text: Most obvious and impressive, perhaps, are the signs of abstention that refer to traditions with a fundamentally symbolic value, for example wearing the veil or the fez. The traditional function of the veil became superimposed by another function, that indicates the colonial context. Even without detailed analysis it becomes clear that the veil serves primarily to defend one’s privacy and to protect it from violation, a fact that Europeans have always vaguely recognised. By wearing the veil, the Algerian woman creates a situation of non-reciprocity; she plays an unfair game by seeing without being seen, without allowing herself to be seen. As such, by means of the veil, the ruled society as a whole refuses to reciprocate by seeing, observing and penetrating without allowing itself to be seen, observed and penetrated.
  A man without work goes off in the morning, more or less early, depending on whether he really has hopes or is already resigned; all morning he walks from one building site to another, relying on the advice of a friend, a cousin, or a neighbour. He stops at a café and has a drink and a smoke with his friends. Looking for work becomes a whole occupation.
  The search for work is the one constant factor in an existence swept to and fro by the whim of accident, together with the daily failure of that search. You look for work “left and right”; you borrow “left and right”; you borrow on the left to repay on the right. “I borrow and borrow, and float like an orange peel on water”, says an unemployed man from Constantine.
  Work is neither an end in itself nor a virtue per se. What is valued is not action directed towards an economic goal, but activity in itself, regardless of its economic function and merely on condition that it has social function. The self-respecting man must always be busy doing something. If he can find nothing to do, ‘at least he can carve his spoon’.
  “Sometimes I work for 10 days, sometimes for 15, but never in a row, not regularly. I’m a construction site driver at the moment. My children need bread. Any job will do then. It is better than running around aimlessly and not bringing anything home. Look at my children, they haven’t got anything to wear. Look at my house, it’s not a house, it’s a shed. Any job is fine with me if I earn enough to feed my children. I haven’t got any other job. That’s the way my life is, it’s just that the money isn’t OK. Everything else will work out, that’s the way we are” (Driver, Oran).
  The authentic farmer must uphold rural values, even if exposed to life in the town: the rural community, that is usually sparing with recognition, is full of praise for those that still respect its patterns and norms, that continue to live, feel and think as farmers and “follow the path of their fathers and their grandfathers”. They say, “He lives there like at home”, “he hasn’t become a beldi [townie], he hasn’t become conceited yet”.
  
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