Bourdieu - Algerian Landing

Algerian landing
Pierre Bourdieu
Collge de France
Translated by Richard Nice and Loc Wacquant
A B S T R A C T In this fragment of a socioanalytic account of his own
social and intellectual formation, the author recounts the motivations,
aims, and circumstances of his eldwork in Algeria during the war of
national liberation and the epistemological experiment that he embarked
upon by simultaneously taking his childhood village as an object of
anthropological inquiry. The conditions of his landing in the French colony,
the material and emotional parameters of research in the shanty-towns
and countryside of a colonial society ravaged by military repression, and
the role of delicate ties with informants are recounted, as are the interplay
between personal dispositions, intellectual models, and the division and
hierarchy between academic disciplines, in an effort to illumine the
conversion of political impulses into scientic endeavours. The authors
switch from philosophy to ethnology to sociology emerges as driven by
the need to feel useful in the face of harrowing suffering and injustice
and rooted in a deep repugnance for the scholastic posture made all the
more intolerable in a state of social emergency. The quandaries presented
by conducting eldwork in a situation of war are revealed to be the initial
impetus for his abiding concern for epistemic reexivity. Such ethnography
of ethnography can enable the researcher to recover the hidden social and
personal springs of her investigations and thereby help convert intuition
bred by social familiarity from intellectual handicap to scientic capital.
K E Y W O R D S reexivity, ethnography, colonialism, war, danger,
emotion, scientic vocation, intellectuals, academic disciplines, Algeria,
Barn, France
graphy
Copyright 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
www.sagepublications.com Vol 5(4): 415443[DOI: 10.1177/1466138104048826]
A R T I C L E
My perception of the sociological eld [in the 1960s] owed much to the fact
that the social and academic trajectory that had led me there set me strongly
apart. Moreover, returning from Algeria with an experience as an ethnolo-
gist which, having been acquired in the difcult conditions of a war of liber-
ation, had marked for me a decisive break with scholastic experience, I was
inclined to a rather critical vision of sociology and sociologists the vision
of the philosopher being reinforced by that of the ethnologist and, above
all, perhaps, to a somewhat disenchanted, or realistic, representation of the
individual or collective position-takings of intellectuals, for whom the
Algerian question had constituted, in my eyes, an exceptional touchstone.
It is not easy to think and to say what this experience was for me, and
in particular the intellectual but also personal challenge represented by that
tragic situation, which would not let itself be trapped within the ordinary
alternatives of morality and politics. I had refused to enter the reserve
ofcers college [cole des ofciers de rserve, EOR], no doubt partly
because I could not bear the idea of disassociating myself from the rank-
and-le soldiers, and also because of the lack of sympathy I felt for the
candidates for the EOR, often graduates of HEC [the cole des Hautes
tudes Commerciales, the leading French business school] or lawyers with
whom I did not feel much in common. After three months of fairly tough
training in Chartres (every week I had to step out from the ranks at the call
of my name to be presented, before the assembled troops, with my copy of
LExpress, the magazine that had become the symbol of a progressive policy
in Algeria, and to which I had somewhat navely subscribed), I rst landed
in the Army Psychological Service in Versailles, following a very privileged
route reserved for students of the cole normale.
1
But heated arguments
with high-ranking ofcers who wanted to convert me to
lAlgrie franaise soon earned me a reassignment to Algeria. The Air
Force had formed a regiment, a kind of sub-infantry whose task was to
guard airbases and other strategic sites, made up of all the illiterates of
Mayenne and Normandy and a few recalcitrants (in particular some
communist workers from the Renault works, lucid and congenial, who had
told me how proud they were of their cell at the cole normale).
On the ship that took us to Algeria, I tried in vain to indoctrinate my
fellow soldiers, who were full of inherited military memories and in particu-
lar all the tales from Indochina about the dangerous terrorists who stab you
in the back (even before setting foot in Algeria, from their contact with the
junior ofcers entrusted with training they had acquired and assimilated the
whole vocabulary of ordinary racism, terrorists, fellaghas, fellouses, bicots,
ratons, etc., and the vision of the world associated with it). We were
assigned to guard an enormous explosives store in the plain near Orlans-
ville. Long and gruelling. The ofcers were young and arrogant; they had
been educated to the rst level of the baccalaurat and done their national
Et hnography 5(4) 416
Bourdieu Algerian landing 417
service, then been recalled, integrated, and promoted. One of them would
do the crossword in Le Figaro and ask me to help him in front of everyone.
My fellow soldiers did not understand why I was not an ofcer. Finding it
hard to sleep, I would often take their place on guard duty. They would ask
me to help them write to their girlfriends. I would write their letters in
doggerel. Their extreme submissiveness towards the military hierarchy and
everything that it imposes put to a severe test what populism remained in
me, nourished by the muted guilt at sharing in the privileged idleness of the
bourgeois adolescent, that had led me to leave the cole normale, immedi-
ately upon passing the agrgation, to go take up a teaching post and do
something useful, when I could have beneted from a fourth year at the
cole.
2
I started to take an interest in Algerian society as soon as, in the last
months of my military service, I managed to escape from the fate that I had
chosen for myself and which had become very hard for me to bear, thanks
to the intervention of a colonel from Barn whom my parents had
approached through relatives of his residing in a nearby village. Being
seconded to the military staff of the French administration (Gouvernement
gnral) in Algiers, where I was subjected to the obligations and schedules
of a second-class private assigned to clerical duties (drafting correspon-
dence, contributing to reports, etc.), I was able to embark on writing a short
book (for the Que Sais-je? series)
3
in which I would try to tell the French,
and especially people on the Left, what was really going on in a country
about which they often knew next to nothing once again, in order to be
of some use, and perhaps also to stave off the bad conscience of the helpless
witness of an abominable war.
While telling myself that I was moving into ethnology and sociology, in
the early stages, only provisionally, and that once I had nished this work
of political pedagogy I would return to philosophy (indeed, during the
whole time that I was writing Sociologie de lAlgrie [Bourdieu, 1958/1962]
and conducting my rst ethnological eldwork, I continued to write every
evening on the structure of temporal experience according to Husserl), I
hurled myself totally, oblivious to fatigue and danger, into an undertaking
whose stake was not only intellectual. No doubt this transition was eased
by the extraordinary prestige that the discipline of anthropology had just
acquired, among philosophers themselves, thanks to the work of Claude
Lvi-Strauss, who had also contributed to this ennobling by substituting for
the traditional French designation of the discipline (ethnologie) the English
label of anthropology, thereby cumulating the prestigious connotations of
the German sense Foucault was then translating Kants Anthropologie
and the modernity of the Anglo-American meaning.
But there was also, in the very excess of my devotion, a sort of quasi-
sacricial will to repudiate the specious grandeurs of philosophy. For a long
time, no doubt oriented thus by the dispositions I owed to my origins, I had
been trying to tear myself away from what was unreal, if not illusory, in a
good part of what was then associated with philosophy: I had gravitated
towards the philosophy of science, the history of science, and towards the
philosophers most rooted in scientic thought, such as Leibniz, and I had
led under Georges Canguilhem a thesis subject on The Temporal Struc-
tures of Affective Life, for which I intended to draw both on philosophical
works such as those of Husserl and on works in biology and physiology. I
found in the work of Leibniz, which I had to learn some mathematics
(differential and integral calculus, topology) and a bit of logic to read,
another opportunity for reactive identication. (I remember my indignation
at a commentary, as worthless as it was ridiculous because it was always
in the register of the grandiose that Jean Hyppolite had produced of a
passage in Leibnizs Animadversiones about a nite surface of innite
length, which integral calculus enables us to know, but which Hyppolite
had converted, at the cost of a gross error on the grammatical agreement
in the Latin text, into an innite surface of nite length, something in-
nitely more metaphysical).
4
I thus understood retrospectively that I had entered into sociology and
ethnology, in part, through a deep refusal of the scholastic point of view
which is the principle of a loftiness, a social distance, in which I could never
feel at home, and to which the relationship to the social world associated
with certain social origins predisposes.
5
That posture displeased me, as it
had for a long time, and the refusal of the vision of the world associated
with the academic philosophy of philosophy no doubt contributed greatly
to leading me to the social sciences and especially to a certain manner of
practising them. But I was to discover very quickly that ethnology or at
least the particular way of conceiving it that Lvi-Strauss incarnated and
that his metaphor of the view from afar encapsulates (Lvi-Strauss,
1983b/1992) also makes it possible, in a somewhat paradoxical manner,
to hold the social world at a distance, even to deny it in Freuds sense, and
thereby to aestheticize it.
Two anecdotes seem to me to express very exactly, in the mode of the
parable or the fable, all the difference between ethnology and sociology (at
least as I construe it). In the course of a visit to him, on the occasion of my
candidacy for the Collge de France, an art historian who was very hostile
to me for reasons that were not only political (he had written, for the front
page of Le Monde, a very ill-intentioned article on Panofsky, just when I
had published my translation of Panofskys Gothic Architecture and
Scholasticism),
6
and who, to demolish me, had spread the rumour that I
was a member of the Communist Party, said to me: What a pity that you
did not write only your Kabyle house!
7
An Egyptologist, the Perpetual
Secretary of the Acadmie des sciences morales et politiques, one of the most
conservative institutions of cultural France (which has no lack of them),
told me, at the reception for the new academic year I had not visited him
during my candidacy, as he was away from Paris alluding to the extra-
ordinary score (two votes) that I had obtained on the vote by the Institut
to ratify the election by the Collge (a purely formal procedure, despite a
few accidents without consequence in the past, tied to the names of Pierre
Boulez, who, reality or legend, obtained two votes, and Maurice Merleau-
Ponty three): My colleagues (or confrres, I no longer remember) did not
much appreciate your writing about the obituaries of the alumni of the
cole normale suprieure. He was alluding to an article on The Categories
of Professorial Understanding in which I had taken as object the obituar-
ies published in the Newsletter of the Alumni of the ENS.
8
We have here a good measure of the distance, often unnoticed, between
sociology, especially when it confronts the most burning issues of the
present (which are not necessarily where one thinks they are, namely, on
the terrain of politics), and ethnology, which authorizes and even fosters,
among authors as much as among readers, the postures of the aesthete.
Never having fully broken with the tradition of the literary journey and the
artists cult of exoticism (a lineage within which stand the Tristes tropiques
of Lvi-Strauss but also a good part of the writings of Michel Leiris and
Alfred Mtraux, all three linked in their youth to the avant-garde artistic
movements of the time), this science without a contemporary stake, other
than a purely theoretical one, can at best churn the social unconscious (I
think for instance of the problem of the division of labour between the
sexes) but very delicately, without ever brutalizing or traumatizing us.
(I think that, although he always granted me very generous support it
was he who, along with Fernand Braudel and Raymond Aron, had brought
me, when I was still very young and had yet published next to nothing, into
the cole pratique des hautes tudes, and he was the rst to call me to
discuss the Collge de France and although he always wrote me very kind
and very laudatory things about each of my books, Lvi-Strauss never felt
great sympathy for the fundamental orientations of my work and for the
relation to the social world engaged in my research in ethnology, and still
less in sociology (I remember that he had asked me oddly nave questions
about the sociology of art in particular). For my part, while I bore an
immense admiration for him, and while I placed myself in the tradition he
had created (or recreated), I had very quickly discovered in him, aside from
the objectivism that I explicitly criticized in Outline of a Theory of Practice
and in The Logic of Practice (Bourdieu, 1972a/1977 and 1980/1990), a
scientistic naturalism which, manifest in the metaphors and often supercial
references to the natural sciences to cladistics, for instance with which
he sprinkled his writings, underlay his profoundly dehistoricized vision of
social reality. It was as if the science of nature was for him, aside from a
source of inspiration and of effects of science, an instrument of order that
allowed him to legitimize a vision of the social world founded on the
denegation of the social to which aestheticization also contributes.
I remember that, at a time when he was surrounded by an aura of critical
progressivism he was in debate with Sartre and Maxime Rodinson about
Marxism Lvi-Strauss had distributed, in his seminar at the cole des
hautes tudes, a text by Teilhard de Chardin to the utter stupefaction of
even his most unconditional followers. But the profoundly conservative
vision that has always been at the basis of his thought unveils or betrays
itself unequivocally in The View from Afar (Lvi-Strauss, 1983b/1992),
with the encomium of Germany and Wagner, the apologia for realist
painting, and the defence of authoritarian and repressive education. He also
wrote in 1968 a rather mediocre text on the student revolt which he inter-
preted as a conict of generations and, in his Marc Bloch Lecture of July
1983, he had critiqued, under cover of the ambiguous concept more
political than scientic of spontaneism, both the subversion of the
students of 1968 who (like Aron, Braudel and Canguilhem, and many
others) had profoundly called him into question, and the critique of struc-
turalism to which I had contributed, in particular in the Outline.
9
He could
only, or wanted only, to see in this critique a regression beneath the objec-
tivist vision that he had imposed in ethnology, that is, a return to subjec-
tivism, to the subject and her lived experience, of which he had purported
to rid ethnology, and which I was revoking just as radically as he with the
notion of habitus.)
With military service over, to be able to continue the investigations that
I had undertaken, which were ever dearer to my heart, I took up a post of
assistant professor in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Algiers and,
especially during the short and long school vacations, I was able to continue
my ethnological inquiries and then my sociological inquiries, thanks to the
Algerian branch of the INSEE [the French National Institute of Statistics
and Economic Studies]. I can say that, throughout the years I spent in
Algeria, I never ceased to be, so to speak, in the eld, carrying out more or
less systematic observation of one kind or another (for instance, I collected
several hundred descriptions of sets of clothing with the intention of relating
the various possible combinations of elements borrowed from European
dress and from the variants of traditional dress chechia, turban, sarouel,
etc. to the social characteristics of their wearers), taking photographs,
making surreptitious recordings of conversations in public places (I had for
a time intended to study the conditions of the shift from one language to
another, and I continued the experiment for a time in Barn, where it was
easier for me to do so), in-depth interviews with informants, questionnaire
surveys, archival forays (I spent entire nights copying out by hand the
surveys on housing, locked, after the curfew, in the basement of the HLM
[social housing] ofce), administering tests in schools, conducting discus-
sions in social-service centres, etc. The somewhat exalted libido sciendi that
propelled me, rooted in a kind of passion for everything about this country,
its people and its landscapes, and also in the dull but constant sensation of
guilt and revolt in the face of so much suffering and injustice, knew neither
rest nor bounds.
I remember for instance this rather gloomy day in autumn when I was
trekking up [with Adbelmalek Sayad] towards At Hichem, a village in
Greater Kabylia, the site of my rst eldwork on social structure and ritual.
In Tizi Ouzou, we heard the clatter of machine-guns; we started into the
valley through a road littered all along with carcasses of burnt-out cars; in
the climb up to the pass, above a curve, sitting on top of a kind of alluvial
cone beside the road, we saw a man dressed in a djellaba, with a rie
between his knees. Sayad showed great sang-froid by acting as if he had
noticed nothing though, as an Algerian, he was perhaps taking even
greater risks than I was. We kept going without speaking a word and my
only thought was that we would have to come back on the same path again
in the evening. But my desire to return to my eldsite and conrm a number
of hypotheses on ritual was so strong that my thinking went no further.
This total engagement and disregard for danger owed nothing to any sort
of heroism but rather was rooted, I believe, in the extreme sadness and
anxiety in which I lived and which, with the desire to decipher a conun-
drum of ritual, to collect a game, to see such and such artefact (a wedding
lamp, an ancient coffer or the inside of a well-preserved house, for instance)
or, in other cases, the simple desire to observe and witness, led me to invest
myself, body and soul, in the frantic work that would enable me to measure
up to experiences of which I was the unworthy and disarmed witness, and
which I wanted to account for at all costs. It is not easy to describe simply,
as I lived through them, situations and events perhaps adventures that
have profoundly shaken me, to the point sometimes of coming back in my
dreams, and not only the most extreme of them. This is the case of the
accounts that one informant gave me while apologizing for paining me, in
an entirely white cell of the monastery of the missionary White Fathers, and
another at the end of the pier of Algiers, so that no one would overhear us,
of the torture the French army had inicted on them. At Djemaa Saharidj,
where I had come to gather data on the allocation of land (something I had
not been able to do in At Hichem, where I had had to content myself with
drawing up the distribution of the different lineages in the space of the
village), on the day I arrived, the White Fathers were not there I had
forgotten that it was Sunday, they were at mass). I walked along a path
above the monastery all the way to a small grove where I came upon an old
Kabyle man, with a thin face, an aquiline nose and a superb white mous-
tache he reminded me of my maternal grandfather busy drying gs on
wicker trays. I started to speak with him about the ritual and about lakhrif,
the season of fresh gs and of ghts . . .
Suddenly, he seemed to me strangely nervous. A shot rang out, very close
to us, and while remaining very courteous, he quickly vanished. I learned a
few days later from a young man who did odd jobs for the White Fathers
and with whom I had spoken at length, that this grove was a place where
the soldiers of the ALN [National Liberation Army] used to come up and
sleep in the afternoon, and that they had red a shot to warn us to make
off. A few days later, when I had already become quite accustomed to the
village and was well accepted by the residents, thanks no doubt to the spon-
sorship of my hosts, two White Fathers Father Devulder, a very friendly
man with a tall frame and a long white beard, whose name I easily recall
because he was the author of some very ne studies of the symbolism of
murals in Kabylia (Devulder, 1951) that I used extensively in my work, and
another, a younger man linked to the ALN there was suddenly great agita-
tion as French soldiers (in whom I readily recognized myself since, only a
year earlier, I was still wearing their uniform) were advancing in single le
along a sunken path towards the mountains. I knew from my young friend,
who himself knew it from the children who circled about the soldiers, that
they were setting out to search for a hide-out, which they suspected was on
the side of the mountain, where the ALN held its meetings and kept its
archives. I followed their progress, amidst the men and women of the
village, who, like me, hoped that they would not nd the refuge before the
evening and that its occupants would be able to escape. And that is what
happened. But, the next day, the cache was taken, together with the papers
that were found there, which included lists of the names of all the ALN
supporters in the country. My friend, who was directly threatened, asked
me to take him in my car. So I set off the next morning, although my work
was far from nished, and we passed through the military checkpoints,
despite some scares, without too much difculty.
To conduct sociological eldwork in a situation of war compels one to
reect upon everything, to monitor everything, and in particular all that is
taken for granted in the ordinary relation between the observer and the
informant, the interviewer and the interviewee: the identity of the inter-
viewers, even the composition of the interviewing unit one or two persons,
and, if two, a man and a woman, an Algerian man and a French woman,
etc. (I evoked a fraction of the reections that were forced upon me by the
conduct of this research in the Foreword to Part Two of Travail et
travailleurs en Algrie [Bourdieu et al., 1963: 2607]). The very meaning
of the observation and interview is in question, more than ever, for the inter-
viewees themselves (are these people perhaps police or spies?). Suspicion is
generalized: several times, agents of the French intelligence services came
on the tracks of our interviewers, asking their own questions about the
nature of the questioning that had been done (for quite some time, every
morning, when I set off in my car to go and pursue my inquiries in the
bidonville [shanty-town] of Le Clos Salembier, I was followed by a police
car, and, one day, I was summoned in by the young SAS ofcer responsible
for this district, who wanted to know what I was doing).
10
One cannot survive, in the literal sense, in such a situation (also experi-
enced by other eldworkers who have studied crack dealers, like Philippe
Bourgois [1995], or the gangs of Los Angeles, Boston, and New York, like
Martn Snchez-Jankowski [1991]) unless one exerts a permanent practical
reexivity which is indispensable, in conditions of extreme urgency and risk,
to interpret and assess the situation instantaneously and to mobilize, more
or less consciously, the knowledge and know-how acquired in ones earliest
social experience. The critical vigilance that I engaged in my later works no
doubt nds its basis in these rst experiences of research in situations where
nothing is ever self-evident and everything is constantly called into question.
(Whence, here again, the irritation I cannot help feeling when specialists of
opinion polls, that is, of surveys conducted vicariously and at a distance,
vexed by my purely scientic objections to their practices, make arrogant
and puerile critiques of investigations which, like those in The Weight of
the World, engage all the acquired experience.)
11
I remember very clearly, for example, the day when, in a regrouping
centre on the Collo peninsula, the fate of the interview, and perhaps of the
interviewers, hung momentarily on the answer that I was to give to the
question put to me by the people among whom we wanted to conduct our
study. It all started in Algiers, at the Institut de statistiques of the rue Bab
Azoun, where Alain Darbel, the INSEE administrator responsible for
drawing a sample of the population of the regrouping centres which,
given the lack of information on the parent population, was pretty much
meaningless chose, as if at random (being more favourable than not to
Algrie franaise, he was very hostile to the intrusion of sociologists into
the holy of holies of INSEE), two particularly difcult regions: Matmatas,
near Orlansville, and the Collo peninsula, the region most fully under the
control of the ALN, which at one point had considered setting up a
provisional government there. It was one of the main targets of the major
military operations (called oprations Challe) in which armoured vehicles,
helicopters, and paratroopers were being deployed in devastating but futile
attempts at pacication. Although I was aware of the danger and, more
vaguely, of the arbitrariness of the choice (as I told Darbel on the eve of our
departure), I decided to go to Collo with a small team: two liberal pied-
noir students
12
(liberal in the sense of that place and time, that is to say,
roughly in favour of Algerian independence) but one of them, unable
to bear the tension, opted to leave before the investigation started; a
young Arab, who had told us he was a law student, although he had no
credentials, and who turned out to be an extraordinary interviewer; and
Adbelmalek Sayad, who was a student of mine at the Faculty of Algiers and
himself also involved in the liberal students movement. After a long car
journey in my Renault Dauphine we arrived in Constantine, which had the
air of a besieged city: all the doors of the cafs were covered with wire mesh
to protect against grenade attacks, and at four in the afternoon there was
no one on the streets. Our plan to rally Collo by road terried the sous-
prfet, a young narque who hardly dared cross the street to join his mother.
It is he who imposed on us to travel by boat by going through
Philippeville.
13
The journey from Philippeville to the small harbour of Collo
seemed to me exhilarating: at last I would see things close up for myself.
Along the whole shoreline, the mountains were in ames.
The sous-prfet of Collo, whose previous post had been at Romorantin,
14
had a message conveyed to me that I should be cautious, and that a fake
terrorist attack [organized by the French army] can happen quickly. Colonel
Vaudrey (I think it was he), the former commander in chief in Algiers, knew
that we were there and who we were. I was on the red list, no doubt since
my military service; I had learned it on the morning of 13 May 1958 from
one of the pied-noir students. Although fully aware of my views on Algeria
I had given a lecture whose title, On Algerian Culture, was perfectly trans-
parent in the context of the time, and which the Algerian students, suspend-
ing their strike, had attended en masse and, although they disagreed entirely
with what I told them, without provocation but also without concessions,
about the difference between the effects of the colonial situation and those
of the acculturation linked to the contact of civilizations, a very fashionable
theme in American ethnology at the time, they had cared to warn me that
I would be well advised to vanish and stay in hiding. (To convince me that
they were well informed, they asked me if I knew Grard Lebrun, who was
indeed a friend of mine, at that time a philosophy teacher at the prepara-
tory classes for the cole normale in the lyce of Algiers and himself on the
list of people to be neutralized, perhaps in the way Maurice Audin had
been.)
15
I had also been made aware of the ill-will of the military authori-
ties by a young student from the cole centrale [another leading grande
cole in Paris], who was opposed to the war and who, in order to be able
to go and judge for himself, had asked to take part in one of the eld trips
organized by the army to convert young people to Algrie franaise: he
had been sent to Collo and he accompanied us in our eldwork.
I chose to go to An Aghbel, about 20 kilometres from Collo. The SAS
captain, who could not quite understand (or understood too well) what we
had come for, wanted to lodge us in the army post. I refused the offer and
we went and set ourselves up in the former school, outside of the protected
zone but in neutral territory (this seemed to me to be very important in
order to carry out the eldwork). At night, as Sayad and I worked until the
wee hours, writing out the days observations, shadows would roam
around. Every morning we would travel for a dozen kilometres in my
Dauphine, along a gorge very propitious for real or fake ambushes (the SAS
captain was attacked there by the ALN shortly after we left I do not
remember how I learned of this, perhaps from Salah Bouhedja, whom I rst
met there and who later came to work in our research centre in Paris).
16
On the day when we arrived at the regrouping centre, a cluster of men were
sitting under some big olive trees (I still have a whole series of photographs
taken a few days later). We left the car and walked towards them. Two or
three of them had weapons bulging under their djellabas. One of them, very
dark-skinned, with a round head and a small beard, wearing a grey
astrakhan hat which set him apart from the others (he was one of the
Bouafer sons, who would turn out to be an amahbul, a visionary and unpre-
dictable character, but nonetheless one who commanded attention and
respect; one of his brothers was a harki
17
and the other was in the ALN),
stood up and addressed me, although nothing, in my appearance at least,
distinguished me from the others. He asked me with some excitement what
we had come to do there. I replied that we were there to see and hear
what they had to say and to report it; that the French army was several
kilometres away and that we were at their mercy, or words to that effect.
He invited us to sit down and offered us coffee. I was often helped in my
eldwork, in Algiers and elsewhere, by characters of this sort, often highly
intelligent autodidacts who, owing to their ambiguous location between
two social conditions and two civilizations, and sometimes between two
religions the most educated of them sometimes professed syncretic beliefs,
which they explained by invoking Ren Gunon
18
showed clear signs of
oddity, even madness (as suggested by the term amahbul that was applied
to them, from which the French maboul [slang for nuts] is derived), but
were nonetheless endowed with immense prestige. One of them, who many
a time served as my laisser-passer and guarantor in my visits to the kasbah
(in the tensest moments of the Battle of Algiers, he would introduce me to
informants with the words you can talk, which instantly dispelled
mistrust), contrived things one day so that we would walk, arm in arm,
down the whole street in front of the Faculty of Letters, at a time when the
cafs were packed with pieds-noirs students in favour of Algrie franaise.
To give the show its full force as a test and a challenge, he was dressed in
ostentatiously oriental style, with silk sirwal trousers and an embroidered
doublet, which, together with his skilfully trimmed black beard, ensured
that he would not pass unnoticed.
As for the Bouafer of An Aghbel, he liked to accompany us in our eld-
work, and often, after the interviews which he had attended (I will not easily
forget the old man, said to be beyond 100 years old, who, when he uttered
the names of the neighbouring tribes, would get red up with excitement
in his enthusiasm for battle before slumping back on his side in exhaustion),
he would give us his thoughts, each more typical than the last of what I
called the cultural pidgin, and of which I will give just one example: The
Beni Toufout [the name of a tribe] . . . whats that, what does that mean?
he would ask. Beni Toufout? Tu votes [you vote, pronounced with an
Algerian accent, tou voot]. You see, we invented democracy . . .
Much like the empirical study of the working classes has sometimes
seemed to the prophets of the proletariat as a manifestation of scepticism,
the common-sense step of going in the eld to see how things really are
could, in those days of political certainties, seem strange, and even suspect,
especially when it concerned military operations such as the regrouping of
populations. And it sometimes happened in Paris in the 1960s that people
would call me to account for my eldwork, almost as if the fact that I came
back unharmed had something shy about it. (My only safe-conduct I
remember one day when I was driving alone in my car towards a Kabyle
village and, having come upon a long column of military vehicles, I was
stopped and forced to turn back was a letter from the INSEE in Algiers
saying that I was authorized to carry out research, which I would show to
the military authorities, who were always surprised to encounter me in such
impossible places.)
Whence all the situations of disconnection, by excess or by default, or
better of being out of phase or out of place, in which I have continually
found myself in my relations with the intellectual world. For example, the
observation of the regroupings made it possible to anticipate and
announce, in a quite counterintuitive and unseasonable way that these
sites, hastily described by some as in the mould of concentration camps,
would for most of them outlive independence. In some places, through an
irony of history, the old villages of origin have become almost holiday
homes for the villagers regrouped in the plains; or that the farms under
self-management that fed the imagination of some pied verts,
19
carried
away by revolutionary enthusiasm, would fall into the hands of an Algerian
petty bourgeoisie of authoritarian technocrats or of the army, or even of the
barons of a socialist neo-feudalism, as Mohammed Boukhobza (1982)
would later say of the great estates that some high ofcials of socialist
Algeria had carved out for themselves in the south of the province of
Constantine. I must acknowledge here the immense support that my realis-
tic, and often rather disenchanted and therefore, in those times of excessive
collective enthusiasm, somewhat scandalous anticipations received from
Algerian friends I think, among many others, of Leila Belhacne, Mouloud
Feraoun, Rolande Garse, Moulah Hennine, Mimi Bensmane, Ahmed
Misraoui, Mahfoud Nechem and Abdelmalek Sayad. These Algerian friend-
ships, no doubt born of afnities of habitus, helped me to elaborate a
representation of Algerian reality that was at once intimate and distant,
attentive and, if I might say so, affectionate and warm, without for that
being nave or fatuous.
The transformation of my vision of the world that accompanied my tran-
sition from philosophy to sociology, of which my Algerian experience was
without contest the pivotal moment, is, as I have already said, not easy to
describe because it is made up of the imperceptible accumulation of the
changes that were gradually imposed on me by the experiences of life or
that I brought about at the cost of a work on myself inseparable from the
work I was doing on the social world. To give an approximation of this
apprenticeship, which I have often described as an initiation (I know that
this idiom will surprise those who are wedded to the brutally reductive
vision of sociology which is ritually described in philosophy teaching as
simplifying and atly positivist), I would like to return to the research
project that I carried out, in parallel with the work I was doing in Algeria,
regarding the bachelorhood of eldest sons in Barn, and which led to three
successive articles, each separated from the previous one by 10 or 15 years
(Bourdieu, 1962b, 1972b, 1989). Indeed, it is perhaps not entirely
misplaced to see a kind of intellectual Bildungsroman in the history of that
research, which, taking as its object the sufferings and dramas linked to the
relations between the sexes in peasant society which is more or less the
title I gave, long before the emergence of gender studies, to the article in
Les Temps modernes devoted to that object (Bourdieu, 1962a) was the
occasion and the operator of a veritable conversion. That word is not too
strong to describe the transformation, at once intellectual and affective, that
led me from the phenomenology of emotional life (springing perhaps also
from the affections and afictions of life, which had to be learnedly denied)
to a scientic practice implying a vision of the social world at once more
distanced and more realistic. This intellectual reorientation was fraught
with social implications: it was in effect accomplished through the shift
from philosophy to ethnology to sociology, and, within the latter, to rural
sociology, a specialty situated at the very bottom of the social hierarchy of
specialties. And the deliberate renunciation implied in this negative
displacement within the hierarchies would no doubt not have been so easy
A peasant ploughing his eld under the g trees in Kabylia.
if it had not been accompanied by the confused dream of a reintegration
into the native world.
In my eldwork in Kabylia, to defend myself against the spontaneous
sociology of my informants, I would often think back to the peasants of
Barn: did the social unit that the Kabyles called either adhrum or thakhar-
rubth have any more reality than the vaguely dened entity that in Barn
we call lou besiat, the ensemble of neighbours, lous besis, upon which some
ethnologists of Europe, following a local erudite, had conferred a scienti-
cally recognized status? Was it not necessary to conduct eldwork directly
in Barn in order to objectivate the experience that served, consciously or
unconsciously, as my point of reference? Thanks to Raymond Aron, who
had known him, I had just discovered the work of Alfred Schtz, and it
seemed to me instructive to question, like the phenomenologist, the familiar
relationship to the social world, but in a quasi-experimental manner, by
taking as object of an objective, even objectivist, analysis a world that was
familiar to me, in which I was on rst-name terms with all the agents, where
the ways of speaking, thinking, and acting were entirely self-evident to me,
and by the same token to objectivate my relationship of familiarity with that
object, and the difference that separates it from the scientic relationship
A peasant and his wife ploughing their eld in Barn.
that one arrives at, as I did in Kabylia, through an effort armed with instru-
ments of objectivation such as genealogy and statistics.
In the rst text, written in the early 1960s, at a time when the ethnog-
raphy of European societies barely existed and when rural sociology
remained at a respectful distance from the eld, I undertook to resolve the
social enigma constituted by the bachelorhood of eldest sons in a society
known for its erce attachment to the principle of primogeniture (Bourdieu,
1962b).
20
Remaining very close to the nave vision from which I nonethe-
less intended to break away, I threw myself into a somewhat frantic total
description of a social world that I knew without truly knowing it, as always
with a familiar universe. Nothing escapes the scientistic frenzy of someone
who discovers with a kind of wonderment the pleasure of objectivating, as
taught in the Guide pratique dtude directe des comportements culturels
by Marcel Maget (1962), a tremendous hyper-empiricist antidote to the
fascination then exerted by the structuralist constructions of Lvi-Strauss
(as well attested by my article on the Kabyle house, which I wrote at about
the same time). The most visible sign of the conversion of the gaze implied
in adopting the posture of the observer was the intensive use I made then
of maps, ground plans, statistics, and photography: everything went into it,
whether it was a sculptured door in front of which I had walked daily on
my way home from school or the games played at the village feast, the age
and make of the cars; I even offered the reader the anonymous ground plan
of a house familiar to me because I had played in it throughout my child-
hood. The immense work required for the statistical construction of a great
many double- or triple-entry tables on relatively large populations without
the aid of a calculator or computer, partook, as did the very many inter-
views associated with in-depth observation that I carried out then, of the
somewhat perverse trials of an initiatory ascesis.
But, proving that the heuristic trajectory also has something of an initia-
tory journey about it, through total immersion and the happy reunions that
accompanied it, I accomplished a reconciliation with things and people
from which the entry into another life had imperceptibly removed me and
which the ethnographic posture causes one to respect quite naturally: child-
hood friends and relatives, their manners, their routines, their accent. A
whole part of myself was thus given back to me, the very part by which I
was bound to them and which distanced me from them, because I could not
deny it without disowning them out of the shame of both them and myself.
The return to my origins was accompanied by a return, but a controlled
return, of the repressed. Of that, the text itself bears hardly any trace. While
the few vague and essayistic nal remarks, on the gap between the primary
vision and the scientic vision, may give a glimpse of the intention of reex-
ivity that was at the basis of the whole undertaking (to do a Tristes
tropiques in reverse), nothing, except perhaps the pent-up tenderness of the
description of the ball, evokes the emotional atmosphere in which my eld-
work was conducted. I think back, for example, to what was the starting
point of my project, the school class photograph that one of my fellow
pupils, by then a low-level clerk in the nearby town, commented on, piti-
lessly chanting unmarriageable with reference to almost half of those who
appeared in it. I think of all the interviews, often very painful, that I
conducted with old bachelors of the generation of my father, who frequently
accompanied me and, through his presence and his discreet intercession,
helped me to elicit trust and condence. I think of this old school buddy,
whom I was very fond of for his keenness and tactfulness, and who, having
retired with his mother into a magnicently maintained house, had chalked
on the stable door the birthdates of his mares and the girls names he had
given them. And the objectivist restraint of my remarks is no doubt partly
due to the fact that I felt the sense of committing something like a betrayal
which led me to refuse to this day any re-publication of texts whose
appearance in scholarly journals with small readerships protected them
against ill-intentioned or voyeuristic readings.
21
No doubt because the progress it manifests lies in the order of reexivity
understood as the scientic objectivation of the subject of objectivation, the
second text marks in a fairly clear manner the break with the structuralist
paradigm (Bourdieu, 1972b), through the shift from rule to strategy, from
structure to habitus and from the system to the socialized agent, himself
inhabited by the structure of the social relations of which he is the product;
that is to say, the decisive moment of the conversion of the gaze which is
accomplished when, underneath the rules of kinship, one discovers matri-
monial strategies, thus recovering the practical relationship to the world.
This reappropriation of the truth of the logic of practice is what, in return,
made possible the discovery of the truth of the ritual or matrimonial prac-
tices, at rst sight so strange, of the Kabyle stranger, thereby constituted as
an alter ego.
22
The nal text, which opens the way to the most general, the most simple
and also the most robust model, is also the one which makes it possible to
understand most directly what was both displayed and disguised in the
initial scene: the small ball that I had observed and described, and which,
with the pitiless necessity of the word unmarriageable, had given me the
intuition that I was dealing with a highly signicant social fact, was indeed
a concrete and palpable realization of the market in symbolic goods
(Bourdieu, 1989). In becoming unied at the national level (as it is, today,
with homologous effects, on a global scale), the matrimonial market had
condemned to an abrupt and brutal devaluation those who were bound up
with the protected market of the old-style matrimonial exchanges controlled
by the families, the eldest sons of the leading families, good catches
suddenly converted into empeasanted peasants, hucous (men of the
woods) repellent and savage, forever excluded from the right to reproduce.
Everything, in a sense, was thus present from the inception, in the initial
description, but in a form such that, as the philosophers would say, the truth
unveiled itself there only by veiling itself.
This kind of experimentation on the work of reexivity that I carried out
in eldwork on Barn which was also, and above all, an ethnography of
ethnography and on the ethnographer, shows that one of the rarest springs
of the practical mastery that denes the craft of the sociologist, a central
ingredient of which is what we call intuition, is perhaps, ultimately, the scien-
tic use of a social experience which, so long as it is rst subjected to socio-
logical critique, can, however lacking in social value it may be in itself, and
even when it is accompanied by crises (of conversion and reconversion), be
converted from a handicap into capital. Thus, as I have said elsewhere, it was
likely an entirely banal remark of my mothers, which I would not even have
picked up if I had not been on the lookout theyve become very kin with
the Xs now that theres a Polytechnicien in the family that, at the time of
my study of bachelorhood, triggered the reexions that led me to abandon
the model of the kinship rule for that of strategy (Bourdieu, 2003). I shall not
undertake here to try and understand and set out the profound transform-
ations of this privileged relation of kinship that was necessary for a remark
that could only be made in a natural setting, in a casual exchange of domestic
familiarity, to be received as a piece of information liable to being integrated
into an explanatory model. And I will simply indicate that, in a more general
way, it is only at the cost of a veritable epistemological conversion, irreducible
to what phenomenology calls the poch, that lived experience, which is in
itself devoid of relevance, can enter into scientic analysis.
Acknowledgements
This article is excerpted from Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse pour une auto-analyse
(Paris: Raisons dagir Editions, Cours et Travaux, 2004, pp. 5386). It is published
here for the rst time in English translation by kind permission of Jrme
Bourdieu. The full text will appear as Outline for a Self-Analysis (Cambridge:
Polity Press and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). The title and
endnotes are by Loc Wacquant, as are the bibliographical references (listed here
in their initial French publication to respect their chronological ordering).
Notes
1 The cole normale suprieure of the Rue dUlm is one of Frances top
grandes coles (competitive graduate schools). It was the traditional
breeding ground of intellectuals, and especially of social scientists, during
much of the long 20th century: among its alumni are Durkheim, Merleau-
Ponty, Sartre, Aron, de Beauvoir, Foucault, Derrida, and Bourdieu.
2 The agrgation is a highly selective national examination leading to a post
in secondary or higher education. Bourdieu passed his agrgation in phil-
osophy in 1953, after which he taught for one year at the public high school
of Moulins in central France.
3 This book series, published by Presses Universitaires de France, was then
considered the top outlet for short academic primers on the range of topics.
It was unusual for a scholar as young and inexperienced as Bourdieu to be
an author for it (although the series continues to be published, it is now a
dim shadow of its old self).
4 A professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne and later at the Collge de
France, Jean Hyppolite (190668) introduced Hegels thought in France
and embodied a strand of philosophy anchored in the internalist history of
philosophical thought. His best-known works are Introduction to Hegels
Philosophy of History and Logic and Existence.
5 For an elaboration of the social roots and effects of the scholastic fallacy
in the social sciences, read Bourdieu (1990, 1997/2000).
6 This translation, which brought together Panofskys studies of the mental
structures and architectural forms characteristic of the Scholastics, contains
an afterword in which Bourdieu (1967) elaborates for the rst time his
reconceptualization of habitus.
7 This is a reference to Bourdieus (1970) classic ethnographic dissection of
The Berber House, or the World Reversed.
8 The obituaries were analysed for ferreting out The Categories of Profes-
sorial Understanding (Bourdieu and de Saint Martin, 1975), much as one
would analyse the structure of a primitive myth, in a move deemed inappro-
priate if not sacrilegious by some alumni of the cole normale.
9 See Lvi-Strauss (1983a) and Bourdieu (1985) for a fuller response to the
charge of spontaneism.
10 The Sections Administratives Spcialises (SAS) were army units created in
1955 by the colonial governor Jacques Soustelle to foster a policy of inte-
gration of the native Algerian population. They combined a civil mission
(of administrative, economic, social, and medical assistance) with a military
task (intelligence gathering and order maintenance). In 1960, about 700
SASs combed the Algerian territory.
11 This is a reference to a review of Bourdieus team study of social suffering
in contemporary France, The Weight of the World (Bourdieu et al., 1993),
by Nonna Mayer (1995), a researcher at the CEVIPOF, the research centre
on French politics of the Institut dtudes politiques de Paris, one of the
countrys leading producers of opinion surveys policy and a frequent
target of Bourdieus critique of polling.
12 Pied-noir (literally black feet) is the ethnic self-designation of French
colonists born in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia during the imperial era and
their descendants.
13 An narque is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale dAdministration or ENA,
Frances top grande cole for the training of upper civil servants. The city
of Philippeville was renamed Skikda in 1962, after the proclamation of
Algerian independence.
14 Romorantin is a small town in the midst of bucolic Sologne, some hundred
miles south of Paris, between Orlans and Poitiers, and thus hardly any
preparation for managing a colonial territory facing a nationalist insurgency.
15 Maurice Audin (193257) was a brilliant young mathematician and
lecturer at the University of Algiers who was abducted and tortured to
death by the French paratroopers in 1957 due to his involvement in anti-
colonial mobilization. The affair immediately became emblematic of the
wanton brutality of French military repression in the waning years of the
colony (Vidal-Naquet, 1958).
16 Salah Bouhedja, a youth in the village at the time when Bourdieu carried
out this eld study, has been the computer specialist of the Centre for
European Sociology since the late 1970s.
17 The noun or adjective harki (from the Arabic harka, movement) originally
designated a member of military units composed of Algerians paired to
French companies to assist in the ght against the rising independentist
rebellion (195462). The term later extended to include all autochthons
who sided with continued French rule (about one eighth of Algerias eight
million population then). An estimated 150,000 of them were massacred
by the FLN after independence, after they were abandoned there by the
French military. For a discussion of the social position and meaning of the
amahbul in traditional Kabyle society, see Bourdieu (1972a: 1523).
18 Ren Gunon (18861951) was an esoteric thinker who, ranging from
Catholic philosophy to Susm, produced religiously inspired critiques of
Western technology and its myth of progress, such as Orient and Occident
(1924) and The Crisis of the Modern World (1927).
19 Literally green feet, a term derived from pied noir to designate support-
ers of an agrarian route towards Algerian socialism. The policy of regroup-
ing and its effects are analysed by Bourdieu and Sayad (1964) and in their
article Colonial Rule and Cultural Sabir in this issue.
20 The core section of this essay appears in English translation as The Peasant
and his Body in this issue.
21 The three articles (Bourdieu, 1962b, 1972b, 1989) were brought together,
with a new introduction sketching the methodological and theoretical
progress they chart, in the book Le Bal des clibataires (The Ball of
Bachelors), going to print at the time of Bourdieus passing (Bourdieu,
2002).
22 This shift from rules to strategy and its epistemological and methodological
implications are discussed in Bourdieu (1985, 1997: Chapter 1, Critique of
Scholastic Reason), and exemplied in Bourdieu (1980/1990: Book II).
References
Boukobza, Mhammed, with Mohammed Khelladi and Tamany Sar (1982)
Structures familiales et changements socioconomiques. Algiers: Institut
national dtudes et danalyses pour la planication.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1958) Sociologie de lAlgrie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France. (Trans. The Algerians, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1962.)
Bourdieu, Pierre (1962a) Les relations entre les sexes dans la socit paysanne,
Les Temps modernes 195 (August): 30731.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1962b) Clibat et condition paysanne, tudes rurales 5(6)
(April): 32136.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1967) Postface to Erwin Panofsky, Architecture gothique et
pensee scolastique, pp. 13367 (trans. by Pierre Bourdieu). Paris: Editions
de Minuit.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1970) La maison kabyle ou le monde renvers, in Jean
Pouillon and Paul Maranda (eds) changes et communications. Mlanges
offerts Claude Lvi-Strauss loccasion de son 60me anniversaire. Paris
and The Hague: Mouton. (Various English translations, inc. The Berber
House or the World Reversed, Social Science Information 92 (April 1970):
15170, and in Pierre Bourdieu, Algeria 1960. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de lHomme 1979.)
Bourdieu, Pierre (1972a) Esquisse dune thorie de la pratique. Geneva: Droz.
(Rev. trans. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977.)
Bourdieu, Pierre (1972b) Les stratgies de reproduction dans le systme de repro-
duction, Annales. conomies, socits, civilisations 4(5) (JulyOctober):
110527. (Trans. Marriage Strategies as Strategies of Social Reproduction,
in R. Foster and O. Ranum (eds), Family and Society: Selections from the
Annales, pp. 11744. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.)
Bourdieu, Pierre (1980) Le Sens pratique. Paris: Editions de Minuit. (Trans. The
Logic of Practice, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990.)
Bourdieu, Pierre (1985) De la rgle aux stratgies, Terrains 4 (March): 93100.
(Trans. From Rules to Strategies, Cultural Anthropology 1(1) (1986):
11020.)
Bourdieu, Pierre (1989) Reproduction interdite. La dimension symbolique de
la domination conomique, tudes rurales 11314 (JanuaryJune): 1536.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1990) The Scholastic Point of View, Cultural Anthropology
5(4): 38091.
Bourdieu, Pierre et al. (1993) La Misre du monde. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
(Trans. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999.)
Bourdieu, Pierre (1997) Mditations pascaliennes. Paris: Seuil. (Trans. Pascalian
Meditations. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.)
Bourdieu, Pierre (2002) Le Bal des clibataires. Crise de la socit paysanne en
Barn. Paris: Seuil/Points. (Trans. The Ball of Bachelors. Cambridge: Polity
Press; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming.)
Bourdieu, Pierre (2003) Participant Objectivation: The Huxley Medal Lecture,
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9(2) (February): 28194.
Bourdieu, Pierre and Abdelmalek Sayad (1964) Le Dracinement. La crise de
lagriculture traditionnelle en Algrie. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
Bourdieu, Pierre and Monique de Saint Martin (1975) Les catgories de len-
tendement professoral, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 3: 6993.
(Trans. The Categories of Professorial Judgement, in Pierre Bourdieu,
Homo Academicus, pp. 194225. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988.)
Bourdieu, Pierre, Alain Darbel, Jean-Pierre Rivet and Claude Seibel (1963)
Travail et travailleurs en Algrie. Paris and The Hague: Mouton.
Bourgois, Philippe (1995) In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Devulder, M. (1951) Peintures murales et pratiques magiques dans la tribu des
Ouadhias, Revue africaine 45: 63102.
Lvi-Strauss, Claude (1955) Tristes tropiques. Paris: Plon. (Trans. Tristes
Tropiques, New York: Atheneum, 1970.)
Lvi-Strauss, Claude (1983a) Histoire et ethnologie, Annales. conomies,
socits, civilisations 38(6) (NovemberDecember): 121731.
Lvi-Strauss, Claude (1983b) Le Regard loign. Paris: Plon. (Trans. The View
from Afar. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.)
Maget, Marcel (1962) Guide pratique dtude directe des comportements
culturels. Paris: CNRS.
Mayer, Nonna (1995) Lentretien selon Pierre Bourdieu. Analyse critique de La
Misre du monde, Revue franaise de sociologie 36(2) (AprilJune): 35570.
Snchez-Jankowski, Martn (1991) Islands in the Street: Gangs in Urban
American Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Vidal-Naquet, Pierre (1958) LAffaire Audin. Paris: ditions de Minuit.
PIERRE BOURDIEU held the Chair of Sociology at the
Collge de France, where he directed the Centre for European
Sociology and the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales
until his passing in 2002. He is the author of numerous classics of
social science, including Reproduction in Education, Society, and
Culture (1970, tr. 1977), Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972, tr.
1977), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste
(1979, tr. 1984), Homo Academicus (1984, tr. 1988), and The Rules
of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Artistic Field (1992, tr. 1996).
Among his ethnographic works are Le Dracinement. La crise de
lagriculture traditionnelle en Algrie (with Adbelmalek Sayad,
1964), Algeria 1960 (1977, tr. 1979), The Weight of the World
(1993, tr. 1998), and Le Bal des clibataires (2002).
All pictures in this article Pierre Bourdieu/Fondation Pierre Bourdieu,
Geneva. Courtesy: Camera Austria, Graz.

Bourdieu - Algerian Landing

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Bourdieu - Algerian Landing

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Algerian landing

You might also like