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Stefano Pontiggia
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Great home-spectations: “Houses-to-be”, marginality, and social expectations in Southern Tunisia
Text.Serial.Journal
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Thematic section: The anatomy of houses: Materialities of being at home
2021-12-22
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2021-12-31
2021-12-31
177-195
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Stefano Pontiggia
2021/12/22
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4548
177
Accademia delle Belle Arti di Verona, Italy
2239-625X
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urn:nbn:it:unica-28024
Great home-spectations: “Houses-to-be”, marginality, and social expectations in Southern Tunisia
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                                         2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2021: 177-195




Great home-spectations
“Houses-to-be”, marginality, and social expectations in Southern Tunisia
Stefano PONTIGGIA
Politecnico di Milano




ABSTRACT: In the mining town of Redeyef (south-western Tunisia), “modern” homes
and building techniques bear the signs of a history of marginalization, inequality, and
lack of resources. Here, power produced specific mode of living and territorial
organization. The article will describe three different homes: the little studio I lived in
between 2014 and 2015 during my fieldwork research, the “mansion” that a young man
living in Redeyef had been erecting for himself, and the house a man erected for his
son. These examples will help to shed light on the extent to which the colonial past, the
political economy of independent Tunisia, and the current lack of any urban planning
interweave to create the conditions of a disadvantaged and precarious life, especially
for the young men, who build their houses to accomplish social expectations about
adulthood. Despite the lack of resources, the people of Redeyef try to make their
dwellings the symbol of a (hoped, even though almost impossible) social acceptance.
KEYWORDS: HOUSES; MARGINALITY; ADULTHOOD; MASCULINITY; TUNISIA.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Stefano Pontiggia
Great home-spectations: “Houses-to-be”, marginality, and social expectations in Southern Tunisia
2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2021: 177-195.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4548
178                                                                         STEFANO PONTIGGIA




Introduction: Houses-to-be as ethnographic objects
    This article1 stems from the notes collected during a field research
conducted between 2014 and 2015 in Redeyef, a mining town in the Gafsa
governorate (southwestern Tunisia)2, and will illustrate two houses I visited,
and one in which I lived, in order to trace the links among individual
experience, the meaning locally assigned to households, and wider historical
and political dimensions3. More specifically, I will describe what I call home-
spectations, that is, the expectations of success and social integration that
locals, especially young men, place on home ownership. As Arjun Appadurai
(2000) rightly states, houses are both universal aspects of every society and
intimate loci of societal and cultural organizations. In the case I present
here, the expectations stemming from homes revolve around local ideas of
masculinity and adulthood; however, as the article will show, these are
heavily influenced by the historical, economic, and political conditions that
shaped the mining basin in which Redeyef is located.
    Houses, says Catherine Allerton (2013), take their meaning from the
liveliness that characterizes them, which in tur depends on the people who
fill them with those sounds, gestures and objects that make homes what they
are. I always remember with pleasure my visits to the dwellings of people
with whom I had an ethnographic relationship. One, in particular, often
comes to my mind when I think back to Redeyef. It is the house where
Tarek4, a man of about thirty-five years, invited me one evening of the
month of Ramadan to celebrate Iftar, the ritual breaking of fasting 5. Behind
the gate opened a large courtyard of at least fifty feet by twenty-five, closed
by a house on the left and other buildings on the other side. A man was lying
on a mattress; in front of him, on a carpet, a coffee table and a bottle of
water waiting to be drunk. He was Tarek’s father, a roundish man in his
sixties with white moustache and a thin layer of beard. He was lying on his
right side and asked his son to let me sit on the carpet to have a talk with me.

1. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their precious comments and insights.
2. The city is located 45 miles south of the governorate capital city, Gafsa. Its population of
about thirty thousand people has a peculiar demographic, since, at the time of my research,
most part of the cohort of those between 28- and 35-year-old had left the city looking for
employment on the coast or in Europe.
3. The research was conducted during the PhD program in Humanities and Social Studies at
the University of Ferrara.
4. All personal names in the article are fictional.
5. Field notes, Redeyef, June 2, 2014.


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GREAT HOME-SPECTATIONS                                                           179


   Tarek let me enter the room dedicated to the guests, furnished with two
white sofas, a rug, a low table and some shelves hanging on the wall. We ate
as soon as the mosques began to sing, beginning with dates accompanied by
fermented milk. There were also brik, two salads, a spicy soup, a marqa of
peas, fruit, homemade bread, and a chocolate mousse to top it all off. I
remember looking through the open door; on the wall of the small square
building in front of me, the light was becoming more and more pink, purple,
and finally orange due to the public lighting. The hum of the television was
only interrupted by the moans of the three sheep living in the courtyard.
   These memories are very different from those I have when I think back to
the flat I used to live: in those empty rooms, to keep me company were only
the echoing barking of stray dogs and the mechanical noise of the phosphate
washing center not far away. The same metallic noise of the gates gave me
different sensations: while those of the houses where I was invited made me
feel the warmth of the extended family, the one that locked me inside my
apartment only reminded me of my loneliness.
   Experiencing homes helps to grasp certain aspects of how people
structure their lives according to gender relations (Bourdieu 1970), family
ties, or religious beliefs. However, there are other constructions that can tell
us more about local history and the links between people, territories, and
political economy. These are what I call “houses-to-be”: unfinished, bare, or
empty buildings (like the apartment where I lived for months) that
punctuate the urban spaces of many cities in the Global South. These
structures, which I will describe in the article, are able to shed light not only
on the links between individual trajectories, kinship, and the state (Carsten
2018), but also on wider social and political configurations that heavily
influence the present condition and the expectations of people.
   “Houses-to-be” are narrative objects because they can tell the story of the
people involved in building and furnishing them, on the one the hand, and
because they can allow historically deeper and geographically broader
analyses of the cities or villages where these individuals live. In the case of
Redeyef, they tell the story of how the city was founded and developed
during and after the colonial phase, and how its structural fragility depends
on state policies and transnational processes. Moreover, these incomplete
houses tell of the obstacles that, in the present, are placed before the young
males of the city in their attempt to acquire a public identity as adults. They
are able, ultimately, to unravel the issue of marginality (in a social and
material sense) that characterizes Redeyef and the entire region of the Gafsa
mining basin.


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180                                                                     STEFANO PONTIGGIA


   In the course of the article, I will alternate the description of the houses
with historical and ethnographic analyses of the dynamics that these houses
allow me to address. I will then conclude with some considerations on the
potentialities of “houses-to-be” as ethnographic objects while trying to
grasp the links between individual trajectories and structural dimensions.
Throughout my analysis, I will rely on field diaries, interviews conducted
during the research, and a specific literature that will allow me to expand
beyond the simple descriptive level.

A house near a canal
   Before descending to Redeyef for my research (Pontiggia 2021) 6, I rented
an apartment there thanks to some intermediares I had met in the
governorate capital, Gafsa. The lessor was Hajj Raouf, a man in his seventies
and former employee at the local Gafsa Phosphates Company (GPC). At the
time of my fieldwork, he had retired from his position and had been running
a taxiphone7 for a while. The small apartment was almost completely without
furniture: it contained just a a bed with metal frame, a carpet, a plastic chair,
a table, and a coat hanger. The pillow was made of foam rubber. There was
no cooking area in the kitchen, which would have forced me to eat outside
for the duration of my stay.
   The apartment was suffocantly hot during the summer and freezing
during the winter at the point that I had decided to buy an electric heater at
the local souq, the open-air market. The rooms were inhabited by flies,
mosquitoes, and roaches. I still remember the expression on the face of Imed
and Jahwer, two friends of mine, when I invited them to take a tour of the
house. Accustomed to the large and well-stocked residences of their
extended families, they were astonished at the sight of the poverty of the
spaces in which I lived.
   My apartment had been completed on the day that I settled in the city in
March 2014; when I reached the place, the workers were making a few
tweaks to the bathroom and the shower compartment. The apartment,
located a few feet from a oued, a dry canal formerly used to bring water to
the city, had been erected in a way that resembled the structure of a
traditional Arab house; nevertheless, it had somehow been reshaped. A
thirty-feet corridor ran beyond the iron door colored with a light blue
painting; without a roof for half its length, the corridor seemed to serve the

6. The fieldwork started in February 2014 to conclude in December of the same year. I then
had a further trip in June 2015.
7. A Taxiphone is a shop that hosts telephone booths.


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GREAT HOME-SPECTATIONS                                                                    181


function customarily attributed to the central courtyard. The bathroom, the
kitchen, and two empty rooms opened to the right side of the corridor, while
my bedroom was at the end. The left side was ten feet high and obscured me
from the view of my neighbors. The floor was grit, and the tiles in the
bathroom and the kitchen evoked Arab-Muslim decorative motifs. No
windows looked outwards onto the street.
   One day, I talked to Ali, one of Haj Raouf’s sons, about the origin of the
materials used to build houses in Redeyef. I discovered that almost
everything was produced elsewhere. The azure paint used to decorate the
walls came from Sfax, a city located on the coast. The empty bricks used to
build the structure came from Tunis; the cement was from the sahel, the
eastern littoral. The electric meters were Chinese. Only the sand and the
tiles were made on site. Redeyef’s growth depended on import of materials
from the most industrialized regions of the country. the only economic
activity in the city and the mining basin was linked to the phosphates
extraction, which was not capable of employing all the men and women of
working age.
   My apartment was not there until five years before my arrival. It was part
of a building erected on the foundations of a traditional house that was
destroyed one night in late September 2009. In three hours, a heavy rain
buried the city center with mud and caused the deaths of twenty-one people.
The canals, full of rubbish and the soil moved upstream by the exploitation
centers of the GPC8, brought the water to accumulate until it did flood
downstream.
   The memory of the disaster, immortalized in a video available on the
YouTube platform9, is still fresh in the minds of the inhabitants. One
morning, a few days after my arrival, I woke up early because I needed Ali,
the son of Haj Raouf, and Adil, a man working on a building in front of my
apartment, to help me in some work. As I left the covered area of the house, I
was surprised to realize that the floor was wet. I reached Ali on the street
wondering why there was silence instead of the usual noise produced by the
workers. I asked him about Adil. “I believe he will not come today. He is
afraid of rain”, he told me. I looked around. Numerous dwellings were built
behind the canal. On the opposite side, a ridge of land supported some
homes which, in an area prone to frequent rains, would have fallen down at
high speed.
8. After closing the subterranean mining tunnels, the Gafsa Phosphates Company started
extracting phosphates in open-air caves called Sièges. The material is moved from the caves
to the mining cities, where it is purified, washed, and stocked before being sent to the che -
mical industries on the coast.
9. www.youtube.com/watch?v=za67I6X6yW8. Accessed on 24/11/2020.

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   That day I discussed the matter with Imed, a young man of about thirty
years who worked at the Gafsa Phosphates Company. I told him that I heard
about the flood and he confirmed that. It rained massively and, in the city
center area, including the one where I live, the canal was filled with water,
devastating all the second floors of the houses, and causing many victims.
Returning home, I met two neighbors and received confirmation of the
event. “Yes”, said one of them. “It was September 25, 2009, at five in the
morning. People were sleeping, water came down and they died. Houses
collapsed”. I thought that, given the structural fragility of most parts of the
city, the rain could indeed be a frightening natural event. Furthermore, the
disaster of 2009 was not the first occurring in the city. Another series of
floods had already struck in the Fall of 1969 hitting the city and the country
as well. The French geographer Jean Poncet argued that the cause should
have been traced in a set of factors, including the desertification of the
territory and the impact of the industrial development plans (Poncet 1970).

Structural fragility and dependance
   The apartmen I rented, its position, and the material of which it was made
are closely linked to local history and the relationships occurring among
different regions of the country. An overview will help to shed light on the
dynamics that shaped the city and the entire mining basin10.
   There is a shared narrative about the birth and expansion of the mining
cities, and Redeyef is no exception. It is a well-known story, based on some
definite and constantly repeated narrative themes: the discovery of
phosphates at the end of nineteenth century; the construction of the first
mines and the arrival of French cadres; the participation of Algerian,
Moroccan, and Libyan workers into the colonial enterprise; and the slow
sedentarization and proletarianization of the local, seminomadic
populations. The Gafsa Phosphates Company, a private enterprise born from
the meeting of the French industrial bourgeoisie and the financial sector,
was charged with the exploitation of the deposits.
   The dual structure (King 2009) of the cities revolved around the
exploitation center and the village that the GPC built for the European
workers, on the one hand, and the few shacks destined to the North African
workers, on the other hand; more often, the latter were created by the
workers themselves. Much of the urban landscape was completely informal
and without infrastructures; the effects of its confused and disorderly growth

10. The mining cities are four: Redeyef, Om Layares (also called Moularès), Metlaoui, and
Mdhilla.


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GREAT HOME-SPECTATIONS                                                          183


are still visible today in labyrinthine neighborhoods where houses cluster
one on top of the other in narrow streets where getting lost is easy. The
cities grew according to the rhythm of the mining industry and its labor
needs, but also following a principle of hierarchy (Bahloul 1996; Waterson
1995) and segregation (Escallier 2006) aiming to secure what Partha
Chatterjee called “the government of colonial difference” (Chatterjee 1993).
   Nowadays, Redeyef still bears the sign of the past presence of different
national groups within the city and their different building techniques. In
1975, the researcher Christian Zarka published a study on the city aiming to
analyze the links between national groups and dwellings (Zarka 1975). He
identified three types of homes and neighborhoods. Those types differed
based on the shape of the housing, the materials used to build them, their
disposition, and their link with processes of social reproduction.
   The first example that he considered was that of the Libyan neighbor-
hood, called Trabelsiya from the Arabic name of Tripoli. The “Tripolitan
village” developed by reproducing the bonds of the patriarchal family in
space and was therefore a cluster of “mother-houses” and their satellites.
   The second type of housing was the so-called soufi, inhabited by the
Algerian workers. Houses were generally built with stone and surmounted by
domes and vaults that appeared from the street like semi-circles placed on
the roofs. Stone helped the houses to remain fresh during summer and warm
in the cold season.
   Zarka then focused on the buildings created by what he called “the
Bedouins,” the local populations. He described a movement that led from
the first temporary dwellings (generally, tents) to houses made of poor
elements such as sun-baked bricks. A central courtyard was the meeting
place for the extended family. The local populations did not have traditions
of construction, the reason why the techniques and materials did not meet
any traditional imperative. As time passed, and the North African workers
went back to their homeland now freed from the colonial rule, the
intergenerational transmission of construction techniques arrested, forcing
the inhabitants to find new expedients and different materials.
   This process had started well before Zarka’s study and has been described
by the French sociologist Roger Brunet (1958). He was particularly struck by
t h e Arab neighborhoods. Those were located far from the production
centers, weak in construction, and lacking in essential services. The homes
of the natives were “infamous heaps of dried mud made up of one or two
rooms and particularly poor furniture... Water is lacking” (Brunet 1958: 444,
my translation).


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184                                                             STEFANO PONTIGGIA


   However, the history of urban development alone cannot explain the state
of degradation many of the houses experienced. To get a more precise idea
of this process, we need to look at how, throughout their history, Redeyef
and the mining cities have been integrated into a drainage economy that,
since before the advent of the colonial domination (Mahjoub 1987), has
made this area dependent on other regions of the country and the world.
   Nevertheless, the Tunisian landscape, with its broad division between an
industrialized coast open to trade and the inland areas oriented to
agriculture or extractive activities, can be better understood if we look at the
French domination and the postcolonial phase. As the researcher
Noureddine Dogui (1995) states, the French capitalist penetration
subjugated the region to the logic of colonial exploitation, which resulted in
the specialization of the Tunisian Southwest in “primary” activities whose
success depended on the needs of the metropolis. The colonial system
engaged the mining basin in a relation of dependence, whose most evident
manifestation was the submission of its economy to the pace of metropolitan
capitalism. This relationship shaped the internal economic activity in
function of an outward opening and disrupted a long-standing territorial
organization based on a north/south axis (Belhedi 1994).
   After independence, local economy remained oriented to the production
of raw primary goods (especially phosphates) without any economic
differentiation nor a real policy aiming to ameliorate the infrastructures of
the basin. Tunisia’s peripheral role in the Mediterranean economic area (Ben
Romdhane 1997) accentuated a national division of labor between an
industrial and commercial coast and a south conceived as pure supplier of
raw materials. This spatial polarization has certainly heightened during the
last twenty years. The integration of the country into a neoliberal economy
caused the exacerbation of these processes of regionalization and
accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2005) which are the premises of any
geography of unequal development. Such an economic form works not by
favoring the “dual” territories on a principle of integration within the
capitalist market, but by creating leopard-patch spaces of exclusion, where
masses of workers are expelled from the capitalist economic circuits (Sanyal
2007).
   Redeyef and the mining basin are an effective representation of this
organization. Between 1962 and 2006, the share of public investment
reserved for the coastal regions (Tunis, central-east, southeast) constantly
fluctuated between 59% and 75% of the total. In most cases, the district of



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GREAT HOME-SPECTATIONS                                                                    185


Tunis11 and the governorates of the central-east have alone received between
40% and 50% of the entire state budget dedicated to development. The
Governorate of Gafsa received a significant share, around 10% of the total,
only during the Fourth and Fifth Development Plans 12 in the years 1972-
1982, when the most substantial investment occurred in the mining sector.
In the preceding and following Plans, the quota of public funds destined to
Gafsa remained stationary, vacillating between 3 and 5 percent (Bousnina
2012, 135-139).
   The subdivision of the national territory into three areas with different
investment priorities, carried out in the second half of the 1970s, had
granted the Gafsa Governorate the status of priority regional development
zone. Nevertheless, the distribution of the funds to public and private
companies dramatically favored the coastal regions. According to the
Tunisian geographer Hamadi Tizaoui, between 1994 and 2009, the
Governorate of Gafsa received only 0.8% of the total industrial investment
(Tizaoui 2013: 246).
   This polarizing dynamic did not stop after the revolution. Since the
revolution, the emerging ruling class has imagined a new form of territorial
organization aiming to reorganize the national space in macro-regions that
connect inland areas and the coast. Regional autonomy is now a principle
expressly articulated in the new Constitution. However, investments in the
less-favored regions have diminished rather than increasing, and this
because of a serious of factors, including political crises, the inexperience of
the new governors, and the strict adherence to the rules established as an
instrument to prevent corruption. Other causes have acted at the local level,
primarily the weakness or absence of administration (Hibou 2015: 142-146).
   The role of the state in Tunisian economy is therefore immediately
evident. According to many Tunisian sociologists, geographers, and
economists (see for example Belhedi 2012, Ben Romdhane 2011, and Gherib
2017), a chain of political choices has explicitly favored some regions to the
detriment of others and attributed different roles to the coast and the inland.
“Underdevelopment”, therefore, would be the result of shifting attention on
the part of the state. Inland regions were involved mostly in agricultural

11. Although it is still mentioned in the sociological texts that I have studied, and despite
the term being currently used to identify the urban area of the city capital, the district of
Tunis no longer exists as an administrative unit. Created in 1974 as an entity regulating ur -
ban investment for transport, urban sanitation, and planning, it was dissolved in 1994.
12. Since the early 1960, Tunisian governments realized and implemented development
plans for economic planning. Based on a three-year and then five-year period, this form of
programing remained the same even after the riots of 2011.

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186                                                             STEFANO PONTIGGIA


development plans or internal migration logics, which benefited the coastal
cities (Hermassi 2013). Southern and western territories were placed on the
margins of any “modernizing” dynamic and attributed the role of supplying
the internal labor market with under-specialized workforce.
   A monoculture generally accompanied this underdevelopment;
agriculture and the mining industry are still the only two productive
activities of any importance. The long-standing submission of Redeyef and
the mining basin to the logic of capitalist extraction has, thus, nourished an
ongoing economic crisis that impeded any economic differentiation and
blocked any project of amelioration of public services such as waste
collection, canals maintenance, and environmental safety. Houses, and the
flat I rented is no exception to it, are therefore affected by this long history
of dispossession (Rousselin 2018), exploitation, and the shifting attention
the state dedicated to the region.

A mansion on the hill and a rooster in the living room
   “I want to show you the house I’m building”, Imed told me one day in
spring 201413. We were sitting at a cafe near my apartment with nothing to
do. I said yes, and we walked. We crossed the city westward until we reached
the foot of a hill that was the highest point in the city. “I chose this place
because, from up there, you can see the whole city”, he said, “you’ll see”. We
ascended a ridge of dry soil under the sun until we reached the body of a
building. Still without paint, the house appeared with the typical red of the
bricks.
   A short escalade terminated between two columns resembling classic
architecture, as the mansion were the modern version of a Greek or Roman
temple. After the entrance, from the left to the right, opened the bathroom
and the kitchen, two bedrooms, and the living room. More precisely, I just
could imagine the chambers. The house was unfinished, only the walls were
there. Since the construction had started the previous year and had
proceeded in hiccups, the fragile, empty bricks were already damaged, and
some holes let the sunlight enter the house. I could see cockroaches and ants
running on the wall and the “pavement”.
   Imed told me he was saving money to go on working on the house.
Despite his salary as a worker for the Gafsa Phosphate Company, which, with
its five-to-six hundred dinar each month, is close to the national average
salary, he did not have the possibility to build his house in a given time.
When he had some money saved, he invested it advancing the work. When I
13. Field notes, Redeyef, April 11, 2014.


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GREAT HOME-SPECTATIONS                                                                    187


left Tunisia, ten months later, the mansion was in the same state as I visited
it. I would have soon discovered that, in Redeyef as well as much of the
Tunisian south, building a house can take years. A few days later, I would
have visited a building in the same conditions thanks to a man very well
known in the city.
    They called him Lion; he was a fifty-eight-year-old man with long grayish
hair on his shoulders and a white beard he often smoothed with his left hand
while talking. He had an athletic body, having practiced many sports in his
youth, and still had a great passion for the mountainous region near the city,
the environment in which he felt most at home. He had a wife and six
children. He had worked as a nurse for about thirty-eight years before
retiring but was famous the most for his engagement during the clashes and
the social movement occurred in 2008 (Allal 2010; Allal and Bennafla 2011;
Mullin 2018).
    One day in early June 2014, I went to his home in the district of Nezla al-
Souafa to interview him about his experience as an activist 14. He welcomed
me into the house he was building for his son Jihed. The two buildings were
next to each other, but the structure differed greatly. Lion’s was a classic
house with a central courtyard and numerous rooms, including the “public”
one used to receive guests. The apartment he was building for Jihed, on the
other hand, had a more modern appearance. When I entered, it was still a
building site, the floor was not ready, and the sanitary facilities were still to
be installed. Beyond the yellow-green iron gate, a small open space led to
the building and perhaps, in the future, could have accommodated a few
plants. Along a corridor of about three feet opened a room on the right, and
the kitchen (still to be installed) on the left. Walking on, I entered the large
hall, which, on one side, opened to a second room. In the hall, two dusty
carpets, a bag with beer cans, a tray housing an aluminum teapot and two
small glasses, a white plastic chair, a bench for body building exercises, a
bottomless sheet metal bin and another topped by three large bricks, and a
black rooster streaked with brown, which I found disturbing and seemed to
stare at me all the time I spent there.
    The Lion was helping his son build the house because, for someone in his
thirties or so, work in Redeyef is very hard to find. After an industrial crisis
in the 1980s, the GPC had laid off two-thirds of the workers and mechanized
the phosphate extraction. As a result, the city’s main source of labor had
been greatly reduced. Yet, owning a house was highly important for a male
who wanted to be recognized as adult man.


14. Field notes, Redeyef, June 10, 2014.

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Houses, masculine adulthood, and social expectations
    The material aspect of homes helps us to understand not only the power
relations existing between different regions of the country and the
disadvantaged condition of Redeyef and the mining towns. It will also lead
us to grasp the lives of the people who are building them as both individuals
and members of a specific age group. The long work of building a house, as
this section will show, is linked to local expectations about adulthood and
masculinity. In Tunisia, and especially in the inner regions, the cultural
meaning of adulthood is defined by marriage (Singerman 2007), which brings
with it the burden of the property of a house. As Rafik, a young man in his
thirties, told me in June 2015, “You must have your own slot. In Redeyef
[living in rented accommodation with a wife] is still disapproved; it’s
shameful, and family members will stress you until you start building your
house”15. In a situation of prolonged crisis that not even the revolution has
been capable to resolve, houses and dwelling practices have something to do
not only with aspirations and loss (Pitzalis, Pozzi and Rimoldi 2017) but also
with the possibility of failure to achieve a socially meaningful trajectory.
Houses are those the epitome of youth’s most intimate desires and fears.
    Youth can be interpreted as a relational concept: as maintained by French
anthropologists Isabelle Rivoal and Anne-Marie Peatrik (2015), a person
attains its adult status only within a framework of power relations with other
individuals. Success is measured by the number of people a man can
dominate and on which he can exercise authority or influence. Men must be
able to build relationships that will be taken seriously, for example, a fruitful
family; this also fits with the public discourse in Tunisia, according to which,
it is necessary to establish a family within the boundaries of the law to earn a
social existence as an adult (Paciello, Pepicielli and Pioppi 2016: 9). For a
man, however, access to marriage depends on his ability to obtain the
material conditions for the future, that is, a means of livelihood. The
pressure of elderly and parents, especially mothers, is firm in the direction of
finding an occupation and building or buying a home before dealing with
other issues that make a young man an adult.
    Youth in Redeyef look at marriages and all the necessary steps to it with
desire and anxiety. One day in November 2014, I met Ghadi, a young man
who had opened a boutique of branded clothes in Redeyef city center. He
was among those who expressed mixed feelings about marriage and enlisted
the difficulties faced by young men women who wish to marry. “It takes
much, much money to get married,” he told me. “It’s the man who pays
everything ... even when you go to meet the parents, this is the first thing
15. Rafik, Tunis, June 3, 2015.


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GREAT HOME-SPECTATIONS                                                               189


they ask you: where is your house? It is bought or for rent? How much you
earn from your work?”. He told me that having a job close to home was
important in the city, and that young men needed enough salary to afford a
house and a car16.
   There are various elements related to the obstacles that young people face
in their transition to adulthood. The first has to do with the side effects of
the demographic transition. In North Africa and the Middle East, many
countries achieved it in the 1980s and 1990s; however, the population is still
very young (Bonnefois and Catusse 2013). The marriage age has risen: while
in the 1960s it ranged from eighteen to twenty years in most of those
countries, it stands today at twenty-seven-year-old, except for Yemen. The
Tunisian case confirms those data, as the average marriage age passed from
19.5 percent for women and 26.3 percent for men in 1966 to 27.1 and 32.4 in
2007 (ONFP 2010). However, those shift in the marriage age does not
coincide with a time dedicated to working activities; thus, if “youth” is a
transitional phase (Van Gennep 1909), it becomes more uncertain as the age
of marriage shifts, the length of studies increases, and unemployment and
waiting are the norm.
   In these countries, the average unemployment rate for those under thirty-
five is around 25 percent, which also has repercussions for the reproduction
of families. The spread of celibacy testifies to a crisis of the marriage model
that derives more from the material and economic difficulties encountered
by young couples than the disaffection towards this institute.
   Even in Tunisia, including the city of Redeyef, the main reason why many
young people marry late is their economic condition. The groom or his
family often cover the high expenses related to engagement and marriage:
earrings, engagement ring and necklace; a new parure for marriage; the
ceremonial dress; the band, food and drink for at least two nights; one or
more sheep for dinner; the deeds to a house. The total cost can thus reach
eight or ten thousand dinar, a vast amount of capital for those who earn
three or four hundred a month, and almost unattainable for those who are
unemployed or underemployed. The family exerts pressure on the male for
him to respect the duties generally associated with the status of an adult
male, i.e., building a house, founding a family, and having kids. However,
those goals become more and more out of sight as unemployment rates
raise: if, between 1966 and 2010, the unemployment rates in the Gafsa
governorate had risen from 12 percent to 28.3 percent (Bakari 2015: 24), in
Redeyef, in 2014, it was 30.8 percent against an overall 19.2 percent in the
Gafsa governorate (ODS 2018: 33).

16. Field notes, Redeyef, November 28, 2014

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190                                                                    STEFANO PONTIGGIA


   In North African contexts, and Redeyef is no exception, the liminal period
between childhood and adulthood expands, making it impossible for part of
the population to assume an adult role. Consequently, the present and the
future perspectives of a growing number of people of working age
increasingly overlap and raise the daily problem of managing time that
consists only of waiting (Honwana 2012). Even if this phenomenon, often
identified by the word “waithood,” unites the younger generations who also
live in the Global North (Honwana 2014), in Africa it is the result of
structural adjustment policies, begun in the 1980s, which reduced the space
of state autonomy in economic planning and job creation17.
   Macroeconomic dimensions, effects of demographic transition, and local
visions on adulthood therefore play a role in defining the future trajectories
of the younger generations in Redeyef. It is no coincidence, for example,
that, throughout the entire duration of my research, I did not meet anyone
in his twenties or thirties who lived alone, outside the home of the parents.
In the city, the general rule is that one leaves the family home only to
emigrate (to the coast or abroad) or to get married. Consequently,
accumulating the money needed to buy or build a house has much to do not
only with being recognized as an adult, but also with achieving
independence that cannot be acquired in the household.

Conclusion
   In anthropology, it is possible to trace a literature that looks at things and
material culture as biographical objects (Hoskins 1998) capable of opening
up glimpses into the lives of the people where research is conducted. These
objects have the potential to create real cosmological orders (Miller 2008),
universes of meaning always changing but able to generate a sense of
comfort and the experience of “feeling at home”. It is obviously no
coincidence that this literature focuses primarily on domestic objects. In this
sense, Janet Carsten arguably claims the possibility to treat houses as
biographical objects, as studying them in these terms helps to illuminate
“the multiple entanglements that houses illuminate between the lives and
relations that are enacted within them and the historically-inflected social
and political contexts in which they are situated” (Carsten 2018: 114).
   But what can we see if, instead of those objects, we consider “houses-to-

17. Alcinda Honwana, Youth, Waithood, and Protest Movements in Africa, Lugard Lecture at
the Fifth European Conference on African Studies, Lisbon, 28 June 28, 2013, African Argu-
ments, 12 August 2013, http://africanarguments.org/2013/08/12/youth-waithood-and-prote-
st-movements-in-africa-by-alcinda-honwana/, accessed on 01/12/2021.


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GREAT HOME-SPECTATIONS                                                           191


be” as ethnographic objects? What do these artifacts show us that others are
unable to address? What I see in them is what I would call the discomfort of
things. On the one hand, this discomfort is expressed in the poverty of the
materials used in the construction of houses and the intrinsic fragility of the
urban context in which they are embedded. As seen in one of the sections of
the article, the colonial and post-colonial experience has resulted in the loss
of traditional knowledge and has not brought about any economic
diversification at the local level. The inhabitants of Redeyef and the mining
basin, therefore, depend on other regions of the country and the world in
collecting the materials needed to build their habitations. Moreover, state
policies and the partial inattention of the state have meant that the same
houses are potentially threatened by external agents (climate, weather
phenomena) that make them unhealthy and insecure, thereby affecting the
lives of those who occupy them. Nevertheless, houses represent an anchorage
for people engaged in creating their world in a situation characterized by
insecurity, marginalization, and precariousness (Pozzi 2020).
   On the other hand, and this applies especially to young men, houses
incorporate local concepts of adulthood and “good life”, as well as moral
prescriptions about future prospects. This is how I use the term “home-
spectations”: the expectations about a successful “carrier”, in Redeyef, pass
through the ownership of a house capable of making a young man an adult.
If we take for granted that future is a cultural fact (Appadurai 2013), that is,
is imbricated in local concepts of life and society and serves as adaptation
and survival strategy in an uncertain world, then we can grasp all the
potential and ambiguity that houses embody in Redeyef. Housing is
necessary to start a family, and the family is critical in the process of
affirming one’s public and personal identity; in this sense, they are essential
to the very processes of social reproduction. Nevertheless, house and
“houses-to-be” are something more. They are silent witnesses of the
difficulties and obstacles that the young men of Redeyef (but, in a broader
sense, we could speak of large areas of southern Tunisia) must face to free
themselves from the burden imposed by the family of origin while, at the
same time, trying to follow its precepts. The red color of the empty bricks
and the long time it takes to build a house almost suggest that these young
men literally must build their future with their own hands.




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 Stefano PONTIGGIA is a social anthropologist (PhD in Human Sciences with
 specialization in Social Anthropology, University of Ferrara 2016) and is postdoc
 fellow at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. He carried out ethnographic research in
 Italy and Tunisia working both within the academy and for NGOs, associations,
 and social cooperatives. He is the author of Revolutionary Tunisia: Inequality,
 Marginality, and Power (Lexington Books, 2021). His interests concern the state
 and its daily formation, social and territorial marginality, power, and asylum
 migration. He is also interested in the way power relations unfold in space and
 contribute to its production.
 stefano.pontiggia@gmail.com




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Stefano Pontiggia
Great home-spectations: “Houses-to-be”, marginality, and social expectations in Southern Tunisia
2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2021: 177-195
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4548
