An Empire of Facts

George R. Trumbull IV is Assistant Professor of History at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.

'A richly rewarding analysis that demonstrates convincingly how constructions of cultural knowledge about late nineteenth century Algeria by colonial anthropologists, explorers, and aspirant writers stigmatized entire communities as, at once, inherently criminal and desperately in need of civilization through colonization. In his focus on influential, yet amateur ethnographers - figures whose observations and representations of Algerian social practices typically owed more to orientalist literature than to scientific enquiry - George Trumbull compels us to reconsider the connections between the transmission of ethnographic 'knowledge', the politicization of colonial identities, and the consolidation of colonial states. The result is a clinical dissection of why and how French men and women came to think as they did about colonial Algeria, its culture, its religion, and its people.' Martin Thomas, Exeter University and author of Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914

• Introduction: 'Sa Vie Etrange Autour de Nous'; 1. Writing like a state: the question of anthropology and the colonial origins of politicized ethnography; 2. The lies that empire tells itself when times are easy; 3. 'Au Coin des Rues Diderot et Moïse': the ethnography of the esoteric and the politics of religious sociability; 4. 'Les Mauvais Génies Dans Tous les Contes de Fées': the ethnography of popular religion and the fashioning of Algerian primitivism; 5. 'Have You Need of a Model, He Will Furnish One on Command': the gendering of morality and the production of difference in colonial ethnography; 6. Discipline and publish: militant ethnography and crimes against culture; Conclusion.