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Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria at war: Notes on the birth of an engaged ethnosociology

Tassadit Yacine Ethnography 2004 5: 487 DOI: 10.1177/1466138104050703 The online version of this article can be found at: http://eth.sagepub.com/content/5/4/487

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Copyright 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com Vol 5(4): 487509[DOI: 10.1177/1466138104050703]

Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria at war

Notes on the birth of an engaged ethnosociology

Tassadit Yacine
cole des Hautes tudes en sciences sociales, Paris, France Translated by Loc Wacquant and James Ingram

ABSTRACT

Pierre Bourdieus early trajectory is retraced to highlight the foundational role his eldwork in colonial Algeria played in his intellectual development and subsequent sociological theorizing. Plunged without forewarning into the midst of a caste society torn by capitalist development and a brutal war of national liberation, the young philosopher turned to empirical investigation in order to understand Algerian society from the inside and to take apart the mechanisms of imperial rule. This article reconstitutes the proximate academic milieu, the intellectual signposts, the personal contacts, and the tragic political conjuncture within which Bourdieus youthful inquiries took shape. These inquiries, which entailed dangerous eldwork in regions fought over by the French military and the guerrillas of the Algerian National Liberation Front, were facilitated by Bourdieus social and regional dispositions as a colonized of the interior of France and led him to erase the established intellectual division of labor between sociology, ethnology, and Oriental studies. It is in the Algerian crucible, suffused by fear, risk, and ambient fascism, that an engaged ethnosociology was forged, alive to the complexity of the real and resistant to theoretical simplication. Bourdieus rst eld studies of the uprooting of the Algerian peasantry and the birth of that countrys urban (sub)proletariat are essential to understanding the formation of his intellectual dispositions and bring to light the organic linkage that existed from the outset between his scientic and political engagements.

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KEY WORDS

Bourdieu, colonialism, war, dispossession, intellectuals, engagement, science, politics, Kabylia, Algeria

Algeria occupies a pivotal place in Bourdieus thought and work, such that it is impossible for a serious analyst to ignore it when seeking to understand his distinctive intellectual approach (especially his ethnographic vision) and his core problematics, as well as the Kabyle references that frequently dot his analyses, including those having nothing to do with this region and culture. These references are sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit or even allusive, but they are omnipresent.1 Thus it behooves the reader or listener to decode them in order to grasp their deeper meaning. For Pierre Bourdieu, it goes without saying that his Algerian and Kabyle experience is at the basis of his epistemological position and of the original political perception that animates his works and led him, like Durkheim before him, to fuse ethnology and sociology, and thereby to set off the ongoing scientic revolution henceforth associated with his name. It is only possible to grasp the specicity and originality of Bourdieus thought by situating it within the particular social and political context that was the trigger of its unfolding: Algerian society caught in the vise of colonization and a war of independence. The aim of this article is not to trace the trajectory of an intellectual immersed in an exotic society but, starting from selected elements of this journey issued from a long work of recollection carried out over the past several years by the protagonists of the Algerian scene (among them Bourdieu himself), to suggest how this youthful eld formed and transformed a brilliant young academic from a modest social background in a culturally dominated region of France. The present article relies on published documents from the period as well as a series of interviews with those who knew and were associated with Pierre Bourdieu during this formative period and, above all, on continuous intellectual exchange with him over the past three decades.2 We will see that, thanks to the dispositions of an internally colonized Frenchman, the uprooted young man from Barn acquired an acute awareness of the effects of external colonization exerted by France on a North African people dispossessed of their material possessions and collective dignity and submitted to an implacable imperial domination. This forced encounter with a harsh eld site and topic at a dramatic historical moment hatched in Bourdieu a new relationship to the world that led him to question the academic knowledge and the scholastic posture he had practically mastered but which remained constitutively foreign to him. Thus the ethnological detour through the Algerian countryside led Bourdieu to renew contact with his originary peasant culture by integrating it with the cognitive culture he had acquired at the university. From this

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one can understand, rst, why Kabylia served him as an enlarging mirror rendering intelligible the acculturation of the Barn peasants he had grown up amongst, and, second, how the investigations he conducted in his native Barn shed new light on Kabylia by offering, at the village level, the image of an accelerated process of uprooting that was operating on the scale of an entire country on the other side of the Mediterranean. The relation between Barn and Kabylia established on the basis of crisscrossing eld observations conducted during the same years (195961) led Bourdieu to examine closely the behavior of the empeasanted peasants of his childhood village of Lesquire and of the uprooted peasants of Aghbala and Djema Saharidj.

A colonized of the interior discovers the colony of the exterior French colonization in Algeria was the longest and most destructive in the whole of North Africa, as shown by comparison with Morocco and Tunisia under the French protectorate (Ageron, 1997). This was due to a population policy favoring colonists from the north European and Christians, French, but also Italian, Spanish, Sicilian, Maltese, etc. at the expense of the indigenous, Arab or Berber-speaking, Muslim majority, who were rapidly dispossessed of their land as well as the countrys natural resources (alfa, cork, mines, gas and oil). In order to attract and settle Europeans, the colonial system relied on systematic discrimination that favored the colonist by granting him economic means and cultural and political guarantees legitimating his supposed superiority in matters of language, customs, and ideals. Thus, up to the 1950s, there were two electoral colleges in Algeria: one for the Europeans and another for the indigenous, with one European vote being equal to ten indigenous ones. Colonial Algeria operated on a caste system, that is, a rigid hierarchy of cultural groups cemented by strict endogamy. The Algerians revolted repeatedly against the French hold on their territory (1871, 1877, 1881, 1916, 1945); resilient opposition turned into open rejection of the colonial model with the general insurrection of 1 November 1954. This insurrection launched a decade of bloody war that pitted a systematic and methodical military destruction of the Algerian nationalists by French power, on one side, against erce resistance and then counterattack by rural guerrilla warfare and urban terrorism, on the other. Between these two forces, initiatives for rapprochement and reconciliation of the two communities were initiated by various gures and political groups, but the dominant colonial minority, which opposed any change and was willing to concede nothing, ended up dragging the country into a spiral of murderous confrontation culminating in Algerian independence in July 1962.3 This troubled

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period was decisive for a whole generation of French intellectuals, among whom it produced a particular awakening of consciousness and political maturity (Le Sueur, 2001). Bourdieus development during this period is not without interest in this regard, since it moreover allows us to discern the place and role of ethnology and sociology in this time of war. What happened for this son of Barn of popular origins (his father was a sharecropper in a small village in the Pyrnes mountains who later became a postal employee) to be diverted from his initial career path upon leaving the Ecole normale suprieure teaching and writing philosophy and to embrace instead a destiny that then appeared very gloomy and, in many respects, contrary to his own expectations and those of his masters? To answer this question, one must reconstitute the fabric of the intellectual and political milieu of the era. The years Bourdieu spent in Algeria at war coincided with those when the socialists of the SFIO were in power in Paris. In 1956 Robert Lacoste was named Resident Minister in Algiers, where intellectuals well-known among the national academic universe frequented the General Government (nicknamed the GG), a highly political but also cultural location. These included the left Catholic mile Dermenghem, a state archivist and librarian; the illustrious patriot and ethnologist Germaine Tillion, a member of the cabinet of Jacques Soustelle (the anthropologist specializing in the Aztecs), who preceded Lacoste as Governor General; Vincent Monteil, an army ofcer and scholar of Islam; and Louis Massignon, an Orientalist who was later elected to the Collge de France. In an open political and military conict of the colonial type, intellectual autonomy is not to be had: at the University of Algiers there reigned a climate of extreme tension and overt hostility toward the few partisans of an Algerian Algeria. Within the local society a cascade of contempt covered the large majority of the population who fell under the heel of the privileged caste of colonists: Muslims (whether Arabs or Berbers), Jews, Spaniards, Italians, and Maltese. Sent by a disciplinary decision to do his military service under these circumstances, the young philosophy graduate found a rigidly hierarchical world that seemed to him like a veritable social laboratory:
I left for Algeria while I was in the army. After two hard years during which it was not possible to do anything, I devoted myself to eldwork. I began by writing a book with the purpose of casting light on the drama of the Algerian people and also on the colonists, whose situation was no less dramatic, beyond their racism. (Bourdieu, 1986: 38)

Expression beyond the closed framework of colonial institutions in a time of war pertained to heresy, at least for those who did not reside in the metropole. In Algiers, a veritable climate of intellectual terror hung over research circles (Nouschi, 2003; Sprecher, 2003). Despite the risks run even

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in Paris, some academics took brave public stands on the Algerian question but without possessing the tools required to disentangle the issues, in particular the necessary empirical knowledge at ground level.4 How would the young Bourdieu produce this knowledge when the threat of death weighed on him as well as on his object as soon as he constituted it as such? Bourdieu was 25 when he rst set foot on Algerian soil in October 1955. He was rst assigned to an air unit in the Chellif Valley, 150 kilometers west of Algiers, as an air force rampant (a crawler, a term used to distinguish ground personnel from pilots) with administrative duties, before returning to Algiers thanks to the personal intervention of a member of the Lacoste cabinet from Barn, Colonel Ducourneau. Bourdieu was then assigned to Algiers from 1956, in the documentation and information service of the General Government, where he worked with Jacques Faugres and Rollande Garse, until completion of his military service. The General Government then had one of the countrys best-stocked libraries. There Bourdieu avidly read everything written on the colony in view of preparing a rst synthetic work on Algeria (Bourdieu, 1958), and also met important gures who were well-informed about the country: the nonpareil archivist Emile Dermenghem, author of a painstaking study of The Cult of the Saints in Maghreb Islam (1954), and historian Andr Nouschi, working on his Study on the Living Standards of the Populations of Rural Constantine (1961), as well as the researchers of the University of Algiers and Social Secretariat (a social science research center founded by the Church that sought to reconcile the Muslim and Christian communities), in particular Henri Sanson (2003). The compulsory passage through this observation post that the General Government represented, from where he could embrace and absorb the existing knowledge on a colonial society being torn apart before his eyes, allowed the young academic to perceive the unfolding of present history from a new angle: I was struck by the acceleration of the disintegration of this society, he told me in 1997. Direct access to documentation, publications, and journals, as well as the personal relationships he established during those months with local researchers, provided him with the keys to a rst synthetic grasp of the Algerian predicament, even as he knew the country almost only from his readings. As soon as he nished his service in 1957, Bourdieu joined the University of Algiers, where he took up a post as an assistant professor, teaching philosophy and sociology while conducting research from 1958 to 1961. From the outset, he mixed statistics and ethnography in a series of studies on the transformations of the urban and rural worlds, focusing on the genesis of the subproletariat in shantytowns, the forced displacements of peasant populations into resettlement camps at the initiative of the French army, and the functioning of the family and household economy. Rapidly, his

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teaching, research, and proximity to the Algerians especially the small minority of Algerian intellectuals (a term used in a broad sense here since Algerian society sported an astronomical rate of illiteracy) that emerged during those years did not fail to attract the attention of elements of the far-right, who regarded him as a dangerous troublemaker. His friendships and his rst writings (Bourdieu, 1959a, 1959b, 1960) led to his being forced, on the advice of a high-ranking ofcer, abruptly to leave Algeria in May 1961 at night by military plane lest he risk being assassinated by advocates of Algrie franaise: after the Algiers putsch, his name was on the list of personalities to be eliminated. Upon landing overnight in Paris, it was Raymond Aron, who had noticed him during a trip to Algiers as president of the baccalaureate jury for Algeria and Tunisia, who enabled Bourdieu to enter the Sorbonne as his assistant before nding a post the following year teaching at the University of Lille.5

The intellectual microcosm of Algiers University How to make the object Algeria exist, to render it visible and intelligible in the chaos of a war denied and euphemized by colonial ideology under the term events?6 This was one of the central questions confronting the young philosopher and future sociologist, and it explains his decision to pursue empirical research to set in relief the disintegration of the structures of the indigenous society. His position and dispositions as an uprooted intellectual a member of the dominant class and culture in view of his dazzling ascent but always shaped by his dominated social and regional origins constituted a decisive advantage for taking apart the mechanisms of colonial domination at their most destructive, especially since the memory of the social and mental upheavals caused by the Second World War was still vivid for the rising intellectuals of his generation. The intellectual eld of the 1950s did not allow the young researcher to nd his place at once. The vast majority of academics produced by colonization continued to represent the system as the guardians of a colonizing thought verging on fascism (as Bourdieu once put it in a private conversation). Free expression was then impossible in this closed and guarded space even forbidden for those who were foreign to it by their origins as much as by their thinking. During this period, the Algiers university possessed a quasi-autonomy vis--vis the universities in France, with its own hierarchies, its local modes of recruitment, its nearly-independent reproduction (Bourdieu, 2000: 7). Schematically, two large currents structured the local academic eld. The rst, of the right, was composed of French Algerians and the French from France (i.e. metropolitans marginalized by the pieds noirs) who favored

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maintaining imperial tutelage. Set against them was a left current, a very small minority but more structured and dominated by the communists. For the world of left intellectuals was in the grip of the Party, which imposed its ideas and directives in the colonies just as it did in France (the PCA, the Algerian Communist Party, was then perceived as a simple appendage of the PCF).7 Beginning in 1956, the war reached its peak in the countryside before gradually taking hold of the cities until the socialists in power in Paris turned to heavy-handed repression (the French Minister of the Interior at the time was Franois Mitterrand). French thought in the metropolis, whether of the left or of the right, generally favored prosecution of the war, with the exception of certain currents like the liberals or the left Christians and certain communists such as Henri Alleg (1957), famous for having denounced torture in Algeria; Maurice Audin, a mathematician and communist activist who disappeared following a round-up by French paratroopers in Algiers; and Fernand Yveton, another communist militant executed to set an example (Vidal-Naquet, 1961). The University of Algiers was dominated by a powerful far-right lobby. It was practically impossible to overtly position oneself outside of the far right bloc, led by those known as the ultras: the soon-to-be OAS representative8 Philippe Marais and Jean Bousquet, a professor of sociology known for his quasi-fascist ideas, were the masters of the campus (Bourdieu, 2000). This climate of extreme intolerance accounts, for example, for Professor Andr Mandouze, a Catholic known for his engagement in favor of Algerian independence, being expelled from the university for want of having him lynched by his own students, erce partisans of Algrie franaise. The same attitude prevailed among students of this persuasion toward Marcel merit (1951), a historian who had written a highly-regarded book on the Emir Abdelkader (a religious and political leader who resisted French occupation for several years after the 1830 conquest): he was hung in efgy by pieds noirs students for having shown that the schooling rate was higher in Algeria before 1830 than after colonization, thus disturbing the intellectual comfort of the colonial academic establishment. The struggle was erce between the partisans of continued colonial rule and their opponents, and this favored Orientalists close to political power, who used this advantage to establish a quasi-monopoly on social science research on Algeria from the sole fact of knowing Arabic. They considered mastery of this language as a necessary and sufcient basis for claiming knowledge of Algerian society. The Marais family provides an example of Arabists, without any specialized training, who reigned over the Algiers faculty, allocated research topics, and represented what was called colonial anthropology (Bourdieu, 2000: 8). The Algiers sociologists and ethnologists, most often educated on the job, were almost always Arab or

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Berber linguists, civil administrators, army ofcers, and clerics. But Bourdieu did not restrict his contacts to the Algiers campus, which was closed to new ideas in contrast to earlier periods, especially the late 19th and early 20th century. The White Fathers, the Jesuits, primary-school teachers (indignes said to be evolved), journalists, and students supplied him with essential information for developing the intimate knowledge of Algerian society that gradually became his. Thus Bourdieu was able to develop solid intellectual relations with several researchers connected to the Church, such as Fathers Jean-Marie Dallet and M. Devulder, and others situated on the margins of the university, like the geographer Jean Dresch, author of an important book on Agrarian Reform in the Maghreb (1963). In this quest to understand Algerian society, and the cultural practices of linguistic minorities within it, the young ethnosociologists attention was directed equally toward the condition of emergence of Kabyle intellectuals who practiced without knowing it ethnology in the form of ethnographic novels. Mouloud Feraoun, a school teacher become novelist, assassinated by the OAS in 1962, was one of the rst to read and comment on Bourdieus early texts on Kabylia.9 Malek Ouary, a writer and journalist for Radio Algiers (a Kabyle station), also served as an informant. Later, the writer, poet, and Kabyle ethnologist Mouloud Mammeri maintained an intellectual relationship with Bourdieu from 1962 to 1989 (Yacine, forthcoming).10 Along with these intellectuals recognized nationally and across the Mediterranean, there were also spontaneous ethnologists, who, inuenced by the works then available (descriptive studies by the White Fathers and by military ofcers), declared themselves researchers by the force of circumstances. Many of them, like Amar Boulifa, Slimane Rahmani, and Brahim Zellal, gathered important materials for understanding the traditional social world, materials to which Bourdieu (1980) made extensive reference in The Logic of Practice. In this situation marked by political tension and the absence of reliable data on a society in rapid and dramatic transformation, Bourdieu was forced to conduct his own inquiries by turning to the nodal category of Algerian society at the time: the uprooted peasants. The philosophy graduate, who had worked and sacriced so much to acquire the dominant culture, thus had to renounce the prestigious symbolic capital of philosophy and break with the scholastic vision inculcated by his academic training in order to render intelligible through empirical observation the material and moral misery of an entire people. I had to abandon my dear studies to write a book of social service, Bourdieu (2003: 232) explains, speaking of his rst book, Sociologie de lAlgrie. By the same token, he was led to forsake the position of witness, marked by culpability, to adopt the posture of the engaged analyst. Fieldwork in a country at war gave Bourdieu the

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opportunity and obligation to make ethnology a vital instrument of symbolic struggle and not merely an academic discipline deprived of any political function (Bourdieu, 1986: 37). It was in the Algerian crucible, drenched in fear, suffused by daily risk (bombs, assassinations, round-ups) and ambient fascism (to use Jean Sprechers expression), that an original thought was forged, nourished by the most abstract philosophical debates and yet attuned to the calling of the quotidian, alive to the complexity of the real, and ercely resistant to theoretical simplications. In turning to empirical research, Bourdieu activated on a scientic plane the political dispositions that had been his since his years at the Ecole normale suprieure, where he had been part of a small left fringe that battled at once against the right and against the governmental and communist left (Bianco, 2003). These dispositions, far from being a handicap, were to be a formidable asset in conducting empirical work that would render intelligible the mechanisms of colonial domination in Algeria before feeding a theory of symbolic power equally applicable to diverse societies.

Anthropology in the service of decolonization Postwar France saw a renewal of the social sciences and particularly of anthropology. With Race and History and Tristes Tropiques, Claude LviStrauss (1952, 1955) gave that discipline unprecedented intellectual nobility. This change of status in the hierarchy of disciplines enticed a number of researchers notably Georges Balandier, Louis Dumont, Michel Leiris, and Jean Pouillon to produce an engaged anthropology that, by denition, questioned colonization and the cultural discrimination on which it was premised. Many important gures in the French intellectual eld, such as philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Ricur and historians Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Fernand Braudel, also contributed at that time, in different ways and to different degrees, to breaking down the walls separating the different social sciences with regard to the Algerian question. The transformations internal to the intellectual world reinforced the budding sociologist Bourdieu in his convictions, despite the impossibility of expressing himself openly on the colonial question where he was conducting his investigations. For the signicant advances in the intellectual eld in metropolitan France were not followed in Algeria, especially in ethnology, whose eld of study shrank like heated leather as the war expanded. If researchers such as Germaine Tillion (1957), Thrse Rivire (1995, an ethnologist specializing on the Aurs), Ren Maunier (1930, an ethnologist writing on the Berber world), or Robert Montagne (1921, a Morocconist)

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had produced distinguished eld studies of the Maghreb in earlier years, there was nothing of the kind when Bourdieu made his entry at the University of Algiers. The eld of sociology was then dominated by staunchly conservative gures, like Jean Bousquet (a professor of NorthAfrican sociology at the Law School and leader of its extreme-right militants), Philippe Marais (a member of the OAS), and Berber specialist Jean Servier (1962). It was in this context marked by rigid political cleavages that one must fully appreciate the importance of rigorous works such as those of Jacques Berque (1955, 1960, 1962), who was a key intellectual beacon for Bourdieu during the years of his eld training. But, even more than Berque, it is Germaine Tillion, a gure from German deportation close to General de Gaulle,11 who attracted Bourdieus attention for the rmness of her early eldwork, her closeness to her objects of study, and her engagement with them, even if the young sociologist immediately marked his distance from the culturalist approach of the eminent anthropologist:
It seems dangerous to try [with Germaine Tillion, Algeria in 1957] to understand all the phenomena of social disintegration observed in Algeria as mere phenomena of acculturation. . . . Thus, the major land laws were conceived, by their promoters themselves, as a methodical project of dismantlement of the fundamental structures of the traditional economy. A veritable social surgery that cannot be confused with cultural contagion, a result of mere contact, these measures (mainly the cantonment, the Senate decree of 1863, and the 1873 Warnier Act), undertaken with total lucidity in the short term, no doubt constitute one of the essential causes, if not the essential cause, of the disintegration of traditional rural society. (Bourdieu, 1958: 118)

It is in relation to Tillion that the young Bourdieu positioned himself from the beginning when he analysed the origins of Algerian underdevelopment, by choosing the very same society, the Chaoua of the Constantine region (East of Algiers), which had been hitherto perceived as a closed universe whose poverty was attributed solely to cultural factors and thus without relation to colonial policy. Bourdieu refuted this thesis as early as 1958 by drawing on the work of Georges Balandier (1951), an Africanist anthropologist and director of studies at the cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, well known for his support for decolonization.
Indeed, as Balandier observes, contact occurred in a particular situation, the colonial situation [characterized by] the domination of a numerically minoritarian but sociologically majoritarian society over an indigenous, technologically and materially inferior majority; the distance between the two societies that coexist without mixing; economic satellitism; a system of

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rationalizations, more or less tinged with racism, meant to justify the privileged situation of the Europeans; and, nally, latent or patent tension. If contact between a highly industrialized civilization with a powerful economy and a non-mechanized civilization with an archaic economy, if, to speak the language of Tillion, gawky godsends and unconscious misdeeds, could sufce to determine the disintegration of the structures of the traditional society, it nonetheless remains that, to these perturbations, the inevitable consequence of contact between two civilizations separated by an abyss in the social realm, one must add the upheavals that were deliberately and knowingly provoked. (Bourdieu, 1958: 118)

At the dawn of the 1960s, Bourdieu was still only an apprentice sociologist, but his rst publications Sociologie de lAlgrie (1958), a synthetic work that appeared in the Que sais-je? series, and two articles published by the governments Social Secretariat in a mimeographed document distributed locally already contributed to an important and innovative reection on the colonial question. In spite of their scientic object and tone, The Internal Logic of Traditional Algerian Society and The Clash of Civilizations (Bourdieu, 1959a, 1959b) were published with considerable difculty by the Social Secretariat, according to Father Henri Sanson, the publication director. From the beginning, Bourdieu established a umbilical connection between social science and politics, between civilized and primitive societies, and between the observer and the observed, that constituted a radical epistemological rupture and a real advance for sociology in the climate of tension caused by far-right pressure within the University of Algiers. He also questioned the separation of disciplines that expressed the colonial hierarchy in the intellectual order: sociology stricto sensu was restricted to the study of the societies of Europe and North America, while ethnology concerned itself with so-called primitive peoples and Orientalism with peoples with universal religions but non-European languages.
One need not say how arbitrary and absurd this classication was. Be that as it may, being about Kabyle society, my work found itself in a rather strange position, in a way caught between Orientalism and ethnology. (Bourdieu, 2000: 8)

This will to abolish the hierarchical and racializing division between sociology and ethnology marked the writing of Sociologie de lAlgrie and led to the book being noticed in foreign academic circles and by the few Algerian intellectuals, who readily perceived its political import. It earned Bourdieu the acerbic criticism of his colleagues at the University of Algiers. In an undated letter to the historian Andr Nouschi, then in the metropole, which we can date at the end of 1958 or the beginning of 1959, the young apprentice sociologist wrote:

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Will I surprise you by saying that Ive heard a thousand venomous and rancorous compliments? You will guess that the specialists . . . of Algiers did not spare perdious and syrupy allusions. . . . They quickly developed a unique doctrine . . . about my little book: bookish, theoretical (what vocabulary!), lacking in sustained experience of Algerian realities, this note on the Europeans, etc. In short, this little metropolitan who meddles in talking about Algeria when so many old specialists, etc., etc. One thinks of the gardeners dog who doesnt eat the lettuces and will not let them be eaten.

The discontent of the Algiers academics derived from the fact that the young metropolitan professor disrupted the local intellectual game by questioning their conception of anthropology founded on cultural discrimination. With Lvi-Strauss, Bourdieu afrmed the principle of the equality of cultures and cast doubt on the naturalizing vision by which the colonizers afrmed their superiority. Bourdieu described the difference between the two worlds, European and Algerian, not as an inherent and eternal disparity, but as the product of a clash of civilizations caused by colonization. The phenomena of social, economic, and psychological disintegration observed within the traditional society had to be grasped as the ineluctable consequence of an interaction of external forces (the irruption of Western civilization) and internal force (the original structures of the indigenous civilization) (Bourdieu, 1959b: 54). From his rst publications, Bourdieu thus pointed to the causative role of colonization, the source of the main economic and social evils visited upon Algeria, without pronouncing himself on the nationalist claim. Nonetheless, a resolutely engaged orientation against the war and in favor of independence is clearly evident in his youthful essays War and Social Mutation in Algeria, Revolution within the Revolution, and From Revolutionary War to Revolution, three texts published in Etudes mditerranennes, Esprit, and LAlgrie de demain, a collected volume edited by Franois Perroux, professor at the Collge de France (Bourdieu, 1960, 1961, 1962b) that established him at once as a signicant new voice in the scientic-political debate on decolonizing North Africa. Returning to this rst research allows us to draw out two axes that organize this segment of Bourdieus overall work. The rst axis concerns the present Algerian society (what interests us here) in the throes of war and of the upheaval of all orders that accompanied it, which runs through the books Work and Workers in Algeria and The Uprooting (Bourdieu et al., 1963, Bourdieu and Sayad, 1964) and extends to the articles of the early 1960s that accompanied their publication. The second is devoted to a later and more pointed analysis of the social and symbolic structures of traditional Kabyle society, treated as an ethnological laboratory from which Bourdieu endeavors to extract the anthropological foundations of the

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Mediterranean mythical-religious system but also the bases of his general theory of the practice of domination (Bourdieu, 1972, 1980). For the historian of the social sciences and of the tradition of eld research in particular, the interest in these two books and of their early sketches12 lies in allowing us to grasp, on the one hand, a scientic modus operandi and, on the other, the radicality characteristic of a work and political action (Bianco, 2003). For Bourdieu, efcacy in the defense of the Algerian cause could only come from a real scientic investment. Under the pen of this witness of history, the war appears as a magnifying glass revealing the deep structures of a national body in convulsions and enables the analyst to renew ethnology by cutting its umbilical cord with the colonization and racism that both sustained and shackled it then. In Bourdieus hands, ethnosociology served as an instrument for rehabilitating peasant cultures, which, in the Algerian context, constituted a symbolic revolution that dismissed with one and the same stroke colonial fantasies and the revolutionary propaganda of the emerging Algerian elites and their intellectual allies in Western countries. Bourdieus attitude diverged from the discourse of nationalist leaders in that its goal was not to encourage this new elite in its unconscious project of destruction of its own culture but to help them perceive the cultural contradictions at the heart of their project of national construction. His own cultural uprooting is at the origin of the special attention that Bourdieu accorded to the least legitimate objects of study in the indigenous tradition, such as rituals:
I would never have come to study ritual traditions if the same intention of rehabilitation that had led me rst to exclude rituals from the universe of legitimate objects and to distrust all the works that gave it a place had not pushed me, from 1958 on, to try to tear it from phony primitivist solicitude and to attack, to its last defenses, the racist contempt that, through the shame of self it manages to instill on its very victims, contributes to prohibiting them from knowing and recognizing their own culture. Indeed, no matter how great the effect of respectability and encouragement that can be produced, more unconsciously than consciously, by the fact that a problem or method comes to be constituted as highly legitimate in the scientic eld, it could not make one overlook the incongruity, even the absurdity, of eldwork on ritual practices carried out in the tragic circumstance of the war. (Bourdieu, 1980: 10)

How to tickle the snake in its hole With the outbreak of the war, the violence that had bathed Algerian colonial society from its beginning became open and declared, especially in the

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countryside, where, in response to the 1956 insurrection, the army conducted sweeps and mass arrests as well as aerial bombardments. In 1957, the violence spread to the hearts of the urban centers, as attested by the famous battle of Algiers, with the result that terrorism and repression dominated the lives of the countrys urban population. It was in this climate of horror and dread that Bourdieu conducted two large eld studies, the one devoted to the emergence of labor in the city, Work and Workers in Algeria (Bourdieu et al., 1963), the other to the upheavals of the traditional peasant society caused by the establishment of resettlement centers at the behest of the French military, under the title The Uprooting (Bourdieu and Sayad, 1964; see also Cornaton, 1998; Rocard, 2001). Conceived as the extension of The Algerians and his rst articles, these two investigations constitute major contributions to an anthropology of peasant wars and a dying colonialism (Wolf, 1971; Gosnell, 2002). They are also pillars of Bourdieus Algerian uvre; yet they remain little known, even among francophone scholars. Though distinct, these two books come from the same period, 195961 for the rst and 19591960 for the second, and partake of a single research program, since the study of work was also carried out in the resettlement camps (Bourdieu et al., 1963: 13).13 Undertaken at the request of ARDES (the Association for Demographic Economic and Society Research) and nanced by the Algerian Development Fund, these two studies both resort to statistics, charts, and documents as well as extended interviews, direct observation, and photography.14 For the rst time, Algerian students worked with a research team directed by Europeans. Miss Azi, Mr Azi, Sedouk Lahmer, Ahmed Misraoui, Mahfoud Nechem, Titah and Zekkal Marie-Aime Hlie, Raymond Hlie, Raymond Cipolin, and Samuel Guedj participated in the rst eld study on work; Abdelmalek Sayad, Alain Accardo, Trad and Moulah Hnine joined some of them for the resettlement camp study.15 Having already perceived the weight of cultural factors in the operation of the economy (Bourdieu, 1958, 1959b), Bourdieu had no difculty approaching the unemployed confronted with the harsh law of market capitalism in the cities and shantytowns in order to grasp the distress that animated this oating population whose traditional economic dispositions were deeply at odds with the demands of the monetary economy and who found refuge in the despair of tradition (Bourdieu, 1979). Ground-level knowledge of the urban world and underworld enabled Bourdieu to uncover the genesis of the Algerian subproletariat and of its malaise. Disoriented, maladapted, caught between heaven and earth, the empeasanted peasant (i.e., attached to the land and its values) suffers from abandoning his ancestral culture and his inability to face up to the exigencies of a rationalized capitalist culture that remains inscrutable for want of having the needed mental tools. Bourdieu discovered in the course of this

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eld study that it is not possible to reduce economic agents to mere bearers of objective structures; on the contrary, it is necessary to pose empirically and theoretically the question of the genesis of economic dispositions and of the economic and social conditions of this genesis (Bourdieu, 1979: 7, 2000). Although it was completed during this period, due to what was thenjudged to be its subversive content, The Uprooting was published only after a delay, in 1964, that is, two years after Algerian independence. But this rst eld study provided Bourdieu with an opportunity to meet, mingle with, and interview displaced populations in resettlement centers in collaboration with Abdelmalek Sayad. To carry out direct observation in the regions hit hardest by the war (Collo, Kabylia, Ouarsenis) was a challenge. Bourdieu met it in a dogged effort, as the Kabyles say, to tickle the snake in its hole, braving the converging injunctions of the French military and the guerrillas of the FLN who battled for control over these territories. An eyewitness of the horrors of war, the sociologist became through the force of historical circumstance this messenger for whom speaking the truth hic et nunc constitutes a vital mission. This could not but accelerate the scientic maturation of the young ethno-sociologist:
There is no question that the exceptional, extraordinarily difcult (and dangerous) conditions under which I had to work could not fail to sharpen my vision through the ceaseless vigilance that they imposed. The very practical problems that carrying out such eld research continually posed, often in a quite dramatic way, forced one to engage in a continuous reection on the reasons and the raisons dtre of the study, on the motives and intentions of the researcher, on all these questions that positivist methodology spontaneously takes as resolved. (Bourdieu, 2000: 9)

The close and conjoint reading of Work and Workers in Algeria and The Uprooting enables one to grasp the germinal role that eld observation of the transformations of the colonial society of Algeria under the extreme conditions of a war of national liberation played in shaping not only Bourdieus youthful writings, but also his durable scientic dispositions. They bring to light the plinth of his inseparably scientic and political engagements and set the whole of his work in a new light.

Notes
1 The connections between Kabyle and Barnais society and the research themes related to Algeria and France are particularly emphasized in the essays collected in Practical Reasons. Thus, concerning the idea of symbolic economy, Bourdieu (1998[1994]: 98) explains:

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The question I am going to examine is one that I have not ceased asking from my rst ethnological works on the Kabyle to my more recent research on the world of art and, more precisely, on the functioning of artistic patronage in modern societies. I would like to show that, with the same instruments, one can analyze phenomena as different as exchanges of honor in a precapitalist society, or, in societies like our own, the action of foundations such as the Ford Foundation or the Fondation de France, exchanges between generations within a family, transactions on the markets of cultural or religious goods, and so forth.

2 It sufces here to say that Pierre Bourdieu played a decisive role in my own intellectual development. But I can also not avoid acknowledging the force of the close relationship with Abdelmalek Sayad, one of Bourdieus rst students in Algiers, who later became a long-term collaborator and leading sociologist of immigration (cf. Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2000), and with Mouloud Mammeri, a novelist and researcher on the Kabyle world, who was encouraged by Bourdieu to speak up in France, especially after 1983, when Algeria prohibited all speech from the Berbers (see Mammeri and Bourdieu, 1978 ; Bourdieu, 1992). 3 One will nd a chronological sketch of the main political and cultural events of this period in the appendix. For a history of the war, see Horne (1978), Droz and Lever (1982), and the essays gathered in Harbi and Stora (2004). 4 I was struck by the gulf between the positions of French intellectuals concerning this war and its end and what I experienced in the army as well as with the embittered pieds noirs, the coups dtat, the insurrections by lower-class whites, the inevitable turn to de Gaulle, etc. (Bourdieu, 1986: 40). 5 Aron had also helped anthropologist Jean Cuisenier, originally established in Tunisia, who later became Lvi-Strausss assistant at the Collge de France. 6 Ofcially, there was no Algerian War and France does not recognize the veterans of this war only soldiers and civilians who experienced the events. 7 For a description of the extraordinary hold of the French Communist Party on intellectual life in France in the postwar decades, read Boschetti (1988). 8 The OAS (Organisation Arme Secrte) was a conspiratorial faction of the French army in Algeria founded to sow terror in order to force the central government to go back on its agreements with the Algerian Liberation Front in favor of independence. 9 See Bourdieus evocation of Feraoun in his preface to Le Sueurs (2001) book on intellectuals during the Algerian war. 10 After independence, Mammeri searched for the instruments of objectivation necessary to analyse the evolution of Kabyle society within the

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11

12

13

14

15

Algerian nation. He was to play a key role in the development of eldwork in North Africa over the ensuing two decades. His relations with Bourdieu are well illustrated by their dialogue on oral poetry in Kabylia (Mammeri and Bourdieu, 1978 translated in this issue). When Bourdieu arrived in Algeria, Germaine Tillion was already a major intellectual and social gure. A student of Marcel Mauss, she had conducted extensive eldwork among the Chaoua of the Aurs montains from 1936 to 1940. She was also a founder of the French Resistance network of the Muse de lHomme and survived deportation to the death camp of Ravensbrck. In 1955 she returned to Algeria to create centers of social help dedicated to ghting poverty and illiteracy. During the Algerian war, she was involved with her friend Albert Camus in public campaigns against torture by the French army, and later led campaigns against the death penalty and for prisoners rights (see Tillion, 2001). This expression is Bourdieus, who always considered the state of research at the time of publication as a draft (or, according to the consecrated expression, a work in progress calling for subsequent revision and amplication). Whence his obstinacy in returning to the same subjects and sometimes earlier writings in order to rene his thinking by applying new analytical instruments or shedding new comparative light on the empirical data (Delsaut and Rivire, 2002). Bourdieu did not make a purely self-directed decision to study employment in Algeria. The opportunity to collaborate with a group of statisticians in the capacity of sociologist was offered to him by the ARDES, through the mediation of Jacques Breil, a left Catholic in charge of statistics in Algeria who had worked with Bourdieu on underdevelopment in the colony (Bourdieu, 1959a). Breil was among those who facilitated eld research at the administrative level during this troubled period. During this period, Bourdieu took over a thousand photographs which constitute a veritable visual testimony of the transformations that were shaking and shaping Algerian society. One of these students, Moula Henine, was murdered by the OAS in 1961. Le Dracinement is dedicated to him.

References
Ageron, Charles-Robert (1997) La Guerre dAlgrie et les Algriens. Paris: Armand Colin. Alleg, Henri (1957) La Question. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Balandier, Georges (1951) La situation coloniale, Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie 11: 4479.

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Berque, Jacques (1955) Structures sociales dans le Haut-Atlas. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Berque, Jacques (1960) Les Arabes dhier demain. Paris: Editions de Minuit. [Trans. The Arabs: Their History and Future. London: Faber and Faber, 1964.] Berque, Jacques (1962) Le Maghreb entre deux guerres. Paris: Seuil. [Trans. French North Africa: The Maghrib Between Two World Wars. London: Faber, 1967.] Bianco, Lucien (2003) Nous navions jamais vu le monde, Awal 27/28, Special issue on Lautre Bourdieu: 26777. Boschetti, Anna (1988[1985]) The Intellectual Enterprise: Sartre and Les Temps Modernes. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1958) Sociologie de lAlgrie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. [Trans. The Algerians (preface by Raymond Aron). Boston, PA: Beacon Press.] Bourdieu, Pierre (1959a) Logique interne de la socit algrienne traditionnelle, in Le Sous-dveloppement, pp. 4051. Algiers: Secrtariat Social. Bourdieu, Pierre (1959b) Le Choc des civilisations, in Le Sous-dveloppement, pp. 5264. Algiers: Secrtariat Social. Bourdieu, Pierre (1960) Guerre et mutation sociale en Algrie, tudes mditerranennes 7 (Spring): 2537. Bourdieu, Pierre (1961) Rvolution dans la rvolution, Esprit 1 (Spring): 2740. Bourdieu, Pierre (1962a) Clibat et condition paysanne, tudes rurales 56 (April): 32136. Bourdieu, Pierre (1962b) De la guerre rvolutionnaire la rvolution, in Franois Perroux (ed.) LAlgrie de demain, pp. 513. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Bourdieu, Pierre (1972) Esquisse dune thorie de la pratique. Geneva: Droz. [Trans. Outline of a Theory of Practice, rev. and extended edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.] Bourdieu, Pierre (1979[1977]) Algeria 60. Economic Structures and Temporal Structures. Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de lHomme. Bourdieu, Pierre (1980) Le Sens pratique. Paris: Editions de Minuit. [Trans. Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity, 1990.] Bourdieu, Pierre (1986) The Struggle for Symbolic Order: An Interview with Pierre Bourdieu, Theory, Culture and Society 3(3): 3751. Bourdieu, Pierre (1992) La rappropriation de la culture renie, in Tassadit Yacine (ed.) Amour, phantasmes et socit en Afrique du Nord et au Sahara, pp. 1722. Paris: LHarmattan. Bourdieu, Pierre (1998[1994]) Practical Reasons: On the Theory of Action. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Bourdieu, Pierre (1998) Lodysse de la rappropriation, Awal Revue dtudes berbres 18 (November): 56. [Eng. trans. in this issue]. Bourdieu, Pierre (2000) Entre amis, Awal 21: 510. Bourdieu, Pierre (2003) Entretien avec Had Adnani et Tassadit Yacine, Awal 27/28, Special issue on Lautre Bourdieu: 22947. Bourdieu, Pierre and Abdelmalek Sayad (1964) Le Dracinement. La crise de lagriculture traditionnelle en Algrie. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Bourdieu, Pierre and Loc Wacquant (2000) The Organic Ethnologist of Algerian Migration, Ethnography 12 (Fall): 173182. Bourdieu, Pierre, Alain Darbel, Jean-Paul Rivet and Claude Seibel (1963) Travail et travailleurs en Algrie. Paris and The Hague: Mouton and Co. Cornaton, Michel (1998) Les Camps de regroupements et la guerre dAlgrie. Paris: LHarmattan. Delsaut, Yvette and Marie-Christine Rivire (2002) Bibliographie de Pierre Bourdieu. Pantin: Le Temps des Cerises. Dermenghem, mile (1954) Le Culte des saints dans lislam maghrbin. Paris: Gallimard. Dresch, Jean (1963) Rforme agraire au Maghreb. Paris: Maspro. Droz, Bernard and Evelyne Lever (1982) Histoire de la guerre dAlgrie (19541962). Paris: Seuil. merit, Marcel (1951) LAlgrie lpoque dAbd-el-Kader. Paris: Editions Larose. Gosnell, Jonathan (2002) The Politics of Frenchness in Colonial Algeria, 19301954. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Harbi, Mohammed and Benjamin Stora (eds) (2004) La Guerre dAlgrie, 19541962, la n de lamnsie. Paris: Laffont. Horne, Alistair (1978) A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 19541962. New York: Viking. Le Sueur, James D. (2001) Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria. Preface by Pierre Bourdieu. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lvi-Strauss, Claude (1952) Race and History. Paris: UNESCO. Lvi-Strauss, Claude (1955) Tristes Tropiques. Paris: Plon. [New York: Modern Library, 1997.] Maunier, Ren (1930) Mlanges de sociologie nord-africaine. Paris: Alcan. Mammeri, Mouloud and Pierre Bourdieu (1978) Dialogue sur la posie orale en Kabylie, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 23 (September): 5166. [English trans. in this issue.] Montagne, Robert (1921) Note sur la kasbah de Mehdiya. Rabat: Larose. Nouschi, Andr (1961) Enqute sur le niveau de vie des populations rurales constantinoises. Paris and Tunis: Presses Universitaires de France. Nouschi, Andr (2003) Autour de Sociologie de lAlgrie , Awal 27/28, Special issue on Lautre Bourdieu: 2935.

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Rivire, Thrse (1995) Aurs-Algrie, 19351936: Photographies. Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de lHomme. Rocard, Michel (2001) Rapport sur les centres de regroupement. Paris: Les Mille et une nuits. Sanson, Henri (2003) Ctait un esprit curieux, Awal 27/28, Special issue on Lautre Bourdieu: 27986. Servier, Jean (1962) Les Portes de lanne. Paris: Robert Laffont. Sprecher, Jean (2003) Il se sentait bien avec nous, Awal 27/28, Special issue on Lautre Bourdieu: 295305. Tillion, Germaine (1957) LAlgrie en 1957. Paris: Editions de Minuit. [Algeria: The Realities. New York: Knopf, 1959.] Tillion, Germaine (2001) Il tait une fois lethnographie. Paris: Seuil. Vidal-Naquet, Pierre (1961) La Raison dtat. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Wolf, Eric (1971) Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper. Yacine, Tassadit (forthcoming) Pierre Bourdieu asmusnaw kabyle, in Pierre Bourdieu, Dialogues sur la Kabylie.

Chronological highlights of Algerian colonial history

1830: 1832: 1837: French troops land at the beach of Sidi-Ferruch with 103 war ships. The Emir Abdelkader organizes resistance to the French invasion in the Oran region. Treatise of Tafna, whereby Abdelkader recognizes French rule and is granted control over the western and central regions of Algeria. General Bugeaud launches the policy of settlement with his soldier ploughers. Ordinances conscating land from native Algerians. French troops reach 108,000. General Bugeaud occupies Lower Kabylia. Deportation of the Republicans to Algeria; volunteer settlers (from the Paris and Lyon region) are given 10 hectares and a house. With the occupation of Higher Kabylia by Randon, Kabylia is under French rule. Bachagha Mokrani insurrection in Kabylia. Insurrection of the Touaregs of the Hoggar led by Cheikh Amoud Ben Mokhtar. Unrest in the Aurs. The 1915 Clmenceau Law grants French citizenship to a small number of Algerians recognized as pro-France.

1840: 18445: 1847: 1848:

1857: 18712: 18771912: 1916: 1919:

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1927:

1930: 1942: 1943:

1945:

1946:

1954: 1955:

1956:

1957:

1958:

1959:

1960:

Created in Paris the previous year, the North-African Star (toile nord-africaine) demands Algerian independence. Ferhat Abbass Federation of Elected Indigenous claims equal rights and duties for all the colonys inhabitants. Grandiose celebrations for the Centennial of the Conquest in the presence of the French President. British and American troops land in Algiers. Ferhat Abbas publishes the Manifesto of the Algerian People, demanding that the Allies recognize the equality of the European and Muslim communities of Algeria. 8 May: on the day of Allied Victory, popular demonstrations in Stif, Guelma, and Kherrata are brutally repressed, resulting in 45,000 dead. Ferhat Abbas founds the Union Dmocratique du Manifeste Algrien (UDMA). Emmanuel Robls brings together Algerian intellectuals of all tendencies in his journal La Forge. Night of 31 October: launch of the national insurrection. The National Liberal Front (FLN) is founded in Cairo. The disintegration of the Algerian situation leads to a political crisis in France. 1 April: Declaration of a state of emergency in the colony in response to an increase in nationalist attacks. 22 January: Albert Camus speaks in favor of a cease-re. March: Formation of the Guy Mollet government and parliamentary vote granting it special powers to respond to the Algerian events. August: the FLN Congress at the Soummam ushers in the formation of a National Council of the Algerian Revolution (CNRA). Series of attacks in Algiers. French paratroopers react violently. Arbitrary arrests, torture, and summary executions begin to be denounced in the metropole. 13 May: a French-Algerian crowd occupies the Palace of Government. Creation of a Committee of Public Safety. 10 September: creation of a Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA), with Ferhat Abbas as President. Autumn: the GRPA declares itself ready to negotiate. De Gaulle promises a referendum on self-determination, which is opposed by the partisans of French Algeria. The vote on a motion in favor of Algerian independence is avoided at the United Nations. 24 January to 2 February: the pro-France Ultras set up barricades at the tunnel of the University of Algiers.

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1961:

1962:

1 July: 5 July:

June: the French government opens serious negotiations with the nationalist insurgents in Melun. December: De Gaulle visits Algiers; large-scale demonstration of the Muslim population triggers mass shootings by the French paratroopers. January: referendum on self-determination. Creation of the Organization of the Secret Army (OAS), a proFrench resistance organization led by generals Challe, Jouhaud, Zeller and Salan, leading to the Putsch of the Generals (April). 15 March: the OAS assassinates Mouloud Feraoun. 18 March: signature of the vian agreements, followed by a cease-re declaration. Referendum on Algerian independence (99.7% in favor). Proclamation of Algerian independence.

Key cultural works of the period on Algeria

Camus, Albert (1942) Ltranger. Paris: Gallimard. [Trans. The Stranger. New York: Knopf, 1946.] Camus, Albert (1947) La Peste. Paris: Gallimard. [The Plague. New York: Knopf, 1948.] Camus, Albert (1951) LHomme rvolt. Paris: Gallimard. [Trans. The Rebel. New York: Knopf, 1956.] Fanon, Franz (1952) Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil. [Trans. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 1968.] Mammeri, Mouloud (1952) La Colline oublie. Paris: Plon. Dib, Mohammed (1952) La Grande Maison. Paris: Seuil. Dib, Mohammed (1954) LIncendie. Paris: Seuil. Fraoun, Mouloud (1954) Le Fils du pauvre. Paris: Seuil. Yacine, Kateb (1956) Nedjma. Paris: Seuil. Alleg, Henri (1957) La Question. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Tillion, Germaine (1957) LAlgrie en 1957. Paris: Minuit. Bourdieu, Pierre (1958) Sociologie de lAlgrie. Paris: PUF, rev. and expanded 1961. [Trans. The Algerians (preface by Raymond Aron). Boston: Beacon Press, 1962.]. Plgri, Jean (1959) Les Oliviers de la justice. Paris: Gallimard. Fanon, Franz (1961) Les Damns de la terre. Paris. [Trans. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove, 1963.]
TASSADIT YACINE is Matre de confrence and Researcher at the Laboratoire danthropologie sociale at the cole des hautes tudes en sciences sociales, Paris, as well as a member of the

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Instituto Orientale de Napoli. She is the Editor of Awal, the journal of Berber studies founded by Mouloud Mammeri with the sponsorship of Pierre Bourdieu. Her research deals with Berber culture and society, with a focus on oral poetry and history. She is the author of Posie berbre et identit (1987), LIzli ou lamour chant en kabyle (1988), Les Voleurs de feu. Elments dune anthropologie sociale et culturelle de lAlgrie (1992), and Chacal ou la ruse des domins. Aux origines du malaise culturel des intellectuels algriens (2001). She is currently at work on an anthropology of gendered emotions and on a volume of the early writings of Pierre Bourdieu on Algeria. Address: EHESS, 54 Bd Raspail, 75006 Paris, France. [email: yacine@msh-paris]