Tassadit Yacine-Titouh was born on November 14^th, 1949 in Metchik, Bejaia district in Algeria. She belongs to a family that was highly repressed during the Algerian war. Her own father was executed  as a warning example in 1956. He was one of the first fighters to be killed in action.

Her elementary, secondary, and graduate studies were done in Algeria. From 1976 to 1980, she taught the Spanish language and civilization at the University of Algiers. She left for France in 1981. This is when she studies and submits a thesis entitled ‘The Cultural Productions and their Agents in Kabylia: Anthropology of Culture in Kabyle societies from 16^th to 20^th century’. She defended her Ph-D thesis at the Sorbonne under the supervision of Mohammed Arkoun and the collaboration of Pierre Bourdieu.

Tassadit has first been elected a lecturer (in 1993), then she became the director of studies (in 2008) at the school for high studies social sciences (EHESS), as well as a member of the social anthropology department at the Collège de France. Along with her own research, she was the managing director of Awal (’Word’), an academic journal founded in Paris in 1985 by the Algerian anthropologist Mouloud Mammeri and the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu at the foundation for human sciences in Paris thanks to the support of Clemens Heller.

Tassadit has led several seminars since 1987, in particular one session on cultural production and production workers.

One seminar only since 2006.

The Anthropology of Dominance in the Berber Societies: speech, practice, and representations.

Invited Professor at Berkeley.

Associated Professor at Naples for many years.

Invited to a large number of Universities: Montreal, University of New Orleans, Tulane, Bâton Rouge, New York, MIT, Oregon, Princeton, Lafayette, Boston, Barcelona, Granada, Cadix, University of Laguna, Colegio Mayor in Mexico City. Museo Nacional of Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, etc.

Invited to many Moroccan universities: Rabat, Fez, Oujda, El Jadida, Meknes, etc.

A member of the scientific council at the CRASC, in Oran, Algeria.

A member of the scientific council of Bejaia, Algeria

Program exchange with universities  Tizi-Ouzou, Agadir, Oujda, etc.

Tassadit Yacine has facilitated about twenty theses for a Doctorate and attended many panels.

Tassadit has had many publications on the anthropology of the Berber world, during a sensitive political period due to the strong hostility of the Algerian authorities, who were against the recognition of the Berber identity. In order to acknowledge the existence  of this minority group in northern Africa and mainly in Algeria, Tassadit had to pass through official speech and public discourse, academic practice, or oral discourse, and at the same time Tassadit collected a corpus compiled some by men, others by women as well as within collectivities that underwent multiple forms of control (linguistic, cultural or political) with the result of internal contradictions. The colonial rule had played a decisive role in the destiny of Algeria and its Berber societies.

Tassadit gained her experience in different countries (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, the Canary Islands, and France); she also kept in touch with renowned scholars from the scientific field (Pierre Bourdieu, Mouloud Mammeri, Mohammed Arkoun, Françoise Héritier, Sherry Ortner, Paul Rabinow) led her to comprehend that the ‘local’ experience is a useful  tool to another approach to consider anthropology. Berber societies have a high universal potential based on their ancestral cultures still largely unknown and have also a need to compare with other African or Mediterranean cultures, or also to benefit from western research. Three-time periods explain this unusual but notable consideration because they justify a female career through hard political situations.

The Berber language, its music, its poetry  (Qasi Udifellah, the harbinger of the At Sidi Braham), its songs (Ait Menguellat sings Chérif Cheddar or the love of art, Jean Amrouche, Berber Songs of Kabylia) and its ancestral rituals, brought the limelight to enter the sphere of scientific investigation.

For a cultural worker – as it is the case for many Third-World scholars – research is a quest for scientific knowledge, a quest for a philosophical sense but also a way to gain back a voice for many dominated populations suffering from the colonial system and national systems, whose efforts to reconstructing the country was done without taking into account the concrete realities of their citizens. Ancient peoples have often been ignored by the dominant groups because their languages and their cultures are considered archaic.

Oral culture materials are collected, transcribed, and analyzed to clarify the language, but mainly to reveal the richness of their content. From this reality, Tassadit Yacine was able to combine oral practices with other forms of production including written ones by recontextualizing them and by taking into account the proposed path of their agents in their respective countries as well as in Europe. The Kabyles had to learn French as soon as the end of the 19^th century (Boulifa, Amrouche, Feraoun, Mammeri). In truth, they have cumulated their ancestral knowledge with linguistic knowledge received in colonial schools. They are the first to have acquired a cultural hybridization. Only the women – largely deprived of attending schools – have been able to keep their culture less exposed to a ‘modernity’ imported and imposed by le colonizers.

Consequently, this accounts for why Tassadit was so keen to understand the works and the life of North-African scholars (Feraoun, Mammeri, Amrouche, Kateb Yacine, Belamri, Kheir-Eddine, etc), who went through the brutal clash of the colonial period when they were compelled to learn both the language and the culture of the other instead of theirs.

Tassadit Yacine was the sole editor, collaborating sometimes with someone else, on many of  the cited authors; this can be read in a few AWAL issues about Kateb Yacine, Mouloud Mammeri, Mohamed Kheir-Eddine, Mouloud Feraoun, Rabah Belamri, Jean Sénac, Jean Amrouche or Pierre Bourdieu (two specific issues of AWAL were dedicated to him), and also Germaine Tillion (‘Acts of colloquium of 2015. Published in 2018). Pierre Bourdieu and Germaine Tillion were great scholars, who came across the Algerian upheaval in the 50s.

Jean Amrouche was consecrated in many publications (An Algerian speaks to the French, in 1994, Journal, 2012). He was an important Algerian scholar engaged in the fight for independence and a fervent defender of the North African identities.

Mouloud Mammeri carried on the same fight after the Algerian Independence (Along with Mouloud Mammeri, 2018) and he associated Tassadit as a young researcher to his quest on the Berber world. An important book written by Tassadit Yacine will testify to the search for political and cultural independence carried on by the colonized scholars and was published in 2001 by edition ‘La Découverte” under the title ‘Chacal ou la Ruse des dominés, ou le malaise des intellectuels algériens’. (The jackal or the trickery of the dominated, the Algerian scholars’ discomfort).

In her attempt to explore further the mechanisms of domination in colonial times, Tassadit Yacine’s objective aimed at visiting the work and the path of those who have done research on Algeria during the colonial war like Pierre Bourdieu. Tassadit was a leader to reveal the major importance displayed by Algeria for the great work of the sociologist (Esquisses Algériennes, 2008); or else in the various Awal publications dealing with this topic (1998 & 2003), and also ‘Pierre Bourdieu en Algérie (1956-1962)’, and ‘Témoignages’, 2022. Tassadit has collaborated with several collective studies (Travailler Avec Bourdieu, Pierre Bourdieu, a sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, International Dictionary, The Social and the Symbolic, etc).

The third and last period in Tassadit’s work is dedicated to gender. The Berber ancestral culture is mainly a female matter because women have always been the keepers of homes and of an age-old memory. They have played a major role in gaining back their country’s memory at various times in North Africa’s history, and more specifically during the national liberation war (‘Ourida’, a feminist and a suitcase-carrier, 2019). Such functions, essential for literary knowledge, and for continuing their group’s cultural values, are not recognized at an overall political level nor within any groups. The patriarchal economy excludes women in fact and in law from their role and their contribution to society.

This is why they need to collect stories from other female oral storytellers, and particularly their different ways of expressing feelings. The emotional part of the group’s history has been “removed” from the dominant members (the men) and hidden from the women.

Tassadit’s research on female productions has been a means to make women’s situation visible, as well as their knowledge and their know-how. These literary creations are linked to feelings. And she effectively described it in ‘L’izli or the Kabyle love song’, in 1988. Once Tassadit had been chosen to join EHESS, she took part in Françoise Héritier’s seminar at the Collège de France, under the title “Body & Affects”.

In the same vein, Tassadit will also publish ‘Nouara, or an Algerian woman’s fight’, in 1994, ‘If You love me, cure me’ (2006), ‘Berber Women on both sides of the Mediterranean, Domination, Resilience and Subjectification’ (2018), also a special issue dedicated to the female Berber writer Taos Amrouche, etc.

These latter pieces of work identify the Berber culture within a wider Mediterranean setting, while they transcend the usual distinction between oral and written cultures, or the East with the West because male domination remains at the core of the means of domination; it clearly shows that the change appears in the external aspects, which are cyclical, but not in the mere relationship between men and women, which are well in place here historically and socially.