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Honor, Excrement, Ethnography: Colonial Knowledge Between Missionary And Militaire In French Algeria, Joseph W. Peterson

Faculty Publications

In 1865, an overly aggressive missionary in the Kabyle mountains of French Algeria was tricked into sitting in human excrement, publicly humiliated by the tribe he hoped to convert. Or was he? Historians of French Algeria have recounted this story as confirmation of the scholarly consensus: that public missions to Muslims were either nonexistent or delusional and short-lived in the early decades of French Algeria. But these historians have relied on a version of the incident that was authored by an unsympathetic military administrator. This article argues that the excremental incident in Kabylie—and the competing versions of what happened there—should …