278 Mediated Publics
become a source of knowledge and a site of social interaction. However,
it is also an attraction for young people in the cultural desert of daily life,
an attraction that turns young men away from the h.ūmma. Although the
h.ūmma remains an important support in the lives of the television view-
ers, its contours are reshaped by television viewing. Television is a source
of fascination: “There are some in the neighborhood who no longer go
out! At home twenty-four hours a day! They come up for air and plunge
back into watching television. Twenty-four hours! Especially at the begin-
ning.” When one is “disgusted” by the h.ūmma, one abandons it for televi-
sion and vice versa. However the h.ūmma maintains its function. As an
intermediary space, it favors exchange. It is the place where, as one of my
participants puts it, one “talks about all sorts of things, trades anecdotes,
discusses sporting events and current affairs,... talks about what is hap-
pening elsewhere and what is being hidden from us here.”
n determining the nature of the link between I h.ūmma and televi-
sion, the family also plays a central role. This is notably due to the role of
women as intermediaries. The link between the h.ūmma, the family and
television can also be seen in the attraction that satellite television exer-
cises on men. However significant and meaningful the return of men to
the domestic sphere may be (notwithstanding the degree to which this
return is still highly codified and only partial), it has not been provoked
by satellite television alone. This phenomenon is an adjustment to a new
reality that seems to derive from fundamental and structural changes in
the Algerian family. These changes herald new questions relating to the
neo-patrimonial state and the nature of tradition, constructions typically
associated with family in the Maghrib. It is my hypothesis that the fam-
ily, just like the h.ūmma, constitutes a locus of sociality, and it is through
this sociological and anthropological reality that public space comes to
be. Researchers who focus on the neo-patrimonial state with its closed
networks of patrons and clients do take into account the elites and their
already constituted intermediaries. These researchers tend to lose sight,
however, of the informal networks in which the family plays a welfare
function. The family as relay or point of mediation plays a central role in
the translation work between neighborhood, city and household. Since
satellite television makes its entrée through the household, there is a price
to pay both by and to the family.