What happened to me in
Hawdh al-Ashraf, at
the end of my first fieldwork in 2003? Why
did I run away to the Capital three weeks before the scheduled
date of my return flight, only to fall
into the arms of an exiled Taizi from this neighborhood? Unwittingly,
this most respectable bank employee achieved to convince me that all
Yemenis were homosexual. How did
they collectively make
me surrenderto
this strange
belief? And why can
I no longer erase this
idea, now hauntingall my sociological
claims?
Hawdh al-Ashraf is a famous square
at the center of modern Taiz. Before the war it was a
soukand a
nation-wide traffic hub, coexisting with
residential areas, wherecafés and restaurants
worked around
the clock. Since
2015, the frontline dividing Yemen runs
through this sector, the
most emblematic hotspot of
the contested city. This place also
represents more than a decade of my life :
it was the setting of a long course research in anthropology, a master
then a PhD, to which I fully dedicated myself from
2003 to 2013.
Hawdh al-Ashraf was a Yemen in miniature, with all segments
of society within reach of face-to-face interaction. I stayed there
approximately three months a year (until 2010), observing interactions and
trying to build consistent relationships with my interlocutors. The rest
of my time spent in France, I struggled to
make sense of what I observed, in relation to local
social history and ethnographic methodology. In
academic circles, my methodological choices never ceased to raise
interest, but isolated me at the same time, as people
failed to reckon with my position in the field. As
early as 2005, I re-formulated my study in terms of “homoerotic”
misunderstandings, hence explainingmy
underlying motivations with utmost sincerity. Insisting
to challenge the “Great Divide” between sociology
and anthropology, I
claimed in substance that homeroticism was but a
mechanical consequence of thiscommitment, and thus
persisted in this symmetrical approach. Still my arguments were met by
blank stares : how could I live
in that place for so long, assuming these problematics?
So I took pains explaining how I got myself into this situation :
soon the story of 2003 was 90% clear, and then 99%, then 99.9,
99.99… All this bore witness to the consistency of that social
scene - but not a 100% certitude, and finally I was forced to
abandon my PhD. Whatever the demonstrative efforts I deployed, society
in Hawdh al-Ashraf simply did not exist.
Finally one year ago,
after the death of former president Saleh, I
reconsidered an incident that happened with Nabil in
2003, during my very last days in Taiz. I never mentioned it anywhere in
my writings. Nabil was the chief of the
inspection police in Taiz’s central souk, and a local charismatic figure
in Hawdh al-Ashraf, who died in a car accident a few years later. On May
27th 2018, fifteen
years after that night, I realized that Nabil did not try to rape me.
Fifteen
years ago when I first set out to do reflexive ethnography1
in Yemen, I chose instinctively to do fieldwork in the city of Taiz, and
was then driven by various circumstances to a particular square, called
Hawdh al-Ashraf. I
was drawn unconsciously tothat
place, as it appears to me with the distance,
because itgave
me the possibility to adopt the posture that I wished for, in terms of
reflexivity and symmetrical anthropology. I didn’t know the word at the
time, but I was trying to take a cybernetic
approach to social reality : to
constantly feed
back my analyses to the field of my own
socialization.And
in no other places in Yemen did social
realities coexist to such an extent with their representations.
Hawdh al-Ashraf means the « Pool of
Saints ». In the days of the imam, it used to be a station for camels
outside the old city, and just below Ahmad’s Palace in
Gahmaliyya. Then it became the central station, the
terminal for shared taxis
from the Capital Sanaa, from the Socialist South and from all over the
country. The Prefecture was built there, it became a souk and a
nation-wide traffic hub, a very important place in the new modern city
of Taiz. Towards the end of the 1990ies, traffic jams had become
endemic. Most taxis coming from Sanaa would push their way up to Hawdh
al-Ashraf, but the station itself was moved downhill, in al-Hawban.
Hawdh al-Ashraf became a roundabout amongst the hundreds of roundabout
that make up the city of Taiz, with the same shops on the avenues, and
the same narrow streets in the background.
I spent ten years of my life
there, either physically, or mentally in between my trips. Hawdh
al-Ashraf was the experimental system in which I locked myself up -
as a former student in physics.And
I remember my supervisor - who was a
historian - saying to me at more than one
stage of my work : « What’s with
roundabout ?? Just get away!
Open the windows! »
And indeed I
could hardly
explain what kept me attached to this place,
except for clumsy confessions, and the
far-fetched experimental justifications that
I elaborated over the years.
Then the Arab Spring came,
and Taiz suddenly stormed in at the center of
Yemen’s political scene. In
spite of that, the Academy was not convinced, I had to give up my PhD in
2013, and I moved to a small city in the South of France to turn the
page. But then the war broke out in
2015, and the frontline quickly stabilized in
« wadi al-qadi », exactly in the distance that separates the
two terminals, between al-Hawban and Hawdh al-Ashraf.
* * *
By taking a look on maps
of the conflict at different dates, the
centrality of this zone clearly
appears : both the
centrality of Taiz in the fight for lower Yemen, and the centrality of
Hawdh Al-Ashraf in the fight for Taiz.
On the animated pictures above, the
front line moves but it remains locked in Taez. On the picture below, the frontline evolves
around Taez, but remains locked around the hill ofthe Presidential Palace, right in between Hawdh
Al-Ashraf and Al-Hawbân :
The hill of the Presidential Palace
is a strategic position at the eastern entrance of the city, linking
to both Sanaa and Aden. Its underground is believed to host large
stocks of weaponry stored by former President Ali Saleh. Since
the beginning of the war, it has been the main Houthi stronghold in
Taiz, while the city itself was rapidly regained by pro-Hadi forces,
including the former headquarters of State power in the modern
city - the Palace of the imam in al-Gahmaliyya (1948-1962) and the
Prefecture in Hawdh al-Ashraf - all located in their times by the
eastern entrance (see the stars on the aerial pictures below). In 2011,
clashes regularly occurred in Hawdh al-Ashraf, as the demonstrators
marched from Freedom Square (in green) up to the Prefecture.
The surroundings of the Presidential palace are now a place
of snippers and landmines, including the bus station in Al-Hawbân. To go
from al-Hawban to al-Hawdh, one needs to drive through the surrounding
mountains and cross several checkpoints. It takes 5 hours and 3000 yemeni
rials (11€). This situation is well described in
François-Wavier Trégan’s documentary : « Yémen,
chaos
and silence »
(starting from 23:00for
images of Hawdh al-Ashraf, and 31:00 for the crossing of the frontline).
The same view from
the top of Djebel Sabir, now held by pro-Hadi
forces :
The square of
Hawdh al-Ashraf has now become one
of the most emblematicplace of the
country’s division :
Journalists from TV channels Skynews-Arabic (February
19th 2016) and Suhayl
(March 2nd
2016),
standing on the Square of Hawdh al-Ashraf.
During the
academic year that followed, I wrote a memoir3
on a young charismatic leader’s influence on the unemployed youth of his
neighborhood, dissecting his ideology and the extent of his authority.
The leader’s ability to attract a prestigious
guest was analyzed as a validating proof of his charisma. At the time, I
was totally incapable to analyze my active role in that story,
especially the negotiation process that preceded : it actually
took three more weeks until Ziad agreed to
socialize me in his neighborhood.
Three days after
we met (August 17th),
Ziad pretended he had applications to submit in Sanaa. He proposed me to
follow him, just for a few days, and I gladly accepted. But once in
Sanaa, it quickly became psychologically unbearable to be isolated with
him there, simultaneously meeting other foreign expatriates in Sanaa,
whom I felt could not understand what was going on. Their simple
presence made me feel crazy, as if I was willingly letting an islamist
cast a spell on me. Hoping to find my balance back, I would reach out
for Yemenis I previously met and tell them about Ziad, but in the end I
would break down and cry, which made me feel even more crazy. For
reasons I could hardly explain, that relationship was only conceivable
in Taiz, in Ziad’s own environment.
On August 23rd,
I finally decided to return by myself, as we were supposed to return to
Taiz any day soon. But Ziad actually waited ten long days until he
returned. He said to me on the phone : “Go
to my room in the
neighborhood, my older brother Nabil will welcome you there.”
So from the next day on, I gladly returned to Hawdh al-Ashraf, and
started to move back and forth between the Square and the Neighborhood,
between the friends of Taher and Ziad’s brother, who began introducing
me to the young neighbors. I did not realize at the time, but I was put
under observation, as in a quarantine. For Nabil was far from being an
intellectual, nor was he a credible “student”, like most persons I had
dealt with until then.
Nabil was five years older than
us, around 28. His maternal grand-father and great uncles had bought this
land at the time he was born, constructed the house and decided to move
there from the Old City. Nabil was the
first-born son of the first-born daughter, the very
first generation who grew up in this new neighborhood. As a
young man, he became one of the leading figure
in Hawdh al-Ashraf. He was then recruited by
the Municipality in the
mid-1990ies, and
became the chief of the inspection police in the central souk. Nabil was
kind of a legend, both admired and hated, but at this time nobody told
me anything. As I understand it now, there was a long negotiation
process with the surrounding society, with my initial contacts in the
French Department and also within the neighborhood. Abderrahman’s friend
Tarek had travelled to France one year earlier, and landed in remote
suburban areas’ public schools, where he taught Arabic. He had met me
only once in the center of Paris, in the Cafeteria of the École Normale
Supérieure. It turned out that none really knew where I came from.
At that moment, Nabil disappeared for a
few days, but I kept stopping by and chat with his cousins and
neighbors in Ziad’s room. Then the room’s entrance started
to evolve, taking a new shape every day :
the door’s width was reduced ; then a lower wall
was build as an obstacle in the way ; then the gate itself was
walled, forcing visitors to go throughthe gate of the “families” (women).Nabil
would rebuild the entrance every night, hoping to discourage his
embarrassing guest, but I simply did not understand that those
modifications were directed to me.
For one thing, I did not know the codes of public and
domestic spaces, and I could not discern the routine from the exceptional,
as everything was new to me. But more importantly, I did not feel the
weight of my presence. Or I should say, Yemenis actively mobilized to
neutralize this competence in me. The idea that
my presence was a problem for Nabil was
considered, but that hypothesis would have needed confirmation. No Yemeni
would ever take the risk to validate it, as it amounted to dismantle all
the established patterns of interaction on which my socialization relied.
In Taiz, the Yemeni capital of “open-minded” modernism, the weight of the
Western guest was a taboo.
Finally Nabil informed me that Ziad was going to come back (September
3rd). Local society
had somehow accepted the situation : I continued to live with Taher
in the University lodgings, but I became the host of Ziad’s family, more
than the French Department’s former students. A process I was hardly
aware of.
I must insist that until Ziad’s return, society in Hawdh
al-Ashraf appeared quite peaceful and unified. There appeared to be a
global consensus, and I had proved my ability to abide
by the rules set by this consensus, except for minor behavioral
incongruities that could be overlooked on the part of
a Westerner. Dissensions began to appear after Ziad’s return, in
relation to his efforts to raise my
consciousness. Yemeni society actively resisted Ziad’s
initiative : it tacitly agreed to cleave
temporarily along familiar lines, and reunited after excluding the
troublemaker. This resulted for me in a subjective experience that was
disconcertingly consistent, in relation to sociological and
anthropological categories.
And then on September 29th,
late that night,we were sitting
in a side street with the young neighbors, under the walls of the
Prefecture, conducting the same never-ending sociological interview.
Ammar suddenly came rushing : Nabil was drunk, the idea to screw
the French guy was in his head, and he just came out carrying a weapon
to chase me in the streets. We took refuge with Ammar in Nashwan’s
apartment, who lived alone with his mother just above, while the other
boys cleared out. And a few minutes later indeed, Nabil
called Nashwan from the street, shouting :
- “Where is the French?”
- “He went home already…”
- “Alright.”
Two more hours we sat in the darkness of
Nashwan’s apartment, with Ammar and him digging
up old neighbors’ stories of alleged child
abuse, passionate
intrigues andgeneralized
clientelism, expressing
their thirst for freedom - or
maybe just trying to probe me relentlessly
from every angle, through all those
stories… Then they took me through the side
streets of the neighborhood until the Square, where I found a taxi. Two
days later I went to Sanaa, initially just for a few days break, but
actually I remained there the three remaining weeks with
Waddah - the
bank employee, a more distant cousin of Ziad -
until I flew back to France (October 23rd).
Hence “Homosexuality” became the
core of my relationship to Yemeni society. But not
in the sense of a “sexual deviance”, to
decidedly break norms of decency, on the contrary. “Homosexuality”
was the name of unwritten
domestic rules, whose existence I suspected,
despite the denial of Taizi modernism (Taiz supposedly was not “a tribal
region”…). The sentiment I called “homosexuality” became my
pride in Yemeni society : a confidence in my
sense of honor, in my ability to eventually
overcome the handicap of intellectualist
categories6,
to lift myself out of the discursive traps set
by Yemenis and respect their
social norms.
These were such fundamental beliefs that
I never questioned the incident. Only in the
winter of 2018, after the collapse of the whole country and the death of
former president Ali Saleh, I started preparing to talk in Arabic on
youtube, about what happened to me in 2003. In March I put out a video7,
to empty my bag once for all… But again two months later, on May 27th
2018, I realized that it was not logical : Nabil did not intend to
rape me at all, not even intended to pretend. When he went out that
night, he was not drunk, he was not wearing a weapon : he just
meant to tell us to go home, to stop annoying the workers who were
sleeping next to us. Ammar saw him coming, and he made up that story in
an instant, to avoid a confrontation. Ammar wanted to protect the
complacency of our relationship, the story we were telling each other.
There was no Regime behind Nabil’s actions, it was all in our heads… The
sexual tension came from the contradictions of my interlocutors, and the
tacit agreement not to confront the Westerner with his own gaze. Yemenis
needed to maintain my ignorance. And I was not
fooled, but they left me no way to prove it, except by sharing the
secret of their collective “homosexuality”. And
during all those years, the Regime was the
alibi of our interactional complacency.
Yemenis in the 2000’s used to be a bit
obsessed with this kind of dreams, especially in Taiz. I wouldn’t be
surprised if things had changed now. In spite of the peace and security,
Taiz in the 2000s was a society of extreme uncertainty in social
relationships. Routine vulgarity was a sign of that, to the point that
it became a defining feature of Taizi identity in larger Yemen, as the
Capital of Yemeni modernity9.
As will clearly appear below, in the story of my socialization in 2003,
uncertainty was a cognitive phenomenon, inextricably linked to the
Yemenis’ self-conscience in Western categories. Râzim
was considered an indissoluble part of modernity, something educated
Yemenis needed to laugh about, but could not laugh about in front of a
Westerner.
This sketch by humorist
Khalil Salim, found on
Youtube,
will introduce you
torâzim…
Cognitive science warns
us on the difficulty to prove wrong a
hallucination. If I say : “Nabil
did not rape me”, scientists observe
that a mental image is created in the head of my interlocutor, and the
image shows Nabil raping
me.The primary
process ignores the negative. Negation only
exists in the sphere of language, but language needs to create the image
first. That is why the enterprise of the Humanities is not so
simple : to document the lives of others is not enough to save
them. More often, on the contrary, verbalizing means cursing.
To protect one single local story in the global world, it takes
discipline. It takes a life’s engagement, nothing less than a religion.
[This
paragraph was initially the text’s opening, added at the last minute
for purpose of clarification. I think the clarification was actually
counter-productive as it broke the text’s construction. Moved down
here on April 30th.]
The work I submitted in June 2004
clearly rested against the allegation
of a pre-existing sociological divide between
the square and the
neighborhood, a hypothesis
that I systematically questioned
afterwards : a
knot in a handkerchief, inherited from my first stay in Hawdh al-Ashraf,
that I took pain to untie in all my subsequent works.
It is no accident that thesame dividing line,
in the war that
erupted in 2015,
would symbolically organize the separation of the country - between
Aden and Sanaa,
between a bureaucratic legitimacy and a
traditional-charismatic one,
between the Yemen within the scope of sociology
and that other Yemen within the scope of anthropology…
In Hawdh al-Ashraf, those
two Yemens used to coexist
within a teacup. That
dividing line started to appear at the very moment I set foot in Taiz. Or
to be more precise, it
started to appearat
the very moment I started to be taken
by Yemeni society. Divisions started to
appear at the moment when I “fell in love”, and
Yemenis started to position themselves in relation to that love, either
complicit or contesting,
according to the contingency
of their own place
in that given social
configuration. The
methodology of reflexive ethnography prevented me to believe that
those differences were intrinsic.
But once I returned to France, to
construct an argument that made sense, I spontaneously imported
a divide predominant at the time in the sociology of France, between the
haves (bourgeois city-centers) and the have-nots (the suburbs of
postcolonial immigration)11.
On the one hand, the young shopkeepers on the Square, with whom I
identified discursively, because they had an occupation, all presented
themselves as students, and seemed to talk freely when they answered my
questions ; on the other hand, the young neighbors gathered around
the Za’im, with whom I identified at a more profound and intimate level. I
identified with the sociological condition of the former, and with the
anthropological condition of the latter. But all that
was in my subjective activity, the logic of my
own intellectual investment, not social reality.
Believing in the ontological existence of those two
categories was very tempting, because Yemenis themselves already took
sides in the “little civil war” of my research.But it was not satisfying intellectually :
Why think that the frontier
between social classes would run right in the middle of that particular
square? More
importantly, I never
forgot the circumstances of my departure from the field, the moment when
I consciously betrayed my interlocutors by
believing in their “homosexuality”. I never
gave up the hope to return there and regain my dignity, so
the only solution was to re-appropriate
that act, and assume it in the face of the
persons who shared that story.
This behavior
was fully consistent from an experimental point of view, and completely
insane in the terms of ordinary language.I
underwent an attempted rape, and yet I wanted to go back. I was forced
to admit my “homosexuality”, yet I felt confident. And
whatever the sociological suppositions I was
bound to articulate, I had faith in the underlying
cohesion of Yemeni society. I
never gave up the hope to return to Hawdh
al-Ashraf, and drink again
the water of that
Pool (Quran 108), as
I still did
innocently in 2003
before being expelled from the mathematical Garden,
down to the worldly
frustration of sociological writing.
As weird as it may seem, “homosexuality”
was the provisional name of a religion I
could not yet discover intellectually (no
more than any true understanding of Bateson’s
“Ecology of Mind”, I believe) :
an experimental path of epistemological
critique, leading
to the discoveryof Allah’s
omnipotence (tawhid al-rububiyya)12.
I converted to Islam in September 2007, during my fourth
long trip in Taiz, right in a middle of a decade fully occupied by
this research. In the following years, I became an avid reader
of anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1904-1980), a great theorist of living
systems and the psychology of learning13.
Bateson was one of the founder of the Macy
conferences, who paved the way for cybernetics and other major
theoretical movements. This included
non-academic extensions, commercialized under the label of
“personal development” or “Neuro-Linguistic
Programming”14,
later popularized in the Middle East by such figures as Ibrahim Elfiky
(1950-2012) or Amr Khaled (born 1967). But Gregory Bateson himself is a
better compagnon than “NLP”…
My story in Hawdh al-Ashraf constitutes a
clear case study of the failure of what we may call “cybernetic
humanities” : the Humanities that pretend
to make up for the researcher’s ignorance, through the use of an algorithm.
All humanities today are somehow influenced by
“cybernetic” epistemologies in varying degrees, not
just the field of reflexive ethnography.
In the history
of science, the
founding moment of this
may be traced backto Descartes’
Discourse on the Method,
in 1637 : “Discourse
on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking
Truth in the Sciences”. Cartesianism already
was a cybernetic Humanity.
Then the “method” became more trivial and
complex at the same time, and it took on the Arabic name of
Al-Khawarizmi (780-850),
algorithm.
“Thus, they only spoke to me about it once they thought that
I too had been “taken”—i.e. when uncontrollable reactions on my part
showed that I had been affected by the real (and often devastating)
effects of particular words or ritual acts. Some people took me for a
dewitcher and asked me to help out, whilst others thought I was bewitched
and offered their help. Notables aside (who were happy to speak of
witchcraft the better to dismiss it), nobody ever discussed these things
with me because I was an ethnographer.”
Back in 2006, when I indulged in homoerotic jousts with other
Yemeni young men in the streets of Hawdh al-Ashraf, the implicit
rule of the game was : “Let’s
venture in a homoerotic subjective interaction, without crumbling!”
Because I did crumble at occasions… Without the
possibility of loosing face, the duel would have been pointless.
I am grateful to
the “cybernetic humanities” at a personal level, for being
the cause through which I was brought to
Islam. I find it interesting intellectually
to explain how, as precisely as possible, because
abroader question
needs to be raised : the interaction between cybernetics and islam.
This will allow me, by
contrast, to point the false hopes of
cybernetic humanities, which are a true challenge of our times.
The metaphor is stimulating in so
far as it invites us to relocate the
mind : to take it out of the head of the researcher, and rather
locate it in a global pattern; to rediscover
the role of our “animal” intuition in that story, hence
muting temporarily the usual academic refrain,
the cartesian cogito’s
glorious march to intelligibility. What if we
all knew what was going on, foreign researchers
and Yemenis alike? What if the catastrophe was
produced by misunderstandings that were structural, institutionalized at
every level of Yemen’s Republic : consistently
contradicting ways to connect conscious thoughts with inner feelings?
Wasn’t that already perceptible
in a little piece of Yemeni society, through the
little story of an ethnographer in the streets of Hawdh
al-Ashraf? And isn’t
all that but a warning sign for our broader
civilization’s “appointed term”?
“I’ve always thought that way, that the relation between me
and that book, or the book and the table, is still a microcosm of the
relation between man and God, or God and the Devil, or what have you. That
the big relations and the small relations are all the same thing. For
study purposes, you have to work with small ones sometimes, and then
people blame you for working with small ones. Then you start working with
big ones, and they blame you for being a mystic. But it’s all the same
business.”
Gregory Bateson in 1978 (see
the mini-trailerof a 2011 documentary)
Only my
conversion to Islam forced me to confront these
questions many years
ago, at a time when the survival of Yemeni society didn’t seem to be at
stake, only the survival of my PhD. And it
is quite the same today : what
if it is not Yemen that urgently needs to be saved, rather the social
sciences themselves, in the face of climate change and
the rise of “populisms” around the globe? In
the last analysis, these
larger questions are
theological : they should remain in our minds, but they need notbediscussedexplicitly. Here,
I just meant to introduce
to you the little
nest that I managed to create in my analyzes, for my little story with
Yemen to survive. And
it does tenuously survive, up to this date. I
believe this story may now prove inspiring, if we are to follow the same
path : retrospectively considering the conditions of our previous
studies, and makeroom at long last for
a new Yemen yearning
to be born.
1I
use the word “ethnography” when
I insist on the methodology of fieldwork, “anthropology” when dealing with
more theoretical issues - or “the social sciences”… I
rarely use the word “ethnology”, whose
resonances quite don’t fit my positions. All these words
however point to the same academic discipline.
4The
Regime did send an
interesting interlocutor, at quite an early
stage : a sort of intellectual affiliated
to the General People’s Congress, who started to hang out with Ziad’s
neighbors. His name
was Salah, I never saw him again in subsequent years. Salah was
a very witty and pleasant interlocutor. Wehad
a long discussion during a whole night, on the hill of funduq
al-Ikhwa (September 10th).
But in the end, he told me I should convert to Islam to get what I
wanted : a Yemeni ID-card, perhaps even the Yemeni
nationality, and above all I would get Yemenis to love me… Salah
wanted to understand the bond that linked me to Ziad, but he finally
realized that none could take his place.
5I
feel the need to precise that my mother was a
psychiatrist and freudian psychoanalyst, so I
fell into the cauldron of
magic potion as a child, raised
with the habit of watching my own subjective impulses. That education
played a crucial role, I believe,
in my ability to rethink Yemeni sociology in terms of honor and
face-to-face interactions.
8See
for instance W.G. Andrews and M. Kalpakli, The
Age of Beloveds : Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and
European Culture and Society (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2005); Jocelyne Dakhlia, “Homoérotismes et Trames
Historiographiques Du Monde Islamique,” Annales
HSS 62, no. 5 (2007): 1097–1122.
9Vincent
Planel, “Le Réveil Des Piémonts : Taez et La Révolution Yéménite,”
in Le Yémen, Tournant Révolutionnaire, ed. Laurent Bonnefoy, Franck
Mermier, and Marine Poirier (CEFAS / Karthala, 2012), 125–41.
Arabic translation available : “صحوة
البراغيل : تعز والثورة اليمنية”.
10On
my third return in February 2006, people came
to me in the street, greeting me with a grin for my wedding. The rumor had
it that I was “married to a black servant (khadim)”.
Obviously, the wedding was meant to emphasize the
official character of my supposed coming out,
while race served the de-metaphorization of sexuality - just like
in the humoristic video above.
11There
was little room for a “non-Muslim” popular class in the French debate at
the time, long before the Yellow Vest movement. In that first study, I
was notably influenced by the posture of French sociologist Stephane
Beaud. Somehow, Taizi frustrations were spontaneously identified with
the false promises of school
democratisation in
the French context : S.
Beaud, 80 % Au Bac et Après ? Les Enfants de La Démocratisation
Scolaire (Paris: La découverte, 2002).
13Gregory
Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chandler Pub. Co., 1972); Mind and
Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979); A Sacred Unity:
Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind, ed. R. E. Donaldson (Harper San
Francisco, 1991); Gregory Bateson and Mary Catherine Bateson, Angels Fear:
Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred (New York: Macmillan, 1987).
14R.
Bandler and J. Grinder, Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming
(Moab, Utah: Real People Press, 1979) - contains a short introduction by
Gregory Bateson.
