The Ḥuḍni society in Algeria: Colonization and transformation of forms of domestic habitat (late 19th - mid 20th century)
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The Ḥuḍna, this concave steppe located south of the highlands in the center of Algeria, presented until the end of the 20th century, a sober landscape punctuated by itinerant dwellings, tents called gitûn by Ḥuḍni, inhabitants of the region. This shelter adapted remarkably to the conditions of existence of these nomads and to the hostility of the natural environment. In the early 1870s, the French colonization, proceeded to the destruction of the nomadism by putting an end to the seasonal complementarities of the rangelands which existed between the region of Ḥuḍna and that of the high plains, which led to a progressive sedentarisation of this society and to the adoption of a fixed habitat: ad-dār. In this article, we try, thanks to a historic-architectural approach, on the one hand, to report on the socioeconomic conditions that contributed to the sedentarisation of this society and, on the other hand, to analyze the effects of this sedentarisation on the evolution of the domestic habitat of the Ḥuḍni society. The study covers a period from the end of the 19th century to the 1950s.
Réseaux sociaux