Algerian Landing

ARTICLE

graphy Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com Vol 5(4): 415–443[DOI: 10.1177/1466138104048826]

Algerian landing ■

Pierre Bourdieu Collège de France Translated by Richard Nice and Loïc Wacquant

■ 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 the more 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.

ABSTRACT

■ reflexivity, ethnography, colonialism, war, danger, emotion, scientific vocation, intellectuals, academic disciplines, Algeria, Béarn, France

KEY WORDS

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My perception of the sociological field [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 ethnologist which, having been acquired in the difficult conditions of a war of liberation, 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 officers’ college [École des officiers de réserve, EOR], no doubt partly because I could not bear the idea of disassociating myself from the rankand-file soldiers, and also because of the lack of sympathy I felt for the candidates for the EOR, often graduates of HEC [the École des Hautes Études 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 L’Express, the magazine that had become the symbol of a progressive policy in Algeria, and to which I had somewhat naïvely subscribed), I first landed in the Army Psychological Service in Versailles, following a very privileged route reserved for students of the École normale.1 But heated arguments with high-ranking officers who wanted to convert me to ‘l’Algérie française’ 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 École 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 particular 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 officers 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 Orléansville. Long and gruelling. The officers were young and arrogant; they had been educated to the first level of the baccalauréat and done their national

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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 officer. 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 École normale, immediately upon passing the agrégation, to go take up a teaching post and do something useful, when I could have benefited from a fourth year at the École.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

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to the intervention of a colonel from Béarn 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 général) in Algiers, where I was subjected to the obligations and schedules of a second-class private assigned to clerical duties (drafting correspondence, 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 finished this work of political pedagogy I would return to philosophy (indeed, during the whole time that I was writing Sociologie de l’Algérie [Bourdieu, 1958/1962] and conducting my first ethnological fieldwork, 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 Lévi-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 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 quasisacrificial 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 scientific thought, such as Leibniz, and I had filed under Georges Canguilhem a thesis subject on ‘The Temporal Structures 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 identification. (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 Leibniz’s Animadversiones about a ‘finite surface of infinite length’, which integral calculus enables us to know, but which Hyppolite

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had converted, at the cost of a gross error on the grammatical agreement in the Latin text, into ‘an infinite surface of finite length’, something infinitely 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 Lévi-Strauss incarnated and that 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, 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 Collège 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 Panofsky’s 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 Académie 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 extraordinary score (two votes) that I had obtained on the vote by the Institut to ratify the election by the Collège (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 MerleauPonty three): ‘My colleagues (or confrères, I no longer remember) did not much appreciate your writing about the obituaries of the alumni of the École normale supérieure.’ He was alluding to an article on ‘The Categories of Professorial Understanding’ in which I had taken as object the obituaries 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

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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 tropiques of Lévi-Strauss but also a good part of the writings of Michel Leiris and Alfred Métraux, 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 École pratique des hautes études, and he was the first to call me to discuss the Collège de France – and although he always wrote me very kind and very laudatory things about each of my books, Lévi-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 naïve 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 superficial 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 – Lévi-Strauss had distributed, in his seminar at the École des hautes études, 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 (Lévi-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 interpreted as a conflict of generations and, in his Marc Bloch Lecture of July 1983, he had critiqued, under cover of the ambiguous concept – more

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political than scientific – 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 ‘structuralism’ 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 objectivist vision that he had imposed in ethnology, that is, a return to subjectivism, 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 field, 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 Béarn, 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] office), administering tests in schools, conducting discussions 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 Aït Hichem, a village in Greater 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 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 rifle 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

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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 fieldsite and confirm 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 conundrum 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,

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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 inflicted 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 Aït 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 moustache – he reminded me of my maternal grandfather – busy drying figs on wicker 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 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 fired 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 sponsorship 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

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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, and another, a younger man linked to the ALN – there was suddenly great agitation as French soldiers (in whom I readily recognized myself since, only a year earlier, I was still wearing their uniform) were advancing in single file 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 find 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 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 to reflect 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 interviewers, 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 the conduct of this research in the Foreword to Part Two of Travail et travailleurs en Algérie [Bourdieu et al., 1963: 260–7]). The very meaning of the observation and interview is in question, more than ever, for the interviewees 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 officer 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 experienced by other fieldworkers who have studied crack dealers, like Philippe Bourgois [1995], or the gangs of Los Angeles, Boston, and New York, like Martín 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, more or less consciously, the knowledge and know-how acquired in one’s earliest

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social experience. The critical vigilance that I engaged in my later works no doubt finds its basis in these first 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 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 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

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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 ‘Algérie française’, he was very hostile to the intrusion of sociologists into the holy of holies of INSEE), two particularly ‘difficult’ regions: Matmatas, near Orléansville, 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 ‘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, 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’ piednoir students12 (‘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 cafés 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 terrified the souspréfet, 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 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 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 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 transparent in the context of the time, and which the Algerian students, suspending 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

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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 Gérard Lebrun, who was indeed a friend of mine, at that time a philosophy teacher at the preparatory classes for the École normale in the lycée 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 authorities by a young student from the École centrale [another leading grande école 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 field trips organized 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 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 fieldwork). At night, as Sayad and I worked until the wee hours, writing out the day’s 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 first 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

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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 unpredictable character, but nonetheless one who commanded attention and respect; 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 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.

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He invited us to sit down and offered us coffee. I was often helped in my fieldwork, 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 René Guénon18 – 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 cafés 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 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 Aïn Aghbel, he liked to accompany us in our fieldwork, 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 fired 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] . . . what’s 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 field 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 fieldwork, almost as if the fact that I came back unharmed had something fishy 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.)

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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 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 realistic, 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 Belhacène, Mouloud Feraoun, Rolande Garèse, Moulah Hennine, Mimi Bensmaïne, Ahmed Misraoui, Mahfoud Nechem and Abdelmalek Sayad. These Algerian friendships, no doubt born of affinities 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 naïve or fatuous. The transformation of my vision of the world that accompanied my transition 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 flatly 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 Béarn, 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

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

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 afflictions of life, which had to be learnedly denied) to a scientific 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

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if it had not been accompanied by the confused dream of a reintegration into 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 thakharrubth have any more ‘reality’ than the vaguely defined entity that in Béarn we call lou besiat, the ensemble of neighbours, lous besis, upon which some ethnologists of Europe, following a local erudite, had conferred a scientifically recognized status? Was it not necessary to conduct fieldwork directly in Béarn 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 Schütz, 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 first-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 scientific relationship

A peasant and his wife ploughing their field in Béarn.

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that one arrives at, as I did in Kabylia, through an effort armed with instruments of objectivation such as genealogy and statistics. In the first text, written in the early 1960s, at a time when the ethnography of European societies barely existed and when rural sociology remained at a respectful distance from the ‘field’, I undertook to resolve the social enigma constituted by the bachelorhood of eldest sons in a society known for its fierce attachment to the principle of primogeniture (Bourdieu, 1962b).20 Remaining very close to the naïve vision from which I nonetheless 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 d’étude directe des comportements culturels by Marcel Maget (1962), a tremendous hyper-empiricist antidote to the fascination then exerted by the structuralist constructions of Lévi-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 childhood. 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 interviews 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 initiatory 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: childhood 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 final remarks, on the gap between the primary vision and the scientific vision, may give a glimpse of the intention of reflexivity 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

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description of the ball, evokes the emotional atmosphere in which my fieldwork 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, pitilessly 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 confidence. 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 magnificently 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 reflexivity understood as the scientific 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 matrimonial 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 practices, at first sight so strange, of the Kabyle stranger, thereby constituted as an alter ego.22 The final 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 significant social fact, was indeed a 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 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

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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 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 springs of the practical mastery that defines the craft of the sociologist, a central ingredient of which is what we call intuition, is perhaps, ultimately, the scientific use of a social experience which, so long as it is first subjected to sociological 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 mother’s, which I would not even have picked up if I had not been on the lookout – ‘they’ve become very “kin” with the 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 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 transformations 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 épochè, that lived experience, which is in itself 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 published here for the first time in English translation by kind permission of Jérôme 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 Loïc Wacquant, as are the bibliographical references (listed here in 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

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breeding ground of intellectuals, and especially of social scientists, during much of the long 20th century: among its alumni are Durkheim, MerleauPonty, Sartre, Aron, de Beauvoir, Foucault, Derrida, and Bourdieu. The agrégation is a highly selective national examination leading to a post in secondary or higher education. Bourdieu passed his agrégation in philosophy in 1953, after which he taught for one year at the public high school of Moulins in central France. 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). A professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne and later at the Collège de France, Jean Hyppolite (1906–68) introduced Hegel’s thought in France and embodied a strand of philosophy anchored in the internalist history of philosophical thought. His best-known works are Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of History and Logic and Existence. For an elaboration of the social roots and effects of the ‘scholastic fallacy’ in the social sciences, read Bourdieu (1990, 1997/2000). This translation, which brought together Panofsky’s studies of the mental structures and architectural forms characteristic of the Scholastics, contains an afterword in which Bourdieu (1967) elaborates for the first time his reconceptualization of habitus. This is a reference to Bourdieu’s (1970) classic ethnographic dissection of ‘The Berber House, or the World Reversed’. The obituaries were analysed for ferreting out ‘The Categories of Professorial Understanding’ (Bourdieu and de Saint Martin, 1975), much as one would analyse the structure of a primitive myth, in a move deemed inappropriate if not sacrilegious by some alumni of the École normale. See Lévi-Strauss (1983a) and Bourdieu (1985) for a fuller response to the charge of ‘spontaneism’. The Sections Administratives Spécialisées (SAS) were army units created in 1955 by the colonial governor Jacques Soustelle to foster a ‘policy of integration’ 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. This is a reference to a review of Bourdieu’s 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 d’études politiques de Paris, one of the country’s leading producers of opinion surveys policy – and a frequent target of Bourdieu’s critique of polling.

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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 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 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 Orléans and Poitiers, and thus hardly any preparation for managing a colonial territory facing a nationalist insurgency. 15 Maurice Audin (1932–57) 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 anticolonial 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 field 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 fight against the rising independentist rebellion (1954–62). The term later extended to include all autochthons who sided with continued French rule (about one eighth of Algeria’s 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: 15–23). 18 René Guénon (1886–1951) was an esoteric thinker who, ranging from Catholic 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 supporters of an agrarian route towards Algerian socialism. The policy of ‘regrouping’ 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 célibataires (The Ball of Bachelors), going to print at the time of Bourdieu’s passing (Bourdieu, 2002).

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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 exemplified in Bourdieu (1980/1990: Book II).

References Boukobza, M’hammed, with Mohammed Khelladi and Tamany Safir (1982) Structures familiales et changements socioéconomiques. Algiers: Institut national d’études et d’analyses pour la planification. Bourdieu, Pierre (1958) Sociologie de l’Algérie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. (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: Editions de Minuit. Bourdieu, Pierre (1970) ‘La maison kabyle ou le monde renversé’, in Jean Pouillon and Paul Maranda (eds) Échanges et communications. Mélanges offerts à Claude Lévi-Strauss à l’occasion de son 60ème anniversaire. Paris and The Hague: Mouton. (Various English translations, inc. ‘The Berber House or the World Reversed’, Social Science Information 9–2 (April 1970): 151–70, and in Pierre Bourdieu, Algeria 1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University 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: Cambridge University Press, 1977.) Bourdieu, Pierre (1972b) ‘Les stratégies de reproduction dans le système de reproduction’, 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 the Annales, pp. 117–44. 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 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.

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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. Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.) Bourdieu, Pierre (2002) Le Bal des célibataires. Crise de la société paysanne en Béarn. 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): 281–94. Bourdieu, Pierre and Abdelmalek Sayad (1964) Le Déracinement. La crise de l’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Bourdieu, Pierre and Monique de Saint Martin (1975) ‘Les catégories de l’entendement 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 des Ouadhias’, Revue africaine 45: 63–102. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1955) Tristes tropiques. Paris: Plon. (Trans. Tristes Tropiques, 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 View from Afar. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.) Maget, Marcel (1962) Guide pratique d’étude directe des comportements culturels. 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

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(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.

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