam), these contemporary ethnographies recreate the tensions between individualism and community ethos, between national and local dictates, between western ethics and religious proscription, all of these attracting considerable media coverage. Without pretense to exhaustivity or even to being representative of a range of real situations, these investigations nonetheless converge on one point : if all sorts of practices may be observed in the Maghreb insofar as sexuality is concerned, the parties have no intention of limiting themselves by category. Whatever the sexual preference, individuals do not necessarily use sexuality to construct an identity. In this sense, practices that are no more or less modern and pluralistic than what may be observed elsewhere, defy the normative obsession that is too often attributed to contemporary Muslim societies.

Postcards of the colonial era showing native women half naked have been used recently in a number of books which, somewhat paradoxically, condemn the fabrication and dissemination of the very images they display. The prefaces to these books, written by authors who are part of an intellectual diaspora, demonstrate the persistence of relations that Maghreb societies maintain with their women. We see reiterated the strong Mediterranean drive for endogamy that was studied in her time by Germaine Tillion, in Le Harem et les cousins (1966). Post-colonial arguments used in these texts thus appear as the “fig leaf” for more fundamental anthropological determinations.

Trekking itineraries and camping trips on the edge of the Sahara desert in Morocco are frequently the scene of sexual exchanges between Western female tourists and their guides, who are members of settled Saharan Bedouin tribes. With no price tag, or even payment requested, these interactions seem to be the starting point of more or less perennial liaisons. A monographic study within the tribal group reveals complex transactional logics which defeat all theories of any type of prostitution. Emancipation rather than transgression, a raiding economy rather than prostitution, an aesthetics of fantasia rather than debauchery, the seduction and capitalization of foreign women is part of a common economic and lineage rationality around the reaffirmation of a Bedouin ethos.

The practice of a new kind of marriage called zawâdj-al-misyâr has spread in Muslim countries, among urban middle and upper classes. In Algeria, as in many Sunni countries, this form of marriage, which can be translated as “passerby's marriage” is seen as a way to relax marital rules and adapt them to the reality of everyday life. Such a reinvention of tradition also appears as a concrete manifestation of the debates and struggles for leadership between Shi'ism and Sunnism. Indeed, like zawâdj al-mut`a (the famous Shiite « pleasure mariage »), the zawâdj-al-misyâr practice appears primarily as a way to live one's sexuality in accordance with one's (now obsessively) guilt-inducing beliefs and a thorny environment concerning the issue of lawful and unlawful.

Through the execution of ritual acts accompanied by certain magical words, tasfih is said to protect young Tunisian girls from sexual contact and thereby guarantees their premarital virginity. A field survey conducted in 2001 revealed a rather facetious ritual, which would undoubtedly preserve virtue but at the same time allowed certain liberties. The ethnographic material collected and presented to a very diverse Tunisian audience, including the medical community, the media, politicians and bloggers, sparked unexpected reactions that focused on one nagging question: “Does it work?” Through reflection on these reactions and on the initial field survey we were able to examine sexual behavior, the vocabulary used to describe it and their heuristic significance in the analysis and understanding of the contradictions of contemporary Tunisia.

A linguistic corpus gathered from recordings of spontaneous exchanges between young single men in Tripoli, reveals everyday language as it is evolving, which serves to speak about sexuality as well as events that are not sexual in nature. Taboo words are recurrent in the sociolect studied. The terms zəbb, zəbr, kāțu “cock” et dlāwəz “balls” are used in interjective, adverbial and adjectival locutions. The noun gaḥba “whore” is used in interjective locutions. Related verbs (gəḥḥəb and tgəḥḥəb) are desemanticized and grammaticalized. The verb nāk “to fuck” is also grammaticalized and changes categories from simple verb to support verb to serial verb.

In Mauritania, where females are supposed to be subordinate to males, we in fact observe a complex diplomacy of relations between the sexes. The analysis of several mixed spaces that are available to the upper classes in the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott, show that women can be demanding with men and inverse roles: they require presents, attention, patience; they enjoy fuelling male rivalry and one-upmanship. These female manipulations must nonetheless follow certain codes; permanently wavering between private and public, there is a difference between what must be seen and what can be seen, between what can be told and what we must remain untold.

Whatever the social background, premarital sexuality in Morocco poses a number of particularly sensitive problems, both practical and moral. However these problems are shaped differently and affect social actors in different ways depending on whether they live in big cities, in the plains just outside urban areas or in the remote desert and mountain areas. Our article addresses these dilemmas and resulting differences, based on an analysis that allows for variations between the plains and mountains on the one hand, and encounters and rendezvous on the other hand. We found that in remote areas, the social environment and behaviors allow, sometimes encourage, intersexual encounters, but strongly oppose the possibility of romantic dates, while in the plains circumstances leave room for organizing rendezvous, but make it difficult for encounters to happen. Our article also explores the impact of new technologies on these interactions, the role of mobility and wish for anonymity.

Because too many shortcuts are taken in the study of female prostitution in the Middle Atlas, this article, taking us back to colonial and postcolonial times, will attempt to portray the phenomena in a different manner. By examining several recollections, exploring individual stories, personal accounts, as well as historic information available on prostitution in this region, this article seeks to reconstruct unifying themes that allow rethinking its inscription in local social dynamics as well as studies on gender and sexuality.

The arrival in Marseilles of the first transvestites from Algeria in the 1980s upset the structure of local prostitution on the fringes of a neighbourhood where an internationally-known Maghreb commercial organization had settled. This contribution intends to break away from the spectacular dimension of exotic identities or the risks associated with AIDS, to return to the itineraries of transvestites, showing that they cannot be viewed as mere displacements in space, from one bank of the Mediterranean to another. They materialize primarily in the distance that separates the world of standards, revealing original biographies often marked by radical transitions from one situation to another in daily life, and from an ethics of secrecy associated with public disorder that may result from these itineraries in terms of “gender” and sexuality.

This article describes a number of cases of male homosexuality in the Maghreb. We will examine the construction of identities in individuals with exclusively homosexual orientation, as well as bisexuality existing in more traditional social settings. In a region still immersed in homosensuality, we will try to point out the contrast between the new sexual practices and the discourse produced about them. We will explain why, in the course of ethnographic research on sexual practices in Maghreb, any attempt to confine relations between males to a typology that isolates friendship, love and sexual desires would be inappropriate. Finally, this article reveals the means used to objectify identities and sexual orientations, particularly through migration, associations and the Internet, in a context where social and ideological currents, whether local or external, are structuring new patterns of life that lead to both openness and withdrawal back to conservative moral and religious values.

Several seminars were recently held in Algeria on issues relating to sexuality, women and the status of families. Faced with a situation that tends to encourage the confinement of women's bodies and control their sexuality, several social practices seem to break away from such standards. Based on personal experience as a researcher working on the margins, the social phenomena of the “tribal” prostitution of the Ouled Naïl in the Algerian Sahara, this field survey explores borders and taboos (prostitution, female celibacy), and some moral uncertainties concerning post-colonial society in Algeria.

Over 10 years after Barcelona, the effects of economic openness in Mediterranean countries are not credible in terms of economic growth and employment dynamics. The purpose of our article is to identify the sectors likely to create employment and wealth in Morocco and to assess whether specialization choices can foster long-term growth and absorb excess labor force. First, we analyzed the potential for employment in economic sectors, especially in manufacturing industries between 1985 and 2001. Subsequently, we evaluated the impact of trade openness and specialization on net employment creation through both an empirical study and an econometric analysis. Our results shed a new light on traditional conclusions, which usually present a positive impact of economic openness on employment.

The control of Islam by the State, exemplified by the creation of an “algerian islamic law” and by a number of exceptions to the principle of separation of Church and State was emblematic of French colonial policy in Algeria. The policy was not challenged after independence. The new Algerian state had no interest in abandoning it and saw it as a way to strengthen the legitimacy that a reference to Islam had given to national claim. As Algeria is now confronted with a phenomenon of individualization of religious practices which challenges the monopoly of official Islamic institutions, will the Algerian government break free from the religious field and put an end to a Gallican and Jacobin tradition dating back to colonization?

Algeria and France cannot but share a common future in light of the multidimensional entanglement of their societies. It is up to the Algerians and the French of good will on both sides of the Mediterranean to work at making their future as mutually supporting and exemplary as possible. If friendship among peoples is not built on treaties but on concrete actions, as French President Sarkozy said, a simplified treaty free of the memory issue could be a first step on the road to Franco-Algerian reconciliation.

The forms taken by political Islam in North Africa, though they seem similar at first, are actually quite diverse. Beyond a few common principles, their ideological positions are far from uniform. A complex and evolving movement, political Islam covers a wide spectrum of political sensibilities. As Islamic formations operate primarily within national frameworks, the political context in which they evolve has a strong influence on their strategies, rhetoric and political programs. As a result, there are three types of Islamic parties: the so-called “managing” parties, the opposition or protest parties, and parties existing outside the system that may or may not be considered as revolutionary.