Books by Judith Scheele
Despite being central to the development of Saharan regional connectivity, northern Chad has been... more Despite being central to the development of Saharan regional connectivity, northern Chad has been closed to researchers since the late 1960s and thus remains virtually unknown to scholarship. Based on long-term fieldwork, The Value of Disorder is an original and in-depth account of the area and its Tubu majority inhabitants. Julien Brachet and Judith Scheele examine trans-border connectivity and trade; civil war and rebellion; wealth creation and dispersal; labour and gender relations; and aspirations to moral autonomy in northern Chad from an internal point of view – a point of view that in turn participates in a dynamic process of regional interdependence. Vividly ethnographic, the book gives precedence to local categories of value, while asking broader questions about the nature of non-state regional political organisation, questions that inform current political developments in the Sahara more widely and have the potential to challenge key concepts in Saharan studies and the social sciences.
Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara describes life on and around the contemporary border between A... more Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara describes life on and around the contemporary border between Algeria and Mali, exploring current developments in a broad historical and socioeconomic context. Basing her findings on long-term fieldwork with trading families, truckers, smugglers and scholars, Judith Scheele investigates the history of contemporary patterns of mobility from the late nineteenth century to the present. Through a careful analysis of family ties and local economic records, this book shows how long-standing mobility and interdependence have shaped not only local economies, but also notions of social hierarchy, morality and political legitimacy, creating patterns that endure today and that need to be taken into account in any empirically-grounded study of the region.
Kabylia is a Berber-speaking, densely populated mountainous region east of Algiers, that has play... more Kabylia is a Berber-speaking, densely populated mountainous region east of Algiers, that has played an important part in Algerian pre- and post-independence politics, and continues to be troublesome to central government. But 'Kabylia' is also an ideal, shaped and shared by a variety of intellectual trends both in Algeria and in France. Kabylia was seen by sociologically minded nineteenth-century French authors as a model of primitive democracy and became central to their debates about good government, the nature of 'race', nationhood, and the social bond. These qualities have by now largely been appropriated by Kabyles themselves, and have become central to Kabyle self-images discussed on numerous web-sites run by Kabyle emigrants in France as much as by local parties and associations in Kabylia itself. Central to this image is the Kabyles' attachment to their home villages. But what exactly makes a village a village? And how can this emphasis on communal autonomy be articulated within a modern nation-state? These are the questions this book tries to answer through an in-depth case study of one particular village, analysing the contemporary debates that animate it, and tracing its history through the French conquest and occupation, the Algerian war of independence, and the political turmoil, including the challenge of Islamist politics, that followed independence.The 'village', as much as Kabylia as a whole, emerges as a place made by its internal contradictions, and that can only be understood with reference to the position it occupies within the various intellectual, political, economic and cultural 'world-systems' of which it is part.
Edited volumes by Judith Scheele
Despite a rich history of ethnographic research in Middle Eastern societies, the region is freque... more Despite a rich history of ethnographic research in Middle Eastern societies, the region is frequently portrayed as marginal to anthropology. The contributors to this volume reject this view and show how the Middle East is in fact vital to the discipline and how Middle Eastern anthropologists have developed theoretical and methodological tools that address and challenge the region's political, ethical, and intellectual concerns. The contributors to this volume are students of Paul Dresch, an anthropologist known for his incisive work on Yemeni tribalism and customary law. As they expand upon his ideas and insights, these essays ask questions that have long preoccupied anthropologists, such as how do place, point of view, and style combine to create viable bodies of knowledge; how is scholarship shaped by the historical context in which it is located; and why have duration and form become so problematic in the study of Middle Eastern societies? Special attention is given to understanding local terms, contested knowledge claims, what remains unseen and unsaid in social life, and to cultural patterns and practices that persist over long stretches of time, seeming to predate and outlast events. Ranging from Morocco to India, these essays offer critical but sensitive approaches to cultural difference and the distinctiveness of the anthropological project in the Middle East. (The introduction is on-line below).
Mainstream historians in recent decades have often treated formal categories and rules as somethi... more Mainstream historians in recent decades have often treated formal categories and rules as something to be ‘used’ by individuals, as one might use a stick or stone, and the gains of an earlier legal history are often needlessly set aside. Anthropologists, meanwhile, have treated rules as analytic error and categories as an imposition by outside powers or by analysts, leaving a very thin notion of ‘practice’ as the stuff of social life. Philosophy of an older vintage, as well as the work of for instance Charles Taylor, provides fresh approaches when applied imaginatively to cases beyond the philosophers’ home-ground of modern Europe and North America. Not only are different kinds of rule and category open to examination, but the very notion of a rule can be explored more deeply.
This volume approaches rules and categories as constitutive of action and hence of social life, but also as providing means of criticism and imagination. A general theoretical framework is derived from analytical philosophy, from Wittgenstein to his critics and beyond, and from recent legal thinkers such as Schauer and Waldron. Case-studies are presented from a broad range of periods and regions, from Amazonia via northern Chad, Tibet, and medieval Russia to the scholarly worlds of Roman law, Islam, and Classical India. As the third volume in the legalism series, this collection brings out common themes that run through the first two volumes, consolidating them in a framework that suggests a new approach to rule-bound systems.
That law is, or should be, related to justice generally goes without saying; that communities are... more That law is, or should be, related to justice generally goes without saying; that communities are the basis for (or objects of) laws is also easily assumed; and notable theories of justice explicitly or implicitly elide the two. In this volume historians and anthropologists use empirical examples to unpick conceptual knots formed by law, justice, and community, asking how these relations appear in practice, and how fundamental they are. A focus on legalism—a type of thought and means of understanding the world that makes categories and meanings explicit—brings local concepts, ideals, and dynamics into focus. ‘Justice’ is routinely associated with the legal process, where it implies notions of regularity and fairness, but the concept can also be used to invoke an ideal against which laws can be assessed, or drawn on as a discursive resources. Community, as a seemingly universal category, often underpins theoretical accounts of justice: it provides the bounded set within which retribution or distribution is achieved, and has long been invoked to justify moral governance. Yet ‘community’ as a concept is neither less elusive nor more universal than justice. Notions of ‘naturally given’ communities disappear once analysed closely, even in areas where they are locally invoked as central: community becomes aspirational, and in itself a legal category.
Conventional wisdom once assumed that the Sahara functioned in history and in contemporary social... more Conventional wisdom once assumed that the Sahara functioned in history and in contemporary social, cultural and political relations as a barrier, dividing the Mediterranean world from Africa ‘proper’, isolating the countries of the Maghrib from their southern and eastern neighbours, and demarcating entirely distinct areas of study. It has more recently become commonplace to suggest that the Sahara has in fact never constituted a serious obstacle to cross-regional interaction and has rather furthered it. Yet despite recent interest in trans-Saharan trade and contemporary migration (now fuelled by security concerns over clandestine immigration and international terrorism), more far-reaching, conceptually innovative and empirically detailed research on connections between North and West Africa has not been much pursued. Such research as has been done has often privileged conceptual frameworks imposed from the outside, rather than studying notions of movement, connections, place and space from the bottom up. Braudel once wrote of the Sahara as ‘the second face of the Mediterranean’: the intention of our book is to explore the ways in which it might be possible to recast Saharan history with the desert at the centre, as a history of densely interdependent networks created by the desert and the relationship between its ‘islands’ and ‘shores’. It analyses the history of North and West Africa both ‘from the bottom up’ and ‘from the inside out’, taking as its focus the Sahara as a shared environment of social, cultural and political interaction at the centre of a region that has been historically, and remains today, characterised by multiple and enduring connections and commonalities. In order to do so, it unites a selection of papers by scholars from a broad range of national and disciplinary backgrounds, who are at the forefront of contemporary Saharan studies, but who remain little known to English-speaking audiences.
Papers by Judith Scheele
HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2022
The state of most current political anthropology tends to be the modern nation-state, and relativ... more The state of most current political anthropology tends to be the modern nation-state, and relatively few works address questions posed by other state formations. Focusing on the Moroccan makhzan and the non-state institutional environment in which it operated, this paper argues for a more sustained engagement with alternative traditions of political thought and practice. It does this by drawing on historical ethnography from Morocco and southwestern Algeria, and through a sustained reciprocal comparison with parts of the classic European literature on the concept of the state.
HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2022
This special section approaches "politics" from a specifically ethnographic point of view. It doe... more This special section approaches "politics" from a specifically ethnographic point of view. It does this by privileging ethnographically derived political concepts rather than more familiar preestablished and supposedly universal categories of political analysis. This introduction offers a general theoretical framework for doing this, and establishes a shared language of analysis. It situates current developments in relation to the history of political anthropology and of the broader discipline, and proposes a definition of the domain of political anthropology through an emphasis on politics as collective ethics. It then reflects on the relationship between language and concepts, and the articulation of different "global" hierarchies of value.
Politics & Society, 2022
A closer look at recent reports of "modern slavery" in the Sahara, particularly the exploitation ... more A closer look at recent reports of "modern slavery" in the Sahara, particularly the exploitation of sub-Saharan migrants in contemporary southern Libya, shows that they speak of other forms of captivity, such as debt bondage, forced prison labor, and hostage taking for ransom. Such forms of exploitation have an equally long history in the region but are more obviously enmeshed with contemporary phenomena: repressive migration policies, state incarceration, and the worldwide ranking of nationalities. This article seeks to understand them for what they are, using fieldwork and historical examples. Understanding shifts the blame for the migrants' plight from "local culture" to the international political economy and grants migrants a degree of agency that blanket condemnations of slavery often deny. It also opens up more general questions about links between labor, mobility, and captivity; the relationship between state and non-state systems of political control, their boundaries and overlaps; and the different ways value is accorded to individual lives-or actively created, negotiated, or denied-in the Sahara and beyond.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2021
This article argues for a return to the study of non-state political institutions, and for the ne... more This article argues for a return to the study of non-state political institutions, and for the need to free them from their association with locally circumscribed, unmarked, or even 'unthought' practice. There are several reasons for this. On the one hand, there is a growing interest beyond anthropology in non-state political arrangements, whether they are described negatively, as the result of 'state failure', or positively. On the other, a focus on the 'non-state', historical and contemporary, opens up crucial perspectives on 'the state', and, through it, on questions of different regimes of historicity and region formation. In other words, it might provide insights into political anthropology as a study of shared thought and imagination, beyond ideal-types of modern bureaucratic governance. This is what this article attempts to do, with special reference to North African and Saharan examples.
Politique africaine, 2021
Au regard du poids accru du paradigme sécuritaire dans l'engagement international en l'Afrique, i... more Au regard du poids accru du paradigme sécuritaire dans l'engagement international en l'Afrique, il semble envisageable de parler d'une « militarisation » du continent. Or cette militarisation n'est pas nouvelle, ni irréversible ou unidirectionnelle, ni le seul fait d'interventions externes. Cet article vise à passer en revue quelques moments forts de la militarisation de l'Afrique, en différents lieux et à différentes époques, afin d'en cerner les effets structurels et structurants, et de mieux en saisir les dynamiques actuelles.
Ethnos, 2021
In Faya in northern Chad, women frequently and ordinarily fight each other in public, using knive... more In Faya in northern Chad, women frequently and ordinarily fight each other in public, using knives and swords and seeking to inflict serious wounds; they are generally proud of their martial prowess. This simple observation sits uneasily which an older ethnography on northern Chad and the Sahara more generally. It is also only partially encompassed by conceptualisations of violence, and in particular female violence, current in anthropological analysis. This paper argues that violence in this context needs to be seen not as the result of a breakdown of social relations, but rather as intrinsic to them. Nor is it simply a means to an end (‘conflict-resolution’), but rather part and parcel of aspirations towards a particular kind of gendered personhood, in a context where the management of local affairs tends to be in the hand of women, and is dependent on but not necessarily encompassed by male spheres of activity.
La vie des idees, 2021
Si l'anthropologie a souvent joué un rôle majeur dans les réflexions philosophiques et politiques... more Si l'anthropologie a souvent joué un rôle majeur dans les réflexions philosophiques et politiques sur l'égalité, les savoirs ethnographiques contemporains dépassent de loin ceux dont disposaient Hobbes, Rousseau ou Smith. Cet essai offre des clés pour se saisir de débats parfois complexes.
Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie, 2020
This paper argues that the Sahara can be approached as a region following Horden and Purcell’s (2... more This paper argues that the Sahara can be approached as a region following Horden and Purcell’s (2000) suggestions for the Mediterranean. Or at least, that this is true in economic and ecological terms. Internally, however, Saharan connectivity tends to be expressed in terms of genealogies, kinship and alliance, which implies moral evaluation of a kind that Horden and Purcell’s model is less able to capture. This becomes especially apparent with regard to the classification of Saharan settlements. From an ecological point of view, it might be meaningless to describe them as either towns or villages. From a moral point of view and in terms of self-definition, however, their classification matters greatly, in practical as much as representational terms. Moral aspirations emerge as an integral part of human ecologies. [rurality, urbanity, moral ecologies, oasis economies, Algeria, Chad]
Social Anthropology, 2019
Remoteness is as much about a position in topological as in topographical space. Remote areas mig... more Remoteness is as much about a position in topological as in topographical space. Remote areas might look inaccessible from the outside, but, for Ardener (1989), feel open and vulnerable from the inside, as their connectivity with the outside world is never fully controlled by locals. Drawing on material gathered in northern Chad, we argue that this lack of conceptual reciprocity can also lead to the opposite: a trope of permanent aggression, based on the local endorsement of external negative stereotypes. From the outside, the “locals” are seen to be archetypical raiders, thieves, and uncouth. From the inside, people concur in these descriptions to a surprising degree, insisting on their disorder, unpredictability, and violence. This endorsement of alterity grants northern Chad a particular place in Saharan history, geography and ethnography, as the most ordinary and seemingly universal constraints seem to be turned here on their head.
Politique africaine, 2018
À partir de la principale mine artisanale du Borkou, l’exportation du natron est conjointement ta... more À partir de la principale mine artisanale du Borkou, l’exportation du natron est conjointement taxée par un chef de canton et un représentant du gouvernement. La manière dont s’est historiquement construite cette entente fiscale instable montre que « chefferie » et « État » ont besoin l’un de l’autre pour affirmer une forme de souveraineté dans cette région. À ce titre, la fiscalité du natron est révélatrice du fonctionnement de l’État tchadien en général, de son dédoublement entre les structures administratives officielles et les chefferies traditionnelles, et de l’articulation entre les arènes politiques locales et nationales.
African Studies Review, 2018
From the outside, northern Chad has long been seen as an area of lawlessness, defined primarily b... more From the outside, northern Chad has long been seen as an area of lawlessness, defined primarily by its inhabitants' alleged propensity for raiding and thieving. From the inside, northern Chad indeed appears as an area that thrives on a rhetoric of predation. This, however, is perhaps best understood not in terms of "crime," but rather as a striving for personal autonomy, as a public denial of reciprocity in a context where notions of bounded moral community and indeed of long-term social strategies of exchange are not much in evidence. Résumé: Le Nord du Tchad a longtemps été considéré par les observateurs extérieurs comme une terre de non droit, définie principalement par le penchant supposé de ses habitants pour les rezzous et le vol. Localement, une certaine rhétorique de la prédation est également mise en avant pour expliquer les relations sociales externes, mais froid même internes, de la zone. Néanmoins, afin de mieux cerner ces pratiques et ces dynamiques historiques, il semble préférable de ne pas les ana-lyser en premier lieu sous leurs aspects « criminels », mais davantage comme le pendant d'une aspiration à l'autonomie personnelle et du déni public de la réci-procité, dans un contexte où les notions de communautés et de stratégies d'échange à long terme ne sont que peu efficientes.
Journal of African HIstory, 2016
Historically, connections between southern Libya and northern Chad have always been
close, if on... more Historically, connections between southern Libya and northern Chad have always been
close, if only due to the fundamental need for connectivity that characterises most
Saharan economies. Drawing on so far mostly inaccessible archival records and oral history, this article outlines the implications of this proximity, arguing that it led to intimate entanglements within families and an ongoing confusion of property rights. This in turn resulted in increased rather than diminished hostility during the years of war that opposed the two countries, as people attempted to define uncertain boundaries, and were – and still are – competing for access to similar resources, moral, symbolic, social, and economic.
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Books by Judith Scheele
Edited volumes by Judith Scheele
This volume approaches rules and categories as constitutive of action and hence of social life, but also as providing means of criticism and imagination. A general theoretical framework is derived from analytical philosophy, from Wittgenstein to his critics and beyond, and from recent legal thinkers such as Schauer and Waldron. Case-studies are presented from a broad range of periods and regions, from Amazonia via northern Chad, Tibet, and medieval Russia to the scholarly worlds of Roman law, Islam, and Classical India. As the third volume in the legalism series, this collection brings out common themes that run through the first two volumes, consolidating them in a framework that suggests a new approach to rule-bound systems.
Papers by Judith Scheele
close, if only due to the fundamental need for connectivity that characterises most
Saharan economies. Drawing on so far mostly inaccessible archival records and oral history, this article outlines the implications of this proximity, arguing that it led to intimate entanglements within families and an ongoing confusion of property rights. This in turn resulted in increased rather than diminished hostility during the years of war that opposed the two countries, as people attempted to define uncertain boundaries, and were – and still are – competing for access to similar resources, moral, symbolic, social, and economic.