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Through an interview with Lilia Ben Salem, this articles retraces certain aspects of sociology in Tunisia: the considerable influence of the French university system on the Tunisian university system during the first decade of Tunisia’s independence, the role played by the CERES, one of the first social science research centres, in the 1960s, the developmental approaches adopted in the 1960s, followed by the debates in the 1970s on the notion of cultural specificity, the effects of arabicising teaching and the professional outlook for sociologists at a time of employment saturation in public administration.