Meditation in urban Tunisia

  

Work on the Tunisian countryside is sufficiently rare for us to welcome the publication, in 2020, by Karthala and IRMC editions, in a revised version, of Mathilde Fautras' doctoral thesis on rural transformations in the Sidi Bouzid region ( Central Tunisia), thesis defended in 2016 in Paris x-Nanterre. The work listed here will hold readers' attention all the more because it concerns a region that is readily considered to be the "cradle" of the Tunisian revolution with the immolation by fire in front of the seat of the governorate, on December 17, 2010, by Mohamed Bouazizi, a young fruit seller from the region. 

What relationship can be established between the popular uprisings that followed this tragic event and the agricultural and rural transformations in the countryside of Sidi Bouzid? 2This question is undoubtedly a guiding thread for the research of the author who takes an interdisciplinary approach to answer it. Thus, Mr. Fautras willingly mobilizes the concepts and tools of sociology and anthropology to analyze public action and social relations in this region marked by the significance of family and tribal affiliations. Its approach nevertheless remains deeply rooted in rural geography, for at least two reasons: on the one hand, it seeks to clarify the relationship between land dynamics and socio-spatial transformations, which, we appropriate, is one of the main themes of rural geography; on the other hand, his approach remains deeply marked by geographical analysis. 

The author successively studies rural landscapes, agricultural systems, land policies and agricultural modernization policies, before focusing on the games of actors (practices and strategies) and the balance of power in connection with access to resources, land of course, but also groundwater and public funding for agriculture. Need more details? Going all out (personal interviews, official data, aerial photos, etc.) during data collection, Mr. Fautras builds, from the information collected, analysis tools specific to geographers, numerous thematic maps – land use for example – and summary diagrams, as well as land trajectories and typologies of agricultural systems and operators. The geographer also pays attention to local representations, in particular those of the land market, which allows her, in a comprehensive approach, to integrate the points of view of local actors into the analysis while distancing herself from the discourse often normative and stereotypes of his interlocutors. 

However, the analysis of these local discourses is essential for those who want to understand the genesis of feelings of injustice in the countryside of Sidi Bouzid before the uprisings of the end of 2010. 3M. Fautras’ work makes it possible to establish the main stages in the formation of land and social inequalities over time. As Habib Attia had shown in his thesis on the high steppes of central Tunisia (1977), colonization constituted a key moment in the socio-spatial recomposition of the countryside with the introduction, at the end of the 19th century, of of capitalist agriculture and private property in a sector hitherto dominated by extensive agriculture and livestock farming and by collective land management. 

Coupled with recurring droughts, colonization profoundly transformed the rural economy and society: settlers developed vast olive groves cultivated in dry-farming in the first half of the 20th century; the inter-regional complementarities which hitherto governed economic life were broken with the increased control of the movement of men and goods by the colonial authorities and the expansion of cultivated land; eventually, herders became sedentary and transformed into peasants (Ibid.). Cumulatively, these processes accentuated existing inequalities, to the benefit of local notables, while poor peasants could no longer benefit from the “redistributive role of collective property” due to the “individualization of property” (p. 102).