Ahmed Zakarya Mitiche

Ahmed Mitiche’s research traces the social life of takwīn al-nafs—a politically and metaphysically attuned practice of ethical self-cultivation—as it emerged in the context of Algerian resistance to French settler-colonialism and its aftermath. The work examines how scholars, writers, and activists sought to reconstitute dismantled and disfigured linkages, both discursive and divine, in the struggle against what they provocatively termed “the colonization of the soul.” With the support of the Foundation, Ahmed conducted two extended periods of ethnographic and archival fieldwork in Algeria with graduates of the schools of the Jemʿiyyat al-ʿUlamāʾ al-Muslimīn al-Jazāʾiriyyīn (AOMA) in the 1940s-1950s and attendees of the study circles of writer and critic Malek Bennabi in the 1960s-1970s. Reading the discourses, practices, and texts of these circles across the interstitial periods before and after the Revolution (1954–1962), the research attends to their shifting registers, affects, and modalities. It shows how takwīn al-nafs operates as a practice of self/soul-formation attuned not only to material decolonization but also to expansive imaginaries of being and belonging in relation to the divine, the earth, and other imperceptible realities, and how this lived practice becomes an analytic for troubling colonial-modern categories, thereby extending anthropological debates on subjectivity, tradition, and decolonization.