• 1 “Pour parler de la folie, il faudrait avoir le talent d'un poète” (Foucault 2011, 184).
• 2 The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric As (...)

1According to the biography which Didier Eribon wrote about him, Michel Foucault concluded his PhD viva with an avowal of incompetence: “In order to talk about madness, we would need to have the talent of a poet.”1 It is not easy to find adequate language to describe an object that is at once under-determined—madness is the other of the logos, an object that resists discourse—and overdetermined—by the psychiatric nosography of which the DSM2 provides an impressive synthesis. I want to show that the ethnographic method, through the variety of its research procedures and of its methods for objectivation, allows us to interrogate madness in a manner that is at once empirically anchored and theoretically productive.

• 3 Prayer is one of the five pillars of Islam. A Muslim must pray five times a day as soon as he reach (...)

2My starting point is a relationship I developed with a man, Abdel, during an immersive ethnographic study which I conducted in the Salafist milieu of the Kabyle city of Tizi-Ouzou, in Algeria. As a Franco-Algerian person who had always lived in France, I moved to Tizi-Ouzou in the month of November 2021 to draw up an ethnography of Kabyle Salafism within the framework of my doctoral thesis. I had the rudiments of Islamic knowledge drawn from my family socialisation, and became involved in the life of the mosques of the city of Tizi-Ouzou among believers who intended to correct and perfect what they viewed as a “cocktail Islam.” I met Abdel in a Salafist mosque, a man of around forty years old, who suffered from parasitical thoughts, which were referred to using the Qu’ranic expression “waswās”—usually translated as “satanic whispers.” Floating suspicion, uncontrollable inopportune thoughts, imagining macabre scenarios… these suggestions were expressed far more through subtle shifts rather than by violent crises, and could erupt at any moment in life: during the daily prayer [salāt],3 in the café, in the street, during ordinary conversations… The main symptom of waswās is a propensity to what psychiatry calls “paranoia,” meaning an excessive tendency to attribute malevolent intentions to other people. This difficulty, which initially constituted an obstacle to my enquiry, would soon become a way in for my ethnography.

• 4 In 1991, the Front islamique du salut (FIS—“Islamic Salvation Front”) won the first free elections (...)

3This analysis is part of a doctoral thesis on the subject of a Salafist religious reformism that has been emerging since the early 2000s in Algeria, the development of which I have been observing on the edges of the city of Tizi-Ouzou (Greater Kabylia). This theology, of which Muḥamad ʿAli Farkūs, an expert and academic from Algiers, is the tutelary figure, was disseminated through local mosques built at the beginning of the millennium in order to contain the proliferation of the “free mosques” where the Jihadism of the 1990s was fomented.4 Rigorously loyalist, this quietist Salafism has been tolerated by public authorities because it does not have much subversive power. In the wilaya (region) of Tizi-Ouzou, and in particular in its urban centre, it has gained traction among vulnerable populations in financially precarious situations, for whom it acts as an integrating institution and provides a collective framework for the definition of individual identity. It nevertheless remains marginal in Kabylia, where Islamist one-upmanship, as in the 1980s and 1990s, are not met with much enthusiasm (Salhi, 2004; Chachoua, 2001; Mahé, 2001) and where rigorist forms of Islam are not well-accepted. My work describes this religiosity and its twofold marginality—in its relations to the state and to society—its followers, their devotional practices, and their daily lives.

• 5 “You won’t make me believe they’ll fund research if there isn’t some interest behind it!” (“Tu vas (...)
• 6 “Ah oui, ils ont le waswās !”

5Abdel was one of these men with whom interpersonal acquaintance was hampered from a certain point—despite a relationship of frank camaraderie and the fact that we saw each other on an almost daily basis. I initially assumed that his reticence was explained by his desire to preserve his personal explanation of the iltizem (commitment to faith)—Salafist trajectories are encoded into a doctrine of exceptionality and of divine guidance that are incompatible with the objectivation work of sociological careers—and perhaps by a worry about the possible underlying political intentions of the enquiry (gathering intelligence for an enemy power5). These explanations were insufficient however, for they ignored the concrete form this muteness took. During our conversations, these men were not just silent but paralysed with fear, visibly suspicious, so that I would put an end to our conversations after just a few minutes. Despite the intimacy we had developed during my research, there was a persistent sense of unease in the air. Fuʾād, an essential interlocutor who was also my flatmate, unlocked the problem: “Ah yes, they have the waswās!”6 I realised that a rigorous ethnography of Salafism could not ignore this category, given how frequently it was drawn upon to explain the struggle to live.

• 7 “Il faut pas écrire pendant le ẖutba ! Tu écoutes, si tu veux tu enregistres, mais tu écris pas !”
• 8 And carried out by a foreigner too, although Abdel had no way of knowing this at this point since I (...)
• 9 This need not necessarily mean Salafism, since even if the imam of this mosque is of this religious (...)
• 10 “Ah, vous êtes un immigré de France ! mašallah (Dieu soit loué) !”

13I met Abdel in 2021 in a Salafist mosque of the city of Tizi-Ouzou, situated in the popular neighbourhood of Les Corbeaux, a few months after I had started my field study. In the lower room of the masǧid, where worshippers carry out their ablutions, he called out to me because he had seen me the day before, nervously scribbling during the weekly ẖutba (sermon). I had been visiting the mosque for a few months, and thus had stopped taking elementary precautions regarding the management of my impressions. During the ǧumuha sermon, Abdel was watching me disapprovingly out of the corner of his eye, and when he came across me the next day, he gave me a firm telling-off: “You shouldn’t write during the ẖutba! You can listen, record it if you want, but you shouldn’t write!”7 While my public note-taking8 was to spark mistrust in interlocutors who took me for an intelligence officer, Abdel was not, at this point, interpreting my activity in this way. For him, there was no doubt about my Islamic character.9 I was simply a scrupulous believer who did not want to miss a single word of the sermon. Faced with his advice [naṣiḥa], which I interpreted as a reproach, I got out of the situation thanks to my usual excuse—my foreignness—which delighted Abdel: “Ah, you’re an immigrant from France! mašallah (Thank God10)!” This was the starting point of a relationship of camaraderie tinged with spiritual paternalism.

• 11 The qamis is a loose robe covering the shapes of the male body, the length of which must not go bey (...)
• 12 “le musulman doit montrer l’exemple”

14I assiduously sought out Abdel’s company at the mosque; I saw him every week at the ǧumuha sermon, we attended the same taǧwid (recitation) sessions, and some durūs dispensed by the imam. Our encounters mainly took place during the day, during the afternoon prayers of duhr and d’al-ʿasr. Since he lived out of town, Abdel usually left again after the sunset prayer on his battered scooter, and returned to his wife and his mother, with whom he lived. He was an affable, spiritual, astute man, who always looked impeccable—his qamis clean and ironed, a taqiya,11 a well-groomed beard—who liked to talk, laugh and share all sorts of opinions about the world. He often talked about himself proudly, talked about his wedding twelve years earlier, of his love of dīn (religion), of prayer, of the importance of obeying divine laws… He described himself as a seasoned polymath, passionate about Islam but also about cooking, adept at mechanics and leatherwork (he sometimes came to the masǧid with little wallets he had made himself). He soon took on the role of counsellor in our relationship, something which is quite common in Kabylia in relationships between an elder and a younger person. As a married man—an essential rite of passage which marks one’s entry into maturity—he boasted of a certain life experience and explained to me that “the Muslim must set an example”12 in every situation of daily life. His body was the medium and the argument of a desire to convey a perfect image of his religion and, thus, of himself.

• 13 Blows made to the ear seem explicit ways of “making voices be quiet,” of correcting oneself; spitti (...)
• 14 The rakʿat are units of Islamic prayer, each one involving a series of gestures and recitations: st (...)

15I soon came to notice the difficulties which Abdel experienced during the daily salāt. Praying next to him, I could glimpse in my peripheral vision his agitated, tense body, swaying back and forth, violently hitting his right ear, trembling as he listened to the Quran, spitting a little saliva into his left hand before quietly starting his recitation again.13 I thought he was suffering from some physiological illness, but then, observing that the scene would be repeated on a daily basis, physically feeling his unease, seeing his face wet with tears in the final posture of the prayer,14 I guessed that there was more going on. I first imagined that he was afflicted by what the DSM-V nosographies define as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and perhaps schizophrenia, but I thought this affliction was contingent on his religious practice and was not aware that it was part of the world of meaning of the waswās. This term appeared often during the Salafist initiation I was being given in Tizi-Ouzou, both in the Qur’anic suras that I was learning (see Table 1) and during the religious instruction classes I was taking. Its translation as “Satanic whispers” or “bad advice” led me to think that it referred to all the suggestions of the Devil that were aimed at disorienting a Muslim and lead him into temptation, in particular by inoculating him with immoral desires.

• 15 “souffle le mal dans les poitrines des hommes”

16In this first sense, this term expresses a motif that is familiar in salvation religions, that of the conflict between the passions of the individual and the behaviour prescribed by the law. It raises the issue of the duty and aspiration of the fallible creature to make progress religiously, and to conquer felicity here below and in the afterlife by working on governing their passions and on an “ethical rationalisation of daily life” (Weber, 1991[1904]). But the rest of the sura invites us to identify another meaning, which is closer to the category of social practice, and well-identified by scholars [ʿulama] of Islam. Indeed, the Hanbali scholar Ibn al-Ǧawzī (2018) underlines the importance of the “furtiveness” [al-ḥanassi] of the bad counsellor who “blows evil into the chests of men”15 [ladhī yuwaswisu fī ṣudūri an-nāsi]. This bad counsellor acts in an insidious manner in the believer’s spirit, interfering with his flow of consciousness by infecting him with doubts and parasitical thoughts. As such, the term does not refer to guilty desires that must be channelled (masturbatory desires, desires for fornication, or any other transgressive desire), but rather mental representations that are intrusive and inappropriate to the context. This form of trouble does not fall either within the register of the amahbul, a Kabyle avatar of the madman who is outside of the world, who has lost his mind, whose errors are forgiven, and who is identifiable in particular in that he is excluded from struggles for honour (Bourdieu 1972).

• 16 I am well aware that a psychiatric diagnosis does more than peremptorily assign a category to an in (...)
• 17 Pandolfo’s article quotes version IV of the DSM. The French Wikipedia article for “waswās” directs (...)

17In Knot of the Soul, Stefania Pandolfo, uses eight case studies to explore the treatment of madness in Morocco, at the crossroads of psychiatric and Islamic registers (Pandolfo 2018). The fourth study briefly refers to the operations that govern the translation of al-waswās into the psychiatric register (ibid., 110–12). If a person’s thoughts are expressed as external injunctions, they will tend to be given a diagnosis of schizophrenia; if the individual thinks that they are the author of said thoughts, they are seen as subject to OCDs.16 In most cases, the waswās is understood as an obsessive-compulsive disorder, and in fact this is how it is translated in the Arabic version of the DSM-V.17 Abdel mainly uses this category to refer to his disorder, without knowing anything about its inclusion in official psychiatric nosography. He also sometimes symbolises his suffering by using a humorous and denigrating register—“the bastard” (“le salopard”) (using the French term: “le salopard); the “thing”; “the other”; “him”… At the end of my field study and after several months of active enterprising on Fuʾād’s part, Abdel finally gave in to an aetiology formulated in terms of possession, but I never heard him self-identify as a “maǧnun” (possessed by a ǧin), although he called several times on the services of a raqi (exorciser) who he claimed brought him some relief.

• 18 Man and the ǧin-s have been created only for the purpose of worship [ʿibada], according to Verse 56 (...)
• 19 Among Salafists, the iǧtihad—the interpretation of religious sources from which one infers orthodox (...)
• 20 “quand tu as le waswās, tout est perturbé, tu peux rien faire tranquillement. Manger, boire, dormir (...)
• 21 This expression is used by Michel Foucault in Surveiller et punir (Discipline and Punish) and descr (...)

18Since I was myself developing obsessive thoughts after a few months of daily life within a Salafist framework, and being quite familiar with psychiatric nosography, it was largely according to the category of OCDs that I initially analysed waswās. Salafist ethics are deontological and normative. The believer must apply rules meticulously, comply with a considerable number of interdictions, must pray on time, at the mosque, with little regard for for the demands of the century; every gesture is followed or preceded by an invocation or evocation aiming for protection against the Devil, ǧin-s, the evil eye… A religiousness based on adoration of the Creator,18 acts of devotion and adoration must be carried out in rigorous compliance with the rules inferred by the ʿālim (scholars) based on the ḥadiṯ-s,19 failing which they may be invalid. If “when you have the waswās you’re all disturbed, you can’t do anything in peace. Eating, drinking, sleeping, talking, everything is disturbed!”20 The issue is supposedly that this “moral orthopaedics,” to use Michel Foucault’s expression21 (1975), shapes pious subjectivities through the somatisation of the norm and the fear of transgressing it.

• 22 I do not entirely know to what extent Abdel had, in the past, thought of his psychological sufferin (...)
• 23 Words transferred as they are into Kabyle interlocution, the nosographical categories used most com (...)
• 24 “bloqu[ant] la partie du cerveau où il y a le waswās” (informal conversation).
• 25 “pousse pour devenir une maladie mentale” (informal conversation, 9 October 2022).

19Getting to know Abdel, however, changed my analysis. When he talked about himself—after a few months, his trouble had become an ordinary topic of conversation—I understood that the waswās described an ubiquitous evil preceding the Salafist systematisation of how to conduct one’s life, and sometimes culminating in a major crisis.22 These situations of disruption were referred to by Abdel using different terms: “crises,” “depression,” “nervous depression” or, more rarely, “anxiety.”23 Although he used these nosographic categories and had in the past resorted to psychopharmacological treatments, with hindsight he viewed this therapeutic approach as superficial. The drugs, rather than acting on the deep causes of his condition, only offered a false cure by “blocking the part of the brain where the waswās is.”24 Even if the waswās “is pushing to become a mental disease,”25 as he was to tell me, he essentially viewed it as a struggle between man and the invisible powers that are attacking him, and not as a mental illness. Abdel firmly rejected nosological hetero-denominations and only rarely used psychiatric categories, in a self-deprecating tone.

• 26 “parle pas beaucoup avec lui sur WhatsApp”
• 27 “Le fait qu’il a supprimé les messages, ça veut pas dire qu’il a du waswās envers toi. Il a sûremen (...)
• 28 The fear of cameras, the unrealistic fear of being spied upon, are characteristic symptoms of schiz (...)

22How are we to understand these retrospective rereadings? Was Abdel ashamed? Was he worried that I might use these conversations for malevolent purposes? Fuʾād explained to me that his own conversations with Abdel were not reviewed and corrected in this way, but added that he “did not speak much with him on WhatsApp.”26 He then added: “The fact that he deleted the messages, that doesn’t mean he has waswās towards you. He probably has some waswās about being spied on himself, or that someone is hacking his telephone, but it’s not aimed at you, I have no doubt about that.”27 Abdel thus seemed to be experiencing a generalised sense of unease which was also expressed in his interactions with me. Indeed, this unease could be perceived on a day-to-day basis in various attitudes of discomfort, such as when a photographic camera was pointed at him, in particular that of a telephone being consulted by a person opposite him.28 In fact, he covered his own with an opaque sticker in order to protect his interlocutors from having to experience a similar sense of discomfort. Thus, even if it did not prevent him from developing intimate relationships, we see here that the suspicion-waswās encouraged him to establish a mutual distance in his relations, to be careful in the way he let himself be known. This seems, in this regard, to be the expression of the fear of the evil eye—ʿayn—of which the photographic eye could be the modern incarnation. Abdel was discreet but also attempted to never leave a trace, to moderate his curiosity about other people, did not ask too many questions and often feared that he had gone too far in his biographical investigation of his interlocutor.

• 29 French current affairs are followed assiduously by most Algerians and in particular by Kabyles, who (...)

24Within the framework of this enquiry, I was regularly asked for whom I was carrying out my research, particularly in some moments when trust had been called into question due to heated current affairs being reported on in the media. The contemporary context of the repression of Islam at the international and above all French level,29 which resonated with an enduring colonial history, influenced our frameworks of interaction. I intend here to describe the process through which I was constructed as a subject during this ethnographic enquiry. We will thus come to understand how Abdel’s mistrust pertained to systems of power and domination.

• 30 I cannot say quite to what extent this strategy was reactive or prophylactic, and whether I was res (...)
• 31 “On est Algérien par le sang !”
• 32 One must take this to mean, “French, with no Algerian origins,” not just simply a French citizen.
• 33 “Ton père est français? Non, ça veut dire tu es un Algérien !” (Informal conversation, 2 February 2 (...)
• 34 “vraiment des manières de Français !”
• 35 During the first two months of my fieldwork, I was renting a personal flat in the neighbourhood of (...)
• 36 I should specify here that, in order to avoid certain lines of questioning, I learnt to use the con (...)
• 37 For many Salafists, France represents an inaccessible elsewhere of which it is difficult to admit h (...)

25Before going down the path of going native—a deepened effort to incorporate ways of feeling, being and judging the community being studied—I first had to locate myself within a similar worldview as that of my interlocutors, by adjusting to the emic frameworks for the granting of trust.30 Born in France, and having always lived there, I did not start to discover Greater Kabylia until I started carrying out ethnographic studies from the year 2016 (before this point, I was only familiar with urban Lesser Kabylia, where part of my maternal family resides). Despite this objective distance, I nevertheless was not viewed as a foreigner by my interlocutors because “you’re Algerian by blood!”31—as Abdel explained to me: “Is your father French?32 No, so that means you’re Algerian!”33 Since a person’s ethnic group and whether or not they are autochthonous is determined by their lineage, I was understood on the basis of the category of “immigrant,” an emic concept which refers to French Algerians and their descendants. While this dual nationality was a useful resource at first, it remained precarious in that it could also constitute the ideal cover for intelligence activities. It was important to ensure there was a coherence to my biography that would transcend this dual nationality, which was all the more suspect given that, as Fuʾād repeatedly told me, I “really did behave like a Frenchman!”34 Since the granting of trust in Tizi-Ouzou is based on topological factors (the village one comes from, one’s lineage, the neighbourhood one lives in), revealing my place of residence,35 my patronymic and matronymic surnames (by accidentally revealing my Algerian passport) were important steps in the process of my integration; revealing my digital social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn36) and the sharing of photographs of my home in Paris also confirmed my sincerity. Finally, let us add that my willingness, my solicitude, my propensity to help people and transport packages during my temporary trips back to France were both proof of my sincere emotional engagement and made me into a useful resource:37 Abdel wanted to marry a second “European” woman, it was thus in his interest to ignore gloomy speculations about me.

• 38 “celui qui a pas la barbe, tu le conseilles ; si au bout d’un certain temps il l’a toujours pas, c’(...)
• 39 “l’art d’apprendre à vivre une autre forme de vie et à parler une autre sorte de langue.” (Asad 202 (...)

26But I could still detect uncertainty in some suspicious glances or polite acts of keeping me at a distance. For after several months of active proselytism, I still remained entirely a Frenchman—turning up at the masǧid in civilian clothes and with insignificant facial hair. And, as Y suggested: “someone who doesn’t have a beard, you give him advice; if after a certain time he still doesn’t have any, it’s salām and that’s it.”38 Thus, from the month of March 2022, I complied with the group’s sartorial standards—a long beard, a clipped moustache, a qamis and taqiya—not just to overcome certain players’ inhibitions, but also to understand the Salafist experience from closer up. As Talal Asad suggests, and after him anthropologists such as Loïc Wacquant (2004) or Tim Ingold (2017), the ethnographic method involves “the art of learning to live a different kind of life and to speak a different kind of language.”39 This learning through the body is thus not just a simple ruse aimed at gaining access to data that would otherwise be hidden—it is the putting into application of the principle of ethnographic empathy, an effort tending towards the adoption of the categories of perception of the world of the subjects being studied. This process of conversion, while it is temporary, requires that one take seriously the forms of life one is studying, even if they upset some of the researcher’s values.

• 40 “détacher de la France.” (Informal conversation with šayẖ S., May 2022)
• 41 I was once violently taken to task on the street by the qayyim (intendant) of a non-Salafist mosque (...)
• 42 “je sais que tu es un espion…”
• 43 “et si c’était un espion… ?”

27As soon as I agreed to engage in this adaptation, my ethnographic relationship to my subjects more systematically took on the form of a religious initiation. Abdel and numerous other believers felt responsible for my education. They controlled me by redefining my urban map, what I did with my body (what I could look at, how I should behave) and above all my physical appearance, noticing the developments in the growth of my beard, praising it, encouraging me not to trim it—and being saddened when I did end up doing so. I developed a genuine Salafist sensibility—ways of being, of appearing, of feeling, of evaluating, of judging. It should thus be specified that this “going native” was located at the crossroads of two distinct but partially congruent intentions: my desire for ethnographic knowledge and my interlocutors’ desire to convert me, in active opposition to my otherness and with the intention of “detaching me from France.”40 During this process, occupying the public space with a Salafist appearance, being spoken to both within and outside of the group using the address aẖ (brother) accustomed me to this social identity: hostile looks I received in the street, the habit of anticipating negative judgements by performing, in any interface situation (contact with non-Salafists) a certain “doing ‘being ordinary’” (Sacks 1984)—a performance of being ordinary—the attacks I was the victim of,41 made me integrate this stigmatised identity for the duration of my field study. I genuinely became part of the Salafist community and accustomed to the poor treatment it received. Suspicions as to my possibly being a double agent died down within my closest group of mutual acquaintances. The fluidity of my communication with Abdel was less rocky, more controllable. But his suspicions remained, not in the form of a systematised belief (“I know that you are a spy”42) but through fleeting suspicions (“what if he was a spy?43)—which were well symbolised by the metaphor of sudden projectiles which he often used to symbolise the action of the waswās on his spirit.

• 44 “ce qu’il pensait du FIS”

28While it was easy to converse with him for many hours about religion, the love he felt for scholars, his fantastical projects to emigrate to Saudi Arabia “opposite Mecca,” or of marrying “four women, one from each continent,” he would, in some situations, abruptly interrupt our conversations about the present and the past. Some biographical lines of questioning disturbed him, in particular when they concerned politically sensitive terrain: when I asked too directly “what he thought of the FIS”44 or asked questions about his life during the 1990s—a period when the Algerian Civil War was unfolding.

• 45 “islam de France”
• 46 It is difficult to establish a precise sequence of the granting of trust, since my perception of mi (...)
• 47 ʿAbdallah was a young man of 26 years old, who was my flatmate at the end of my fieldtrip.
• 48 “Soit il a été guidé [par Dieu], soit c’est un espion !”—“I said to myself: ‘Oh, what, he’s in Fran (...)
• 49 “l’islam, le salafisme, sont des objets sensibles.” (Informal conversation, R., 22 January 2022)
• 50 “les ennemis du dīn (religion).”
• 51 “Toi, tu vas être un de ces spécialistes de l’islam de France ! Tu vas travailler à l’Institut du m (...)
• 52 The French colonial authorities implemented a range of measures aimed at bureaucratising Islam in A (...)
• 53 French colonisation in Algeria started in 1830 and ended in 1962. My interlocutors did not know the (...)
• 54 An Algerian who fought for France during the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962).
• 55 In an article from 1990, Lila Abu-Lughod puts forward the hypothesis that, for the “halfie, the cre (...)

30The suspicion that was directed at me, although it was unequally distributed depending on the individuals, places and times, hung over the whole of my field study.46 My sociological profile made my presence unlikely in a Salafist environment that was mainly characterised by precarious circumstances. An Algerian Salafist occupies a position of multiple marginalities compared to a Franco-Algerian graduate: he follows a minority religion that is stigmatised in Algeria (and above all in Kabylia), resides in a country of the Global South, which are generally poorly-equipped in economic and educational capital. My presence was difficult to explain, and thus appeared absurd and requiring only explicable through extraordinary justifications. ʿAbdallah,47 once we had gotten to know each other well, described the alternative that came to his mind when he first met me: “Either he has been guided [by God], or he’s a spy!”48) As I was often told, “Islam and Salafism are sensitive subjects,”49 and “the enemies of dīn (religion)”50 conspire in the shadows. I was carrying out my research in a miscreant country that was really criticised for its disdain of Islam (frequent informal conversations): “You, you’re going to be one of these experts in French Islam! You’re going to work at the Institut du monde arabe!”51 as Rani and Rabah, two of my main interlocutors during my research, put it. The syntagma “French Islam”—islam de France—used in the French context to describe projects of “cultualisation”⁵² of the Muslim religion, was the object of mockery among my interlocutors, in that it supposedly expressed a desire to subject “pure monotheism” to the laws of men. This attitude was part of colonial history going back a hundred and thirty years, during which the occupying power regularly attempted to subjugate the Algerians’ religion by infiltrating it, administering it or simply by knowing it53 (Lorcin 2006). The opposition between Islam and infidels is part of a structured system of contrastive pairs which more generally oppose Good and Evil, ʿilm islamiyya (Islamic science) and ʿilm dunyawi (profane science) and finally, Islamic reason (faith) and scientific reason (rationality, argumentation). While it is important to display a positive attitude to one’s brother in Islam—to charitably interpret his actions, avoid gratuitous suspicions, give him the benefit of the doubt—internalised colonial history and the contemporary political context encourage prudence. The valency of my dual nationality oscillated between the two opposed poles of the prodigal son and the harki.54 Thus, the position of “halfie,” of which Lila Abu-Lughod (1990) has underlined the virtue for research, was far from constituting a useful resource.55 It gave me a problematic ambiguity, and disturbed Abdel, in particular when my activity as a researcher, when it became too explicit, made me tend towards the pole of total otherness.

• 56 For most of my interlocutors, the “Berberists” who, from the end of the 1980s, supported/promoted/c (...)
• 57 “Dans chaque masǧid sunniste [qui suit rigoureusement la sunna, donc salafiste], il y a un espion, (...)
• 58 “sécurité contre dépolitisation.”

31I should also mention that suspicion is a common cognitive mechanism in Algeria, and particularly in Kabylia. Ordinary political rationality rests on conspiracy theories.56 This mistrust is heightened among Salafists, who know that they are under the surveillance of the Algerian state and act according to this assumption: “In every Sunni masǧid, [which rigorously follows the Sunna, and is therefore Salafist] there is a spy, there is surveillance, we know this,”57 ʿAbdallah would often tell me. In a book from 1990, Abdelkader Yefsah uses the expression “spyitis” (“espionnite”) to describe the fear of each citizen of being under surveillance in Boumediène’s Algeria (1965–1979). The forms of expression of spyitis changed after the 1990s and the Algerian Civil Car, during which the Islamists sparked a revolt that was violently repressed and the intelligence services massively expanded. I will not have the time to verify this hypothesis, but I believe that Abdel’s subjectivity was shaped by the social pact of governmentality that followed this dark decade: “security in exchange for depoliticisation,”58 which made him particularly sensitive to any criticism of the regime, and to any political subject—it was a genuine taboo, the mere mention of which caused him physical discomfort. Having benefitted from modest access to a pension by being employed in the public sector, and from public housing, particularly dependent on the welfare state and lacking any network of solidarity based on his lineage (he is the only child of his mother, who is his father’s third wife), Abdel was particularly keen to preserve this precarious stability. His desire for an ordinary, peaceful life was certainly troubled by the presence of a Franco-Algerian ethnographer in a Salafist environment.

32These contextual elements invite us to take some precautions regarding the more pathologising and idiosyncratic interpretations of the waswās. We can see that it is not reductible to an individual’s cognitive functions, and must first be understood based on the social dynamics that underpin it. The country’s history provides suspicion with its own grammar, and is shared, perhaps in a less violent and less systematic form, by many men for whom their relationship to the political has been constructed within the same authoritarian matrix. Having revealed this, we can take an interest in the ways in which this trouble has been displayed in concrete terms within the framework of my fieldwork relationship with Abdel. While the field created conversational routines which allowed for the serenity of an ordinary exchange of speech, this acquired comfort was sometimes suddenly disrupted. This happened when the research approach became formal or too explicit, either by my suggesting carrying out a semi-structured interview, or simply by my asking questions that were interpreted as aiming at the acquisition of scientific knowledge. Obstacles to knowledge then themselves became subjects of knowledge.

• 59 “maître du jeu.”
• 60 “maître du je.”

34The second source is also a recording, which was made fortuitously, a little before a weekly preaching of the ǧumuha prayer in a mosque of the city of Tizi-Ouzou. During this episode, I learnt that Abdel had stopped working as a security guard seven years earlier, unlike what he had led me to believe up until that point. As he explained to me the circumstances that led to him losing his job, he told me the story of a professional conflict during which he displayed a great suspicion towards his line manager, which to me was reminiscent of the waswās. By looking at this narrative objectively, in light of the issue of subalternity, our understanding is refined. In fact, Abdel was attempting to remain “master of the [professional] game”59 through a defensive mistrust which allowed him to preserve some margin of manoeuvre against the rigid structure imposed by the Human Resources Manager. This allowed him to resist subordination and also to remain “master of himself,”60 meaning that he preserved his feeling of dignity and social value, by performing a public servant’s exemplarity.

• 62 “‘frappe’ avec des sous-entendus (lemâun).” (Yacine 2011)
• 63 “dire sans dire”
• 64 “un discours adressé en principe à un tiers alors qu’il s’adresse à soi.” (ibid.)
• 65 He wraps it up in various rhetorical tools—in particular amusing metaphors—which give the conversat (...)

36During the conversation, I asked Abdel questions, but he skilfully ignored and avoided them, overturning the structure of the conversation and implicitly calling my position into question. The focussed attention of a face-to-face forced us to talk, but speech was dangerous, since, for my interlocutor, my intentions were not clear. Because there was a tension between the obligation to communicate and the worry of compromising oneself, Abdel neutralised speech and produced an “omnibus” discourse (Bourdieu 2010), speaking as if he was being heard, was going to be listened to, as if the walls had ears and one had to speak with parsimony. Then, surreptitiously, he “‘strikes’ with hints (lemâun62),” certainly aimed at me when he suggests that Islam should not be misused “to try, for the needs of life, to give an image…” This interlocutive technique is characteristic of the register of indirect address that the works of Tassadit Yacine on Kabyle meta-communicational practices allow us to analyse. We have here a subtle art of “saying without saying”63 or of saying the unsayable, in certain situations where the structure of the distribution of speech constrains expression (due to issues of propriety or domination, for example related to gender). In the present case, the power of the indirect address resides in the ability to produce “a discourse aimed at a third party when in fact it is aimed at oneself.”64 Abdel formulates suspicions but in doing so uses an abstract example in which it is nevertheless easy for me to recognise myself. He thus does not break off our communication, but keeps me at a good distance by indicating that he knows what is really going on here.65

• 66 “étudier [sa] psychologie”

37As I reread this extract a year and a half after my field study, I detect in it a legitimate and rational mistrust. Given the colonial past and my own ambiguous position, it is understandable for Abdel to be wary of my questions and to keep me at a good distance. His suspicion is even formulated using an emic grammar of which it displays his control. My interlocutor reveals himself here to be a genuine argaz (man) socialised in the subtle art of the management of distances and the sense of limits. The ability to overcome the tension between propriety and distance is characteristic of men who are educated, courteous but not naive, respectful of their interlocutors but not fooled by them. If I was reading Abdel’s attitude as an expression of the waswās, it was above all because I was surprised—and inconvenienced—that a man I had entertained a friendly relationship with for a year could doubt my intentions. It was also because my contextual perception was informed by meta-communicational data that are evacuated by the strict recording of the words exchanged. The issue here is nevertheless not to enrich my description by adding in the kinaesthetic register—shifty looks, forms of bodily engagement and disengagement—but to think about what these words mean. As a counterpoint to Geertzian “thick description,” which pays attention to the stratified hierarchy of significant structures (Geertz 1998), this narrow description, which isolates a single layer of meaning, allows for a different form of objectivation and allows us to understand Abdel solely through what he says—whereas the unease that I felt in context pushed me towards what Benoît Majerus (2013) calls “diagnostic circularity,” the interpretation of every action through the prism of a presupposition about mental trouble—and reveals the logic that underpins its inferential processes. Far from being muddled, these doubts then seem very justified, and invite us to examine the power relations that underpin fieldwork relations. In an article from 1962, Edwin Lemert puts forward the hypothesis of a “conspiratorial nature of exclusion.” Processes of marginalisation can lead the people marginalised to imagine a “pseudo-community” that seems to them to be plotting against them. By underlining that paranoia can arise out of interactional dynamics, this proposition allows us to depathologise mental trouble. It should nevertheless be enriched with an analysis of the problem of domination, and invite us to ask ourselves to what extent unequal distribution of power corresponds to the unequal distribution of knowledge which can lead to paranoia. Here, it seems clear to me that my relationship with Abdel is based on a structural inequality connected to North-South relations, and on the exclusion of the interlocutor from the space within which scientific work is made accessible. What is the point of my justifications and explanations about my research work: the fact remains that it is carried out in a country that is ontologically an enemy, so that my questions are always read according to this postulate. Finally, it is not insignificant that Abdel fears at the end that I am planning on “studying [his] psychology.”66 For him, ethnographic knowledge was doubly suspect: as anthropology, it was a Western science and a knowledge-power acquired within colonial relations of domination; as an ethnographic practice, it displayed a family resemblance to psychiatric analysis. Mistrust was then inscribed within a relation of domination and an irremediably differentiated access to the world.

• 67 Abdel was convinced that the resurgence of his mental troubles originated in his having neglected t (...)

39I am starting here from a conversation I had with Abdel, during which I learnt that he was no longer a security guard, contrary to what he had led me to believe up until that point. He told me about why his career was interrupted, as a result of a conflict with his superiors. He had been sharing his position with two other employees, each of them working one week out of three. Because he needed to move house, Abdel asked for a period of leave which came to an end midweek, so that he was not able to return to his job without disturbing the regular alternation between work and rest. Although he had been replaced by a colleague, he was accused of having been absent without justification by the new Human Resources Manager. Destabilised by his moving,67 he obtained a medical certificate which retroactively justified this absence. The manager, whom he described as malevolent, suspected him of lying. While Abdel’s defensive strategies in the face of this manager are a priori reminiscent of the suspicion-waswās, I show that they are better understood in light of the relationship of professional subalternity that structured his place of work. Abdel intended to stay “master of the [professional] game” by refusing to submit to his manager’s authority. As such, his carefully maintained vagueness about his professional activity can be seen as part of a strategy of validation aimed at remaining “master of himself”—preserving his sense of dignity—in spite of the difficulties of life. Abdel still felt like a loyal servant, even though he was no longer working, and took particular care to display, in his daily life, a professionalism worthy of a public servant.

• 68 “chômage technique depuis sept ans…”
• 69 “incarnée et saturée d’affectivité…” (Le Breton 2017)
• 70 “Et moi, je rentre le 15…”

42When he told me he had been on “furlough for the past seven years,”68 I reacted with surprise, and then made our conversation more tense with a concatenation of questions. By asking if he “still [got] all [his] wages”and if he had “a diagnosis,” I was in fact creating a situation similar to the one he was describing, conjuring up the stigma of idleness and duplicity which had been expressed by the Human Resources Manager. It thus becomes easier to understand the tension that goes through the whole conversation, and the intensity of Abdel’s responses to my insistent interrogation. He offers up a speech that is “embodied and saturated with affectivity,”69 and genuinely relives the scene. The arguments given to his manager also seem to be aimed at me. The limits between past and present retract, as is hinted at by the chronological indications and decontextualised details (“And me, I come back on the 15th”70). I pushed him into a defensive reaction, during which he argued, for the first time in our relationship, that he was a “psychiatric patient”—whereas the rest of the time he would be at pains to present himself as healthy and would insist that he was not a “handicapped” person, a “psychiatric patient” or “mad.” Claiming the quality of psychiatric patient is here part of a strategy of respectability, since it is a response to the suspicion of idleness that is imposed by the structuring framework of justification. The challenge that Abdel was facing, both with me but also with his line manager, was needing to seem ill enough not to seem lazy, but healthy enough to remain worthy of respect. The acknowledgement of his infirmity had to go hand in hand with presenting a wretched image of himself, and giving up on the ways of presenting himself that made him appear to be a respectable man.

• 71 The sudden entrance of women into managerial positions was indeed often described by my interlocuto (...)
• 72 “d’homme à homme…”

44But Abdel’s detachment is not the heroic resistance of a subaltern individual, as defined by the mythology of the “weapons of the weak” as analysed by James Scott (1985). It also displays a defiance in the face of a new hierarchy which was disturbing the dominant system of sex and gender. Abdel expressed defiance against a professional environment which departed from the traditional representations of masculinity and femininity, within which men have the functions of authority and decision-making power (Yacine 2000). We should note that he did not entirely refuse to provide legal proof of his disability, but rather subverted the company’s hierarchy by handing it in elsewhere, presenting his manager with a minimal and insolent form of engagement which broke with the formality she was expecting (he announced that he “told her orally” that he was sick, as if it were not important). His refusal to provide proof of this is thus a form of negation of the right of the other person—of the woman—to request it.71 This mistrust-distance is a defence of virility, the ultimate refuge of his feeling of worth. Throughout the narrative, Abdel presents himself as a man who “knows how to talk,” i.e. who is able to defend himself against the hierarchical order but also to understand the issues at the heart of situations and to argue his case. We can perceive his claim to dignity when he displays a sense of work well done (in the idiom of shopfloor culture, as it has well been analysed by Willis, 2006 [1977]), boasting to the president of APC—a man [argaz] with whom one can speak between men, “man to man,”72 as part of personalised relations founded on the sense of honour and of respect for a man’s word—that he has many years of experience and has displayed flawless professionalism. He thus presents himself as a “member of the civil service” whose position is protected because his loyalty is constant. He draws the self-portrait of a man who honours the values of exemplary Kabyle masculinity [tirrugza], based on honour, respect for a man’s word, a sense of duty, and the ability to honour one’s obligations (Yacine 2000; Bourdieu 1972). This display of exemplarity was in fact replayed for my benefit when he refused to reveal, at the end of our conversation, “the country’s faults.” So that Abdel seemed to still be playing his role as a loyal security guard. The embellishment of his career did not seem to be purely connected to the register of self-performance, but also to that of incarnation—it is significant that he included his seven years of sick leave in his twenty-two years of professional experience. This institutional loyalty is like a way of continuing to work at a job that requires certain skills, certain cultivated dispositions of the body and, above all, a particular ethics.

• 73 Le Courant redefines serendipity not just as an ability to change one’s lines of questioning during (...)
• 74 “insider (préalablement intégré à son terrain), midsider (intégré sous certains aspects, extérieur (...)

48The alternation of registers of engagement that characterised my relationship with Abdel invite us to reflect on what is the “right distance” in ethnography, which Alban Bensa (1995) defines as an epistemological balancing act between engagement and detachment. The ethnography put forward here highlights that detachment arises out of a negotiation with one’s interlocutors, that they sometimes contest it (Broqua 2009; Thorne 1979), that it is often limited by the characteristics of the enquiry (Makaremi 2008), but, more generally, that it is modulated. As such, as Stefan Le Courant (2013) proposes, the ethnographer must not set off in search of an illusory “just balance,” but rather must take advantage of the range of positions which he experiments with, which can oscillate from strong involvement to detachment, from trust to mistrust.73 Based on the case of Abdel, we come to replace the analysis of the researcher’s insertion into the field according to a gradient of “insider (already integrated to their field), midsider (integrated in some ways and external in others), outsider (external to the field74)”with a more nuanced reflection on the modulations of detachment that characterise the ethnographic process. The ways in which Abdel tried to get closer to me to initiate me into Islam, pulled away when he seemed suspicious of me, viewed me as a ward, a traitor, a monetary resource… allow us to interrogate the relations of domination that underpin the waswās and the forms of resistance which it attempts to articulate.