Bourdieu - Algerian Landing

7/28/2019 Bourdieu - Algerian Landing

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/bourdieu-algerian-landing 1/29

Algerian landing

■ Pierre Bourdieu

Collège de FranceTranslated by Richard Nice and Loïc 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 fieldwork 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 scientific endeavours. The author’s

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 themore intolerable in a state of social emergency. The quandaries presented

by conducting fieldwork in a situation of war are revealed to be the initial

impetus for his abiding concern for epistemic reflexivity. 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 scientific capital.

K E Y W O R D S ■ reflexivity, ethnography, colonialism, war, danger,

emotion, scientific vocation, intellectuals, academic disciplines, Algeria,Béarn, France

graphyCopyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

www.sagepublications.com Vol 5(4): 415–443[DOI: 10.1177/1466138104048826]

A R T I C L E



My perception of the sociological field [in the 1960s] owed much to the factthat the social and academic trajectory that had led me there set me stronglyapart. Moreover, returning from Algeria with an experience as an ethnolo-

gist which, having been acquired in the difficult conditions of a war of liber-ation, had marked for me a decisive break with scholastic experience, I wasinclined to a rather critical vision of sociology and sociologists – the visionof the philosopher being reinforced by that of the ethnologist – and, aboveall, perhaps, to a somewhat disenchanted, or realistic, representation of theindividual or collective position-takings of intellectuals, for whom theAlgerian question had constituted, in my eyes, an exceptional touchstone.

It is not easy to think and to say what this experience was for me, andin particular the intellectual but also personal challenge represented by that

tragic situation, which would not let itself be trapped within the ordinaryalternatives of morality and politics. I had refused to enter the reserveofficers’ college [École des officiers de réserve, EOR], no doubt partlybecause I could not bear the idea of disassociating myself from the rank-and-file soldiers, and also because of the lack of sympathy I felt for thecandidates for the EOR, often graduates of HEC [the École des HautesÉtudes Commerciales, the leading French business school] or lawyers withwhom I did not feel much in common. After three months of fairly toughtraining in Chartres (every week I had to step out from the ranks at the callof my name to be presented, before the assembled troops, with my copy of L’Express, the magazine that had become the symbol of a progressive policyin Algeria, and to which I had somewhat naïvely subscribed), I first landedin the Army Psychological Service in Versailles, following a very privilegedroute reserved for students of the École normale.1 But heated argumentswith high-ranking officers who wanted to convert me to‘l’Algérie française’ soon earned me a reassignment to Algeria. The AirForce had formed a regiment, a kind of sub-infantry whose task was toguard 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 hadtold me how proud they were of ‘their’ cell at the École normale).

On the ship that took us to Algeria, I tried in vain to indoctrinate myfellow soldiers, who were full of inherited military memories and in particu-lar all the tales from Indochina about the dangerous terrorists who stab youin the back (even before setting foot in Algeria, from their contact with thejunior officers entrusted with training they had acquired and assimilated thewhole 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 Orléans-ville. Long and gruelling. The officers were young and arrogant; they hadbeen educated to the first level of the baccalauréat and done their national

Ethnography 5(4)416



Bourdieu ■ Algerian landing 417



service, then been recalled, integrated, and promoted. One of them woulddo 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 officer. Finding it

hard to sleep, I would often take their place on guard duty. They would askme to help them write to their girlfriends. I would write their letters indoggerel. Their extreme submissiveness towards the military hierarchy andeverything that it imposes put to a severe test what populism remained inme, nourished by the muted guilt at sharing in the privileged idleness of thebourgeois adolescent, that had led me to leave the École normale, immedi-ately upon passing the agrégation, to go take up a teaching post and dosomething useful, when I could have benefited from a fourth year at theÉcole.2

I started to take an interest in Algerian society as soon as, in the lastmonths of my military service, I managed to escape from the fate that I hadchosen for myself and which had become very hard for me to bear, thanks

Ethnography 5(4)418



to the intervention of a colonel from Béarn whom my parents hadapproached through relatives of his residing in a nearby village. Beingseconded to the military staff of the French administration (Gouvernement

général ) in Algiers, where I was subjected to the obligations and schedulesof a second-class private assigned to clerical duties (drafting correspon-dence, contributing to reports, etc.), I was able to embark on writing a shortbook (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 countryabout which they often knew next to nothing – once again, in order to beof some use, and perhaps also to stave off the bad conscience of the helplesswitness 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 finished this workof political pedagogy I would return to philosophy (indeed, during thewhole time that I was writing Sociologie de l’Algérie [Bourdieu, 1958/1962]and conducting my first ethnological fieldwork, I continued to write everyevening on the structure of temporal experience according to Husserl), Ihurled myself totally, oblivious to fatigue and danger, into an undertakingwhose stake was not only intellectual. No doubt this transition was easedby the extraordinary prestige that the discipline of anthropology had justacquired, among philosophers themselves, thanks to the work of ClaudeLévi-Strauss, who had also contributed to this ennobling by substituting forthe traditional French designation of the discipline (ethnologie) the Englishlabel of anthropology, thereby cumulating the prestigious connotations of the German sense – Foucault was then translating Kant’s Anthropologie –and the modernity of the Anglo-American meaning.

But there was also, in the very excess of my devotion, a sort of quasi-sacrificial will to repudiate the specious grandeurs of philosophy. For a longtime, no doubt oriented thus by the dispositions I owed to my origins, I hadbeen trying to tear myself away from what was unreal, if not illusory, in agood part of what was then associated with philosophy: I had gravitatedtowards the philosophy of science, the history of science, and towards thephilosophers most rooted in scientific thought, such as Leibniz, and I hadfiled under Georges Canguilhem a thesis subject on ‘The Temporal Struc-tures of Affective Life’, for which I intended to draw both on philosophicalworks such as those of Husserl and on works in biology and physiology. Ifound 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 identification. (I remember my indignationat a commentary, as worthless as it was ridiculous – because it was always

in the register of the grandiose – that Jean Hyppolite had produced of apassage in Leibniz’s Animadversiones about a ‘finite surface of infinitelength’, which integral calculus enables us to know, but which Hyppolite




had converted, at the cost of a gross error on the grammatical agreementin the Latin text, into ‘an infinite surface of finite length’, something infi-nitely more metaphysical).4

I thus understood retrospectively that I had entered into sociology andethnology, in part, through a deep refusal of the scholastic point of viewwhich is the principle of a loftiness, a social distance, in which I could neverfeel at home, and to which the relationship to the social world associatedwith certain social origins predisposes.5 That posture displeased me, as ithad for a long time, and the refusal of the vision of the world associatedwith the academic philosophy of philosophy no doubt contributed greatlyto 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 Lévi-Strauss incarnated andthat his metaphor of the ‘view from afar’ encapsulates (Lévi-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 Freud’s sense, andthereby to aestheticize it.

Two anecdotes seem to me to express very exactly, in the mode of theparable or the fable, all the difference between ethnology and sociology (atleast as I construe it). In the course of a visit to him, on the occasion of mycandidacy for the Collège de France, an art historian who was very hostileto me for reasons that were not only political (he had written, for the frontpage of Le Monde, a very ill-intentioned article on Panofsky, just when Ihad published my translation of Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism),6 and who, to demolish me, had spread the rumour that Iwas a member of the Communist Party, said to me: ‘What a pity that youdid not write only your Kabyle house!’7 An Egyptologist, the PerpetualSecretary of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, one of the mostconservative institutions of cultural France (which has no lack of them),told me, at the reception for the new academic year – I had not visited himduring 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 Institutto ratify the election by the Collège (a purely formal procedure, despite afew ‘accidents’ without consequence in the past, tied to the names of PierreBoulez, who, reality or legend, obtained two votes, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty three): ‘My colleagues (or confrères, I no longer remember) did notmuch appreciate your writing about the obituaries of the alumni of theÉcole normale supérieure.’ He was alluding to an article on ‘The Categoriesof 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, betweensociology, especially when it confronts the most burning issues of thepresent (which are not necessarily where one thinks they are, namely, on

Ethnography 5(4)420



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

artist’s cult of exoticism (a lineage within which stand the Tristes tropiquesof Lévi-Strauss but also a good part of the writings of Michel Leiris andAlfred Métraux, all three linked in their youth to the avant-garde artisticmovements of the time), this science without a contemporary stake, otherthan a purely theoretical one, can at best churn the social unconscious (Ithink for instance of the problem of the division of labour between thesexes) but very delicately, without ever brutalizing or traumatizing us.

(I think that, although he always granted me very generous support – itwas 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, intothe École pratique des hautes études, and he was the first to call me todiscuss the Collège de France – and although he always wrote me very kindand very laudatory things about each of my books, Lévi-Strauss never feltgreat sympathy for the fundamental orientations of my work and for therelation to the social world engaged in my research in ethnology, and stillless in sociology (I remember that he had asked me oddly naïve questionsabout the sociology of art in particular). For my part, while I bore animmense admiration for him, and while I placed myself in the tradition hehad created (or recreated), I had very quickly discovered in him, aside fromthe objectivism that I explicitly criticized in Outline of a Theory of Practiceand in The Logic of Practice (Bourdieu, 1972a/1977 and 1980/1990), ascientistic naturalism which, manifest in the metaphors and often superficialreferences to the natural sciences – to cladistics, for instance – with whichhe sprinkled his writings, underlay his profoundly dehistoricized vision of social reality. It was as if the science of nature was for him, aside from asource of inspiration and of ‘effects of science’, an instrument of order thatallowed him to legitimize a vision of the social world founded on thedenegation of the social – to which aestheticization also contributes.

I remember that, at a time when he was surrounded by an aura of criticalprogressivism – he was in debate with Sartre and Maxime Rodinson aboutMarxism – Lévi-Strauss had distributed, in his seminar at the École deshautes études, a text by Teilhard de Chardin to the utter stupefaction of even his most unconditional followers. But the profoundly conservativevision that has always been at the basis of his thought unveils or betraysitself unequivocally in The View from Afar (Lévi-Strauss, 1983b/1992),with the encomium of Germany and Wagner, the apologia for realistpainting, 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 conflict of generations and, in his Marc Bloch Lecture of July1983, he had critiqued, under cover of the ambiguous concept – more




Ethnography 5(4)422



political than scientific – of ‘spontaneism’, both the subversion of thestudents of 1968 who (like Aron, Braudel and Canguilhem, and manyothers) had profoundly called him into question, and the critique of ‘struc-

turalism’ to which I had contributed, in particular in the Outline.9 He couldonly, 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 purportedto rid ethnology, and which I was revoking just as radically as he with thenotion of habitus.)

With military service over, to be able to continue the investigations thatI 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 continuemy ethnological inquiries and then my sociological inquiries, thanks to theAlgerian branch of the INSEE [the French National Institute of Statisticsand Economic Studies]. I can say that, throughout the years I spent inAlgeria, I never ceased to be, so to speak, in the field, carrying out more orless systematic observation of one kind or another (for instance, I collectedseveral hundred descriptions of sets of clothing with the intention of relatingthe various possible combinations of elements borrowed from Europeandress 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 fora time intended to study the conditions of the shift from one language toanother, and I continued the experiment for a time in Béarn, where it waseasier for me to do so), in-depth interviews with informants, questionnairesurveys, archival forays (I spent entire nights copying out by hand thesurveys on housing, locked, after the curfew, in the basement of the HLM[social housing] office), administering tests in schools, conducting discus-sions in social-service centres, etc. The somewhat exalted libido sciendi thatpropelled 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 neitherrest nor bounds.

I remember for instance this rather gloomy day in autumn when I wastrekking up [with Adbelmalek Sayad] towards Aït Hichem, a village inGreater Kabylia, the site of my first fieldwork on social structure and ritual.In Tizi Ouzou, we heard the clatter of machine-guns; we started into thevalley through a road littered all along with carcasses of burnt-out cars; inthe 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 riflebetween his knees. Sayad showed great sang-froid by acting as if he hadnoticed nothing – though, as an Algerian, he was perhaps taking even




greater risks than I was. We kept going without speaking a word and myonly thought was that we would have to come back on the same path againin the evening. But my desire to return to my fieldsite and confirm a numberof hypotheses on ritual was so strong that my thinking went no further.

This total engagement and disregard for danger owed nothing to any sortof heroism but rather was rooted, I believe, in the extreme sadness andanxiety 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 weddinglamp, 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 measureup to experiences of which I was the unworthy and disarmed witness, andwhich I wanted to account for at all costs. It is not easy to describe simply,

Ethnography 5(4)424



as I lived through them, situations and events – perhaps adventures – thathave profoundly shaken me, to the point sometimes of coming back in mydreams, and not only the most extreme of them. This is the case of theaccounts that one informant gave me while apologizing for paining me, inan 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 inflicted on them. At Djemaa Saharidj,where I had come to gather data on the allocation of land (something I hadnot been able to do in Aït Hichem, where I had had to content myself withdrawing up the distribution of the different lineages in the space of thevillage), on the day I arrived, the White Fathers were not there – I hadforgotten that it was Sunday, they were at mass). I walked along a pathabove the monastery all the way to a small grove where I came upon an oldKabyle man, with a thin face, an aquiline nose and a superb white mous-tache – he reminded me of my maternal grandfather – busy drying figs onwicker trays. I started to speak with him about the ritual and about lakhrif ,the season of fresh figs and of fights . . .

Suddenly, he seemed to me strangely nervous. A shot rang out, very closeto us, and while remaining very courteous, he quickly vanished. I learned afew days later from a young man who did odd jobs for the White Fathersand with whom I had spoken at length, that this grove was a place wherethe soldiers of the ALN [National Liberation Army] used to come up andsleep in the afternoon, and that they had fired a shot to warn us to makeoff. 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 friendlyman with a tall frame and a long white beard, whose name I easily recall




because he was the author of some very fine studies of the symbolism of murals in Kabylia (Devulder, 1951) that I used extensively in my work, andanother, a younger man linked to the ALN – there was suddenly great agita-

tion as French soldiers (in whom I readily recognized myself since, only ayear earlier, I was still wearing their uniform) were advancing in single filealong a sunken path towards the mountains. I knew from my young friend,who himself knew it from the children who circled about the soldiers, thatthey were setting out to search for a hide-out, which they suspected was onthe side of the mountain, where the ALN held its meetings and kept itsarchives. I followed their progress, amidst the men and women of thevillage, who, like me, hoped that they would not find the refuge before theevening 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 papersthat were found there, which included lists of the names of all the ALNsupporters in the country. My friend, who was directly threatened, askedme to take him in my car. So I set off the next morning, although my workwas far from finished, and we passed through the military checkpoints,despite some scares, without too much difficulty.

To conduct sociological fieldwork in a situation of war compels one toreflect upon everything, to monitor everything, and in particular all that istaken for granted in the ordinary relation between the observer and theinformant, 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 reflections that were forced upon me by theconduct of this research in the Foreword to Part Two of Travail et travailleurs en Algérie [Bourdieu et al., 1963: 260–7]). The very meaningof the observation and interview is in question, more than ever, for the inter-viewees themselves (are these people perhaps police or spies?). Suspicion isgeneralized: several times, agents of the French intelligence services cameon the tracks of our interviewers, asking their own questions about thenature of the questioning that had been done (for quite some time, everymorning, when I set off in my car to go and pursue my inquiries in thebidonville [shanty-town] of Le Clos Salembier, I was followed by a policecar, and, one day, I was summoned in by the young SAS officer responsiblefor 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 fieldworkers who have studied crack dealers, like PhilippeBourgois [1995], or the gangs of Los Angeles, Boston, and New York, likeMartín Sánchez-Jankowski [1991]) unless one exerts a permanent practical

reflexivity which is indispensable, in conditions of extreme urgency and risk,to interpret and assess the situation instantaneously and to mobilize, moreor less consciously, the knowledge and know-how acquired in one’s earliest

Ethnography 5(4)426



social experience. The critical vigilance that I engaged in my later works nodoubt finds its basis in these first experiences of research in situations wherenothing 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 scientific 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 theinterviewers, hung momentarily on the answer that I was to give to thequestion 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 BabAzoun, 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 muchmeaningless – chose, as if at random (being more favourable than not to‘Algérie française’, he was very hostile to the intrusion of sociologists intothe holy of holies of INSEE), two particularly ‘difficult’ regions: Matmatas,near Orléansville, and the Collo peninsula, the region most fully under thecontrol of the ALN, which at one point had considered setting up aprovisional government there. It was one of the main targets of the majormilitary operations (called ‘opérations Challe’) in which armoured vehicles,helicopters, and paratroopers were being deployed in devastating but futile

attempts at ‘pacification’. Although I was aware of the danger and, morevaguely, of the arbitrariness of the choice (as I told Darbel on the eve of ourdeparture), I decided to go to Collo with a small team: two ‘liberal’ pied-noir students12 (‘liberal’ in the sense of that place and time, that is to say,roughly in favour of Algerian independence) but one of them, unableto bear the tension, opted to leave before the investigation started; ayoung Arab, who had told us he was a law student, although he had nocredentials, and who turned out to be an extraordinary interviewer; andAdbelmalek Sayad, who was a student of mine at the Faculty of Algiers andhimself also involved in the ‘liberal students’ movement. After a long carjourney in my Renault Dauphine we arrived in Constantine, which had theair of a besieged city: all the doors of the cafés were covered with wire meshto protect against grenade attacks, and at four in the afternoon there wasno one on the streets. Our plan to rally Collo by road terrified the sous- préfet , a young énarque who hardly dared cross the street to join his mother.It is he who imposed on us to travel by boat by going throughPhilippeville.13 The journey from Philippeville to the small harbour of Colloseemed to me exhilarating: at last I would see things close up for myself.Along the whole shoreline, the mountains were in flames.

The sous-préfet of Collo, whose previous post had been at Romorantin,14

had a message conveyed to me that I should be cautious, and that ‘a faketerrorist attack [organized by the French army] can happen quickly’. ColonelVaudrey (I think it was he), the former commander in chief in Algiers, knewthat we were there and who we were. I was on the ‘red list’, no doubt sincemy military service; I had learned it on the morning of 13 May 1958 fromone 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 disagreedentirelywith what I told them, without provocation but also without concessions,about the difference between the effects of the colonial situation and those

Ethnography 5(4)428



of the acculturation linked to the ‘contact of civilizations’, a very fashionabletheme in American ethnology at the time, they had cared to warn me thatI would be well advised to vanish and stay in hiding. (To convince me that

they were well informed, they asked me if I knew Gérard Lebrun, who wasindeed a friend of mine, at that time a philosophy teacher at the prepara-tory classes for the École normale in the lycée of Algiers and himself on thelist of people to be ‘neutralized’, perhaps in the way Maurice Audin hadbeen.)15 I had also been made aware of the ill-will of the military authori-ties by a young student from the École centrale [another leading grandeécole in Paris], who was opposed to the war and who, in order to be ableto go and judge for himself, had asked to take part in one of the field tripsorganized by the army to convert young people to ‘Algérie française’: he

had been sent to Collo and he accompanied us in our fieldwork.I chose to go to Aïn Aghbel, about 20 kilometres from Collo. The SAScaptain, who could not quite understand (or understood too well) what wehad come for, wanted to lodge us in the army post. I refused the offer andwe went and set ourselves up in the former school, outside of the protectedzone but in neutral territory (this seemed to me to be very important inorder to carry out the fieldwork). At night, as Sayad and I worked until thewee hours, writing out the day’s observations, shadows would roamaround. Every morning we would travel for a dozen kilometres in myDauphine, along a gorge very propitious for real or fake ambushes (the SAScaptain was attacked there by the ALN shortly after we left – I do notremember how I learned of this, perhaps from Salah Bouhedja, whom I firstmet 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 photographstaken a few days later). We left the car and walked towards them. Two orthree of them had weapons bulging under their djellabas. One of them, verydark-skinned, with a round head and a small beard, wearing a greyastrakhan hat which set him apart from the others (he was one of theBouafer sons, who would turn out to be an amahbul , a visionary and unpre-dictable character, but nonetheless one who commanded attention andrespect; one of his brothers was a harki17 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 hearwhat they had to say and to report it; that the French army was severalkilometres away and that we were at their mercy, or words to that effect.

Ethnography 5(4)430



He invited us to sit down and offered us coffee. I was often helped in myfieldwork, in Algiers and elsewhere, by characters of this sort, often highlyintelligent autodidacts who, owing to their ambiguous location between

two social conditions and two civilizations, and sometimes between tworeligions – the most educated of them sometimes professed syncretic beliefs,which they explained by invoking René Guénon18 – showed clear signs of oddity, even ‘madness’ (as suggested by the term amahbul that was appliedto them, from which the French ‘maboul ’ [slang for ‘nuts’] is derived), butwere nonetheless endowed with immense prestige. One of them, who manya 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 toinformants 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 thecafés were packed with pieds-noirs students in favour of Algérie française.To give the show its full force as a test and a challenge, he was dressed inostentatiously oriental style, with silk sirwal trousers and an embroidereddoublet, which, together with his skilfully trimmed black beard, ensuredthat he would not pass unnoticed.

As for the Bouafer of Aïn Aghbel, he liked to accompany us in our field-work, and often, after the interviews which he had attended (I will not easilyforget the old man, said to be beyond 100 years old, who, when he utteredthe names of the neighbouring tribes, would get fired up with excitementin 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 Icalled the cultural pidgin, and of which I will give just one example: ‘TheBeni Toufout [the name of a tribe] . . . what’s that, what does that mean?’he would ask. ‘Beni Toufout? Tu votes [you vote, pronounced with anAlgerian accent, ‘tou voot ’]. You see, we invented democracy . . .’

Much like the empirical study of the working classes has sometimesseemed to the prophets of the proletariat as a manifestation of scepticism,the common-sense step of going in the field to see how things really arecould, 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 peoplewould call me to account for my fieldwork, almost as if the fact that I cameback unharmed had something fishy about it. (My only safe-conduct – Iremember one day when I was driving alone in my car towards a Kabylevillage and, having come upon a long column of military vehicles, I wasstopped 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 tothe military authorities, who were always surprised to encounter me in suchimpossible places.)




Ethnography 5(4)432



Whence all the situations of disconnection, by excess or by default, orbetter of being ‘out of phase’ or ‘out of place’, in which I have continuallyfound myself in my relations with the intellectual world. For example, the

observation of the ‘regroupings’ made it possible to anticipate andannounce, in a quite counterintuitive – and unseasonable – way that thesesites, hastily described by some as in the mould of concentration camps,would for most of them outlive independence. In some places, through anirony of history, the old villages of origin have become almost ‘holidayhomes’ for the villagers ‘regrouped’ in the plains; or that the farms underself-management that fed the imagination of some ‘ pied verts’,19 carriedaway by revolutionary enthusiasm, would fall into the hands of an Algerianpetty 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 officials 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 excessivecollective enthusiasm, somewhat scandalous anticipations received fromAlgerian friends – I think, among many others, of Leila Belhacène, MouloudFeraoun, Rolande Garèse, Moulah Hennine, Mimi Bensmaïne, AhmedMisraoui, Mahfoud Nechem and Abdelmalek Sayad. These Algerian friend-ships, no doubt born of affinities of habitus, helped me to elaborate arepresentation of Algerian reality that was at once intimate and distant,attentive and, if I might say so, affectionate and warm, without for thatbeing naïve or fatuous.

The transformation of my vision of the world that accompanied my tran-sition from philosophy to sociology, of which my Algerian experience waswithout contest the pivotal moment, is, as I have already said, not easy todescribe because it is made up of the imperceptible accumulation of thechanges that were gradually imposed on me by the experiences of life orthat I brought about at the cost of a work on myself inseparable from thework I was doing on the social world. To give an approximation of thisapprenticeship, which I have often described as an initiation (I know thatthis idiom will surprise those who are wedded to the brutally reductivevision of sociology which is ritually described in philosophy teaching assimplifying and flatly positivist), I would like to return to the researchproject that I carried out, in parallel with the work I was doing in Algeria,regarding the bachelorhood of eldest sons in Béarn, and which led to threesuccessive 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 thatresearch, which, taking as its object the sufferings and dramas linked to therelations 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 inLes Temps modernes devoted to that object (Bourdieu, 1962a) – was theoccasion and the operator of a veritable conversion. That word is not toostrong to describe the transformation, at once intellectual and affective, thatled me from the phenomenology of emotional life (springing perhaps alsofrom the affections and afflictions of life, which had to be learnedly denied)to a scientific practice implying a vision of the social world at once moredistanced and more realistic. This intellectual reorientation was fraughtwith social implications: it was in effect accomplished through the shiftfrom 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 negativedisplacement within the hierarchies would no doubt not have been so easy

Ethnography 5(4)434

A peasant ploughing his field under the fig trees in Kabylia.



if it had not been accompanied by the confused dream of a reintegrationinto the native world.

In my fieldwork in Kabylia, to defend myself against the spontaneous

sociology of my informants, I would often think back to the peasants of Béarn: did the social unit that the Kabyles called either adhrum or thakhar-rubth have any more ‘reality’ than the vaguely defined entity that in Béarnwe call lou besiat , the ensemble of neighbours, lous besis, upon which someethnologists of Europe, following a local erudite, had conferred a scientifi-cally recognized status? Was it not necessary to conduct fieldwork directlyin Béarn in order to objectivate the experience that served, consciously orunconsciously, as my point of reference? Thanks to Raymond Aron, whohad known him, I had just discovered the work of Alfred Schütz, and it

seemed to me instructive to question, like the phenomenologist, the familiarrelationship to the social world, but in a quasi-experimental manner, bytaking as object of an objective, even objectivist, analysis a world that wasfamiliar to me, in which I was on first-name terms with all the agents, wherethe ways of speaking, thinking, and acting were entirely self-evident to me,and by the same token to objectivate my relationship of familiarity with thatobject, and the difference that separates it from the scientific relationship


A peasant and his wife ploughing their field in Béarn.



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 first text, written in the early 1960s, at a time when the ethnog-

raphy of European societies barely existed and when rural sociologyremained at a respectful distance from the ‘field’, I undertook to resolve thesocial enigma constituted by the bachelorhood of eldest sons in a societyknown for its fierce attachment to the principle of primogeniture (Bourdieu,1962b).20 Remaining very close to the naïve vision from which I nonethe-less intended to break away, I threw myself into a somewhat frantic totaldescription of a social world that I knew without truly knowing it, as alwayswith a familiar universe. Nothing escapes the scientistic frenzy of someonewho discovers with a kind of wonderment the pleasure of objectivating, as

taught in the Guide pratique d’étude directe des comportements culturelsby Marcel Maget (1962), a tremendous hyper-empiricist antidote to thefascination then exerted by the structuralist constructions of Lévi-Strauss(as well attested by my article on the Kabyle house, which I wrote at aboutthe same time). The most visible sign of the conversion of the gaze impliedin adopting the posture of the observer was the intensive use I made thenof maps, ground plans, statistics, and photography: everything went into it,whether it was a sculptured door in front of which I had walked daily onmy way home from school or the games played at the village feast, the ageand make of the cars; I even offered the reader the anonymous ground planof 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 greatmany double- or triple-entry tables on relatively large populations withoutthe 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 thesomewhat 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 thataccompanied it, I accomplished a reconciliation with things and peoplefrom which the entry into another life had imperceptibly removed me andwhich the ethnographic posture causes one to respect quite naturally: child-hood friends and relatives, their manners, their routines, their accent. Awhole part of myself was thus given back to me, the very part by which Iwas bound to them and which distanced me from them, because I could notdeny 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 controlledreturn, of the repressed. Of that, the text itself bears hardly any trace. Whilethe few vague and essayistic final remarks, on the gap between the primary

vision and the scientific vision, may give a glimpse of the intention of reflex-ivity that was at the basis of the whole undertaking (to do a ‘Tristestropiques in reverse’), nothing, except perhaps the pent-up tenderness of the

Ethnography 5(4)436



description of the ball, evokes the emotional atmosphere in which my field-work was conducted. I think back, for example, to what was the startingpoint 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 whoappeared in it. I think of all the interviews, often very painful, that Iconducted with old bachelors of the generation of my father, who frequentlyaccompanied me and, through his presence and his discreet intercession,helped me to elicit trust and confidence. I think of this old school buddy,whom I was very fond of for his keenness and tactfulness, and who, havingretired with his mother into a magnificently maintained house, had chalkedon 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 partlydue 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 whoseappearance in scholarly journals with small readerships protected themagainst ill-intentioned or voyeuristic readings.21

No doubt because the progress it manifests lies in the order of reflexivityunderstood as the scientific objectivation of the subject of objectivation, thesecond text marks in a fairly clear manner the break with the structuralistparadigm (Bourdieu, 1972b), through the shift from rule to strategy, fromstructure 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 isaccomplished 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 first sight so strange, of the Kabyle stranger, thereby constituted asan alter ego.22

The final text, which opens the way to the most general, the most simpleand also the most robust model, is also the one which makes it possible tounderstand most directly what was both displayed and disguised in theinitial scene: the small ball that I had observed and described, and which,with the pitiless necessity of the word ‘unmarriageable’, had given me theintuition that I was dealing with a highly significant social fact, was indeeda concrete and palpable realization of the market in symbolic goods(Bourdieu, 1989). In becoming unified at the national level (as it is, today,with homologous effects, on a global scale), the matrimonial market hadcondemned to an abrupt and brutal devaluation those who were bound up

with the protected market of the old-style matrimonial exchanges controlledby 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 initialdescription, 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 reflexivity that I carried out

in fieldwork on Béarn which was also, and above all, an ethnography of ethnography and on the ethnographer, shows that one of the rarest springsof the practical mastery that defines the craft of the sociologist, a centralingredient of which is what we call intuition, is perhaps, ultimately, the scien-tific use of a social experience which, so long as it is first subjected to socio-logical critique, can, however lacking in social value it may be in itself, andeven when it is accompanied by crises (of conversion and reconversion), be

converted from a handicap into capital. Thus, as I have said elsewhere, it waslikely an entirely banal remark of my mother’s, which I would not even havepicked up if I had not been on the lookout – ‘they’ve become very “kin” withthe X’s now that there’s a Polytechnicien in the family’ – that, at the time of my study of bachelorhood, triggered the reflexions that led me to abandonthe model of the kinship rule for that of strategy (Bourdieu, 2003). I shall notundertake here to try and understand and set out the profound transform-ations of this privileged relation of kinship that was necessary for a remarkthat could only be made in a ‘natural setting’, in a casual exchange of domesticfamiliarity, to be received as a piece of information liable to being integratedinto an explanatory model. And I will simply indicate that, in a more generalway, it is only at the cost of a veritable epistemological conversion, irreducibleto what phenomenology calls the épochè, that lived experience, which is initself devoid of relevance, can enter into scientific analysis.

Acknowledgements

This article is excerpted from Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse pour une auto-analyse

(Paris: Raisons d’agir Editions, Cours et Travaux, 2004, pp. 53–86). It is publishedhere for the first time in English translation by kind permission of JérômeBourdieu. The full text will appear as Outline for a Self-Analysis (Cambridge:Polity Press and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). The title andendnotes are by Loïc Wacquant, as are the bibliographical references (listed herein their initial French publication to respect their chronological ordering).

Notes

1 The École normale supérieure of the Rue d’Ulm is one of France’s top grandes écoles (competitive graduate schools). It was the traditional

Ethnography 5(4)438





12 Pied-noir (literally ‘black feet’) is the ethnic self-designation of Frenchcolonists born in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia during the imperial era andtheir descendants.

13 An énarque is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration or ENA,France’s top grande école for the training of upper civil servants. The cityof 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 hundredmiles south of Paris, between Orléans and Poitiers, and thus hardly anypreparation for managing a colonial territory facing a nationalist insurgency.

15 Maurice Audin (1932–57) was a brilliant young mathematician andlecturer 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 thewanton brutality of French military repression in the waning years of thecolony (Vidal-Naquet, 1958).

16 Salah Bouhedja, a youth in the village at the time when Bourdieu carriedout this field study, has been the computer specialist of the Centre forEuropean Sociology since the late 1970s.

17 The noun or adjective harki (from the Arabic harka, movement) originallydesignated a member of military units composed of Algerians paired toFrench companies to assist in the fight against the rising independentistrebellion (1954–62). The term later extended to include all autochthonswho sided with continued French rule (about one eighth of Algeria’s eightmillion population then). An estimated 150,000 of them were massacredby the FLN after independence, after they were abandoned there by theFrench military. For a discussion of the social position and meaning of theamahbul in traditional Kabyle society, see Bourdieu (1972a: 15–23).

18 René Guénon (1886–1951) was an esoteric thinker who, ranging fromCatholic philosophy to Sufism, 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 theirarticle ‘Colonial Rule and Cultural Sabir’ in this issue.

20 The core section of this essay appears in English translation as ‘The Peasantand 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 célibataires (The Ball of Bachelors), going to print at the time of Bourdieu’s passing (Bourdieu,2002).

Ethnography 5(4)440



22 This shift ‘from rules to strategy’ and its epistemological and methodologicalimplications are discussed in Bourdieu (1985, 1997: Chapter 1, ‘Critique of Scholastic Reason’), and exemplified in Bourdieu (1980/1990: Book II).

References

Boukobza, M’hammed, with Mohammed Khelladi and Tamany Safir (1982)Structures familiales et changements socioéconomiques. Algiers: Institutnational d’études et d’analyses pour la planification.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1958) Sociologie de l’Algérie. Paris: Presses Universitaires deFrance. (Trans. The Algerians, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1962.)

Bourdieu, Pierre (1962a) ‘Les relations entre les sexes dans la société paysanne’,Les Temps modernes 195 (August): 307–31.Bourdieu, Pierre (1962b) ‘Célibat et condition paysanne’, Études rurales 5(6)

(April): 32–136.Bourdieu, Pierre (1967) ‘Postface’ to Erwin Panofsky, Architecture gothique et

pensee scolastique, pp. 133–67 (trans. by Pierre Bourdieu). Paris: Editionsde Minuit.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1970) ‘La maison kabyle ou le monde renversé’, in JeanPouillon and Paul Maranda (eds) Échanges et communications. Mélangesofferts à Claude Lévi-Strauss à l’occasion de son 60ème anniversaire. Parisand The Hague: Mouton. (Various English translations, inc. ‘The BerberHouse or the World Reversed’, Social Science Information 9–2 (April 1970):151–70, and in Pierre Bourdieu, Algeria 1960. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme 1979.)

Bourdieu, Pierre (1972a) Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique. Geneva: Droz.(Rev. trans. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1977.)

Bourdieu,Pierre (1972b) ‘Les stratégiesde reproductiondans le système de repro-duction’, Annales. Économies, sociétés, civilisations 4(5) (July–October):

1105–27. (Trans. ‘Marriage Strategies as Strategies of Social Reproduction’,in R. Foster and O. Ranum (eds), Family and Society: Selections from theAnnales, pp. 117–44. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.)

Bourdieu, Pierre (1980) Le Sens pratique. Paris: Editions de Minuit. (Trans. TheLogic of Practice, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990.)

Bourdieu, Pierre (1985) ‘De la règle aux stratégies’, Terrains 4 (March): 93–100.(Trans. ‘From Rules to Strategies’, Cultural Anthropology 1(1) (1986):110–20.)

Bourdieu, Pierre (1989) ‘Reproduction interdite. La dimension symbolique de

la domination économique’, Études rurales 113–14 (January–June): 15–36.Bourdieu, Pierre (1990) ‘The Scholastic Point of View’, Cultural Anthropology

5(4): 380–91.




Bourdieu, Pierre et al. (1993) La Misère du monde. Paris: Editions du Seuil.(Trans. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society.Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999.)

Bourdieu, Pierre (1997) Méditations pascaliennes. Paris: Seuil. (Trans. PascalianMeditations. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.)

Bourdieu, Pierre (2002) Le Bal des célibataires. Crise de la société paysanne enBéarn. Paris: Seuil/Points. (Trans. The Ball of Bachelors. Cambridge: PolityPress; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming.)

Bourdieu, Pierre (2003) ‘Participant Objectivation: The Huxley Medal Lecture’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9(2) (February): 281–94.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Abdelmalek Sayad (1964) Le Déracinement. La crise del’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie. Paris: Editions de Minuit.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Monique de Saint Martin (1975) ‘Les catégories de l’en-tendement professoral’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 3: 69–93.(Trans. ‘The Categories of Professorial Judgement’, in Pierre Bourdieu,Homo Academicus, pp. 194–225. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988.)

Bourdieu, Pierre, Alain Darbel, Jean-Pierre Rivet and Claude Seibel (1963)Travail et travailleurs en Algérie. 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 desOuadhias’, Revue africaine 45: 63–102.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1955) Tristes tropiques. Paris: Plon. (Trans. TristesTropiques, New York: Atheneum, 1970.)

Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1983a) ‘Histoire et ethnologie’, Annales. Économies,sociétés, civilisations 38(6) (November–December): 1217–31.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1983b) Le Regard éloigné. Paris: Plon. (Trans. The Viewfrom Afar. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.)

Maget, Marcel (1962) Guide pratique d’étude directe des comportementsculturels. Paris: CNRS.

Mayer, Nonna (1995) ‘L’entretien selon Pierre Bourdieu. Analyse critique de La

Misère du monde’, Revue française de sociologie 36(2) (April–June): 355–70.Sánchez-Jankowski, Martín (1991) Islands in the Street: Gangs in Urban

American Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Vidal-Naquet, Pierre (1958) L’Affaire Audin. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.

■ PIERRE BOURDIEU held the Chair of Sociology at the

Collège 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

Ethnography 5(4)442



(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 Déracinement. La crise de

l’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie (with Adbelmalek Sayad,1964), Algeria 1960 (1977, tr. 1979), The Weight of the World

(1993, tr. 1998), and Le Bal des célibataires (2002). ■

All pictures in this article © Pierre Bourdieu/Fondation Pierre Bourdieu,Geneva. Courtesy: Camera Austria, Graz.


Bourdieu - Algerian Landing

Documents