La tribu au Maghreb et au Sahara (Antiquité-Temps présent)

The question posed by J. Berque ("What is a North African tribe?" in L'éventail de l'histoire vivante. Hommage à Lucien Febvre, 1954, repeated in L'autre et l'ailleurs. Hommages Roger Bastide, 1976) illustrates the importance of the notion of tribe in the field of human and social sciences in the Maghreb. The word 'tribe' is part of everyday scientific language, evoking North African society - but also that of other regions of the world - and its organization and history, from Antiquity to the present day. However, the notion to which it refers remains the subject of much debate, on which this book offers a new, multi-disciplinary perspective.

This one examines the interplay between individual and collective identity, the ways in which they are expressed and the material culture to which they refer, the relationship between the state and the tribe, the links between tribes and territory through reference to a terroir and/or wider areas, and the different meanings of the term in different contexts. The aim is to propose a discussion of the notion of tribe considered over the long historical period in the Maghreb and Sahara, in order to measure its evolutionary characteristics as closely as possible.