Chapter Title: Bourdieu and Fanon on Algeria

Chapter Author(s): Roxanna Curto

Book Title: Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies

Book Editor(s): RAPHAEL DALLEO
Published by: Liverpool University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1gn6c51.8

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 chapter four

Bourdieu and Fanon on Algeria

Roxanna Curto
Bourdieu and Fanon on Algeria

A s we approach the question of Bourdieu’s place in postcolonial studies, I

propose to consider his relationship to another thinker whose ideas are
often considered foundational to the field: Frantz Fanon. Although there is
no evidence that Fanon and Bourdieu ever met, they were both prominent
intellectuals stationed in Algeria during the War of Independence: Fanon
arrived in 1953, working as a psychoanalyst at a hospital; and Bourdieu arrived
in 1955 to do his military service. They developed many of their most famous
ideas in a shared context, Algeria during the War of Independence, and
although they only rarely engage explicitly with each other’s works, implicitly
they frequently respond to each other’s ideas.
A comparative reading of Bourdieu and Fanon provides a means of rethinking
the relationship between Bourdieu and postcolonialism. Although Bourdieu
was highly critical of the politics of Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre, Bourdieu’s
and Fanon’s theories line up remarkably well, and can be profitably put into
dialogue to yield new insights about the forms of violence, domination and
revolution that emerge from colonization. What Fanon adds to Bourdieu is a
consideration of the role of race; and Bourdieu brings to Fanon insights into
the workings of social classes and the process of symbolic domination.
In particular, the imagined dialogue between these two thinkers will
demonstrate the following. First, how Fanon’s psychoanalysis shows the
fundamental role of race in the interplay between habitus, field and capital that
Bourdieu describes. Conversely, Bourdieu’s hierarchical division of social and
economic classes, which do not correspond neatly to Fanon’s racial categories
in the case of Algeria, illustrates the necessity of taking social stratification
into account in studies on colonialism. Despite the animosity that existed
between them, there are in fact many similarities in the way that Bourdieu
and Fanon describe colonialism as a system maintained through brute force
that cannot be reformed. Moreover, Fanon’s analysis of psychological violence

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 Bourdieu and Fanon on Algeria

in colonization relates closely to Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic domination.

However, both authors diverge greatly with regard to the relationship that
they perceive between the peasant class and modernity, which determines the
role that each believes this class will (or will not) play in the revolution. While
Fanon characterizes the peasants as open to modernity and revolutionary,
Bourdieu finds them too tied to tradition to be capable of adapting to modern
ways, and considers the urban proletariat to be the greatest instigators of
change.

Habitus, Field, Hysteresis and Symbolic Domination

As several scholars of Bourdieu (Haddour; Go; Burawoy) have pointed out,

many of Bourdieu’s central concepts—habitus, field, hysteresis and symbolic
domination—have their very origins in the colonial context. Bourdieu began
to formulate them in Algeria, a period of transition from his philosophical
training at the École Normale Supérieure, to the ethnographic field work
among the Kabyle and Arab populations. Julian Go writes, ‘I suggest here
that Bourdieu’s early thinking on colonialism (and not just his ethnographical
experience in Algeria in itself) served as a generative site for his concept of
habitus, his relational sociology (as most clearly discerned in his concept of
field), and his reflexive sociology’ (61). Similarly, Abdellah Hammoudi suggests
that Bourdieu’s idea of habitus developed from reflections on ‘tradition’ in the
context of ethnography.
Central to Bourdieu’s sociology is the complex relationship between habitus
and field, which establishes the structure of symbolic domination. In Outline of
a Theory of Practice (1977 [1972]) and The Logic of Practice (1990 [1980]), Bourdieu
develops the concepts of symbolic capital and habitus. Bourdieu defines
habitus as the set of habits, dispositions and behaviors resulting from one’s
upbringing in a specific cultural milieu. He calls it a system of dispositions that
generates perceptions, appreciations and practices; the generative schemes,
structured and structuring, which are acquired in the course of individual
life trajectories. Through this concept, Bourdieu suggests that even though
we believe ourselves to be completely free agents, our actions and decisions
are often the result of a socially determined habitus. In The Uprooting (1964),
Bourdieu first uses the term ‘habitus’ in reference to French colonial Algeria,
describing a ‘corporal habitus.’
A field, for Bourdieu, is the social space in which the habitus operates;
the network or configuration of relations found in a particular group or
context. Examples of fields would be the French educational system, the
Catholic Church and academia in the US. As Bourdieu points out, agents often
occupy more than one social field, with the values and habitus present in
each overlapping or coming into conflict with one another. The relationship
between a habitus and field determines a subject’s behaviors and practices,
and suffering and symbolic domination often result from an inappropriate

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Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies

fit between habitus and field. Colonial systems could be conceptualized as

several overlapping fields in which the traditional habitus of colonial subjects
comes into conflict with the modern capitalism of the colonizer.
Applying this to Fanon’s psychoanalysis, one could say that many
of the practices described in Black Skin, White Masks as forming the ‘white
mask’ of French culture constitute a kind of habitus. Although Fanon uses
the term ‘mask’ to refer to these dispositions, they are not superficial in
nature, but in fact deeply ingrained in the mind and body, as we see in the
chapters he devotes to language, sexual relations and culture. From the
perspective of Bourdieu, an individual develops a certain habitus, based on
his/her experience in the French educational system, by learning the French
language, as well as the entire system of values and history entailed in this
sort of education. In the essays of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon explains
how the Antillean, as a dark-skinned black or mulatto living in Martinique,
assumes the ‘white mask’ of French culture. This ‘white mask’ consists of the
perspective he/she adopts as a result of being surrounded by French culture,
including attending school in the French educational system, speaking French
and inhabiting an island that is a French colony (as was the case at the time
when Fanon was writing). Fanon’s ‘white mask’ operates on a number of levels:
a visual level, as in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory; a linguistic level, in terms
of the use of French versus ‘petit nègre’ (pidgin French) or Creole; and an
ontological level, borrowing from Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of self and other,
since Fanon states that the Antillean is perceived by the French person (from
the perspective of the ‘white mask’) as an object among others, depriving him/
her of his/her subjectivity. It could thus be said that the Antillean assuming
a ‘white mask’ adopts the habitus associated with the French colonial field
within Martinique.
When Fanon considers the effects of looking back and realizing that the
self-perception does not correspond to the perception that others have of
one’s self, he is describing the split between habitus and field that Bourdieu
views as part of the process of symbolic domination. Appropriating Jacques
Lacan’s analysis of the ‘mirror stage,’ Fanon explains how the Antillean looks
at him or herself in the mirror, assuming the perspective of a Frenchman (the
‘white mask’), but sees his/her dark skin color underneath. He then recognizes
this skin color as his/her own, but continues to view it from the point of view
of the ‘white mask.’ This produces a splitting of the ego, since the Antillean
adopts a French perspective, one that devalues the dark skin color, but then
perceives the color of his/her own skin, which clashes with this perspective.
In Bourdieu’s terms, this process could be described in terms of the
interplay between habitus and field. Bourdieu views habitus and field as
mutually constitutive; in a sense, they are independent forces, but changes
in one lead to changes in the other. When habitus is well matched to field,
there are few conflicts. This occurs, for instance, when every member of a
social field assumes the expected position, and behaves in accordance to the
habitus that corresponds to this position: for example, a wealthy gentlemen

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 Bourdieu and Fanon on Algeria

who expresses an interest in high art, an industrial worker who follows boxing
matches. When learned behaviors in one field (for instance, the traditional
habitus of the Algerian peasant) impede adaptation to another (for instance,
the capitalist economy of the French colonizers), this leads to a ‘split habitus,’
what Bourdieu calls ‘hysteresis.’ Interestingly enough, Bourdieu adopts a term
recalling Freud’s notion of hysteria, which is so central to psychoanalysis;
although he does not explicitly comment on the psychological effects of
the split habitus, his use of this term suggests that the subject suffers an
individual crisis as a result of it.
The situation Fanon describes in Black Skin, White Masks could be considered
that of a (split) habitus that clashes with the surrounding field. An Antillean
who ‘acts white’ has a habitus that does not correspond to the social field in
which he is considered non-French; and yet, if he lowers his linguistic level to
that of pidgin French (‘petit nègre’), as expected by French colonizers, this is
inconsistent with his/her self-image and entails an implicit recognition of his/
her own inferiority. So in either case, according to Fanon, there is a split ego.
This clash is not simply the result of behaviors, but of a corporeal element:
skin color. In Bourdieusian terms, it is impossible for him/her to have a habitus
that corresponds exactly to the social field of French culture, even if he or
she has been raised and studied in France, which is precisely Fanon’s point.
Applying Bourdieu’s concepts to Fanon, it could be said that Fanon highlights
the extent to which habitus and field, and the mismatch between them, can
be used for oppression.
Fanon’s analysis of the split ego renders Bourdieu’s notion of positioning
within the field problematic, because of its lack of attention to race. Bourdieu
states that positions in the social field are determined by birth, social class and
economic class, as well as access to four forms of capital: economic (financial
means); cultural (knowledge and taste for high and low culture); social (whom
you know, your relations); and symbolic (the power to determine and name
identity) (Bourdieu 1993). But as Fanon argues, an Antillean who possesses
the kinds of capital described by Bourdieu will not be accepted into the social
field due to his/her race. As Fanon states in Black Skin, White Masks, even if an
Antillean speaks perfect, standard French, performs French mannerisms, etc.,
he will be seen as acting, rather than being, white or French. Moreover, while
Bourdieu emphasizes the role of the educational system and inherited wealth
in allowing people access to capital, Fanon regularly emphasizes that, in the
colonial system, such access is severely restricted due to race, as exemplified
by the reappropriation of lands from Algerian peasants.
Continuing his analysis from Black Skin, White Masks in The Wretched of the
Earth, Fanon emphasizes the extent to which social positioning is determined
by race, and how this highlights a shortcoming of Marxist analyses of the
colonial order:
When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that
what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not

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Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies

belonging to a given race, a given species. In the colonies the economic

substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you
are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is
why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have
to do with the colonial problem. (40)
In Bourdieusian terms, it could be said that Fanon is stating that in the colonial
order ‘whiteness’ is a form of capital that determines one’s social position,
due to its strong link to economic capital. From a Fanonian perspective, many
Marxist analyses that focus on class fail to consider this equivalence between
‘whiteness’ and wealth, and are thus ‘slightly stretched’ when applied to the
colonial system.
Bourdieu was very aware of his lack of emphasis on the question of race,
and did not regard it as a central issue for Algeria. In his mind, Fanon overem-
phasizes racial issues, and was wrong to equate the plight of the black person
under colonialism in regions such as the Caribbean or sub-Saharan Africa with
that of the Arab or Algerian peasant during the War. In a 1994 interview with
Le Sueur, Bourdieu states:
The problems of racism do not present themselves in the same terms.
There is a specificity to the racism against blacks, which is very particular.
There are corporeal properties … This is absolute racism. In the Algerian
case … the problems of corporeal identity that Fanon articulated with
regard to blacks are not manifested in the same fashion. I have never
heard an Algerian present his problems in the same terms as blacks. There
is certainly the inferior treatment, etc., but not on the basis of corporeal
identity, on the basis that Fanon writes about. I think this is very important
… The black’s problems are not the same as the Algerian’s problems. For
the Algerians, there are poverty, humiliation, and Frenchification, and
linguistic issues, but they are not concentrated to the degree to which
Fanon claims on corporeality. There is a huge difference … The Algerian
women have a relationship with their body that is not the same. I think that
the logic that Fanon develops does not have the same importance for the
North Africans [Maghrébins] as it does for Fanon. (Le Sueur 253)

Bourdieu is correct to point out that Fanon has a tendency to overgeneralize

when it comes to his analysis of race: the plight of the Antillean, including the
legacy of the slave trade, cannot simply be equated with that of the Algerian
peasant. Nevertheless, Fanon’s analysis does highlight some shortcomings of
Bourdieu’s theories about the relationship between habitus, field and capital,
when applying them to a racialized context, such as 1950s Martinique, Algeria
or Senegal. Fanon demonstrates that race functions as a personal attribute
that controls access to all four kinds of capital described by Bourdieu, and
can create a ‘split habitus’ even when an individual’s practices and behaviors
conform perfectly to the social field in which he/she is positioned. Positioning
in the field, and the resulting habitus, is determined by a combination of race
and possession of various kinds of capital.

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 Bourdieu and Fanon on Algeria

Similarly, Bourdieu’s conceptual framework sheds light on the shortcomings

of analyzing a colonial system from Fanon’s perspective, which greatly
emphasizes the role of race in societies. This is actually a key point in the case
of 1950s Algeria due to the variety of social and economic classes for different
races and ethnicities. Fanon tends to perform Manichean divisions of societies,
such as between French and Arabs (referred to as ‘indigenes’), colonizers and
colonized, black and white peoples. However, as evidenced in Bourdieu’s
analyses of Algerian society, there were many groups that did not fit neatly
into these binary characterizations, including the urban proletariat, which
consisted of both pieds noirs and indigènes, and more generally, Arab-speaking
white settlers. Fanon views the rule of a black National Bourgeoisie to be as
dangerous as the colonial system, and he does not believe the urban classes
will lead the revolution; whether or not he believes a pied noir or white settler
possesses any revolutionary potential remains unclear.
While Fanon’s theories highlight the absence of race in Bourdieu’s analysis,
Bourdieu’s dissection of social classes and their revolutionary potential
underscores the extent to which social and economic class do not always
correspond exactly, as in the case of Algeria during the War. What Fanon
brings to Bourdieu is an account of the role of race in the interplay between
habitus, field and capital; what Bourdieu contributes to Fanon is an analysis of
the role of four forms of capital in the positioning in a field (which does not
just depend on race).

Politics of the Algerian War

Given the enormous disparities in their origins, backgrounds and education,

the similarities in Fanon’s and Bourdieu’s accounts of the structure and effects
of colonialism are striking. Although they presented different versions of their
views on the colonial system in Algeria, if one considers the full spectrum
of views on the War during the 1950s and 1960s, Bourdieu and Fanon were
actually quite close to one another. On the far right was the reactionary OAS
(Organisation de l’Armée secrète) which sought to maintain a French Algeria
at all costs; in the center the reformists of the ‘School of Algiers,’ including
Albert Camus, the French ethnographer Germaine Tillion and the Algerian
writer Mouloud Feraoun; and on the far left the FLN (National Liberation
Front), of which Fanon was of course a member. On this spectrum, Bourdieu
would have been somewhere between the center and the left, due to his
beliefs that the colonial system could not be reformed and Algeria should be
independent, coupled with his resistance to the FLN’s extremism. This was
ultimately not that far from Fanon.
From the earliest moments of the War, Fanon and Bourdieu, who were
both strongly against the French Empire, endorsed an ‘Algerian Algeria’ that
would be fully independent from the French state. In this sense, they held
similar views, since they agreed that the colonial system was so violent and

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Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies

poisoned that reform was impossible. In particular, Bourdieu was highly

critical of French colonial reformists such as Germaine Tillion (who advocated
modifying the colonial system but maintaining a French Algeria) because
he believed they lacked realism; his ethnographic fieldwork had led him to
conclude that the violent resettlement of peasants had placed them into such
a lowly position that a revolution was inevitable, and was the only means of
abolishing the colonial system (1958).
This belief that only a revolution can overturn the colonial system echoes
Fanon’s writings in The Wretched of the Earth, in which he states: ‘Decolonization,
which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of
complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor
of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding’ (36); ‘In decolonization,
there is therefore the need of a complete calling in question of the colonial
situation. If we wish to describe it precisely, we might find it in the well-known
words: “The last shall be first and the first last.” Decolonization is the putting
into practice of this sentence’ (37). In other words, for Fanon, the process of
decolonization must be one of completely overturning the colonial order, in
large part through violence. This is because the colonial system is divided into
two separate sections and ruled by violence, ‘The colonial world is a world
divided into compartments’ (37); it ‘is a world cut in two. The dividing line,
the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations […] In the colonial
countries […] the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence
and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and
advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge’ (38). Therefore
no reform is possible.
At the same time, Bourdieu publicly criticized the Leftists, as represented
by Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre and the FLN, for their extremism and dangerous
idealism. In the only two known instances in which Bourdieu speaks explicitly
about Fanon, he states, first: ‘But above all I wanted to get away from
speculation—at that time [1960s], the works of Frantz Fanon, especially The
Wretched of the Earth, were the latest fashion, and they struck me as being false
and dangerous’ (1990, 7). Then:
What Fanon says corresponds to nothing. It is even dangerous to make the
Algerians believe the things he says. This would bring them to a utopia. And
I think these men [Fanon and Sartre] contributed to what Algeria became
because they told stories to Algerians who often did not know their own
country any more than the French who spoke about it, and, therefore,
the Algerians retained a completely unrealistic utopian illusion of Algeria
… the texts of Fanon and Sartre are frightening for their irresponsibility.
You would have to be a megalomaniac to think you could say just any such
nonsense. (Le Sueur 282)
These strong remarks of condemnation are consistent with Bourdieu’s general
critique of the Left’s utopianism as ‘misleading and dangerous’ and even
‘irresponsible.’ In a 1986 interview, he declared that the Left’s ‘Parisian ideas’

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 Bourdieu and Fanon on Algeria

about the War fed a ‘mythical conception of Algerian society’ and failed to
correspond to the ‘objective situation of colonial Algeria.’ The ‘utopianism’
Bourdieu is referring to is mainly the idea that the peasants will provoke the
revolution, and that they will acquire liberation and economic stability with
independence.
Nevertheless, there are many similarities in how Bourdieu and Fanon
describe the War in their writings. Azzedine Haddour believes that a ‘number
of textual echoes in Algeria 1960 suggest that Bourdieu read Studies in a
Dying Colonialism’ (77), a compilation of Fanon’s journalistic writings. Haddour
continues, ‘Like Fanon, Bourdieu argues that: the war revolutionized the
Algerian society; the custom of wearing the veil was abandoned; Western
technologies like the radio were put at the service of the revolution; the war
curbed the authority of the father and changed the relationship of the latter
with son and daughter’ (77). So it seems like Bourdieu and Fanon usually agree
on their analysis of societal trends, except for the role of race in Algeria, but
disagree on the best way for the revolution to occur.
A comparison of Fanon and Bourdieu’s notions of colonialism reveals
significant commonalities. In particular, both thinkers conceive of colonialism
as an order that is put into place and maintained through a combination
of brute force and psychological and symbolic domination. While Fanon
emphasizes the role of physical violence in the colonial system in the first
chapter, ‘On Violence,’ of The Wretched of the Earth, he analyzes psychological
forms of domination not only in his earlier work, Black Skin, White Masks, but
also in later chapters of The Wretched of the Earth, especially ‘On National
Culture.’ For him, colonialism is maintained through the exertion of both
physical and psychological violence.
Similarly, in ‘The Shock of Civilizations’ and Algeria 1960, Bourdieu describes
colonialism as a caste system and emphasizes the role of force in colonial
domination. In ‘Revolution within the Revolution,’ he writes, ‘Indeed, the war
plainly revealed the true basis for the colonial order: the relation, backed by
force, which allows the dominant caste to keep the dominated in a position of
inferiority’ (1962, 146). Although his use of terminology is markedly different,
Bourdieu’s emphasis on the role of physical violence in colonization recalls
the first chapter of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, ‘On Violence.’1 Much like
Fanon states that the colonial system entails a complete separation of orders,
in ‘Revolution within the Revolution’ Bourdieu writes, ‘In short, when carried
along by its own internal logic, the colonial system tends to develop all the
consequences implied at the time of its founding—the complete separation
of the social castes’ (146). Bourdieu, like Fanon, also recognizes the extent
to which colonialism dehumanizes its subjects, causing them ‘humiliation

1 In ‘Decolonizing Bourdieu,’ Julian Go states, ‘Bourdieu portrayed colonialism as

a racialized system of domination, backed by force, which restructures social
relations and creates hybrid cultures’ (53); while this is an interesting idea, I have
not found any evidence of the system being ‘racialized’ for Bourdieu.

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Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies

and alienation’ (1962), although he does not offer an extended psychological

discussion like Fanon.
Bourdieu acknowledges that the colonial order is imposed primarily through
violence, yet he believes that brute force alone is not enough to maintain any
social order, and that there must always be a symbolic domination that works
to legitimate it. As David Swartz writes, ‘Like Weber, Bourdieu stresses that
domination requires legitimation even when it requires brute force or money’
(81). This domination is often taken for granted and perceived as a natural
form of power, but nonetheless constitutes a form of violence, according
to Bourdieu. Swartz writes, ‘Symbolic violence refers to the internalized
effects of symbolic power that distort identity by encouraging the dominated
to accept the conditions of their domination as legitimate’ (84). Although
Bourdieu does not discuss symbolic violence in terms of race (he does not use
this term), extending his analysis of this concept to Algeria, it could be said
that in the colonial system racism constitutes that legitimating mechanism,
the form of symbolic domination that comes to be perceived as ‘natural’ and
is taken for granted.
Although both thinkers agree that the colonial system is imposed through
a combination of brute force and psychological or symbolic domination, and
cannot be reformed, they disagree on the potential use of physical violence in
overturning this order. For Fanon, the fact that the colonial order is imposed
through violence means that it must be overthrown through the same means.
He views the violence of the War as cathartic and believes that it will
purify the revolutionary class (mainly the peasantry) and free them. Bourdieu,
however, ‘was particularly troubled by Fanon and Sartre’s Marxist conviction
that the Algerian peasantry represented a revolutionary class that would be
freed though the violence of the war from all traces of colonialism, leaving a
tabula rasa on which a postcolonial socialist state could be built’ (Goodman
106). Although he acknowledges that the colonial system must be abolished
and a new order established, Bourdieu does not view the violence involved in
the revolution as in any way ‘purifying’ or ‘cathartic,’ and considers Fanon to
be irresponsible for promoting such ideas.

The Role of the Peasants and Working Classes in the Revolution

Although Bourdieu and Fanon had similar ideas about the role of physical
and psychological violence in the colonial system, and the need to overthrow
this order entirely rather than reform it, they strongly disagreed about the
revolutionary potential of different social and economic classes, as well as
the process by which decolonization would take place. In particular, they
held widely disparate beliefs about which group—the peasants or urban
proletariat—was the most revolutionary. Both thinkers—who not only wrote
theoretical texts but also performed ethnographic research—developed
these beliefs while doing fieldwork in the Kabyle, as well as spending time

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 Bourdieu and Fanon on Algeria

in Algiers. Fanon, as a member of the FLN, equated this party with progress,
and believed that the fellah (the indigent peasant class, akin to Marx’s lumpen-
proletariat) formed the most revolutionary group, because they had nothing
to lose. As he writes in The Wretched of the Earth, this class will unite with
the intellectuals who will guide them to produce a revolutionary movement.
Fanon writes that because the fellah finds itself outside of everything, all
institutional structures, it is in a position to overthrow them. For Fanon, the
Algerian working classes or urban proletariat are too conservative to launch
the revolution, because they have something to lose (their employment), and
he thus associates them with the national bourgeoisie that he so vehemently
criticizes. According to Fanon, the revolution will occur in one of two
ways: either the fellah will be led by organic intellectuals to form a social
democracy; or the urban proletariat will unite with the national bourgeoisie
to reproduce the colonial system in another form, ultimately leading to a
dictatorship of a few. He clearly views the former as the ideal, and strongly
criticizes the latter.
For Bourdieu, Fanon’s analysis of these social groups (which corresponds
to Sartre’s as well) is misguided, idealist and completely out of touch with
reality. Bourdieu felt that Fanon and Sartre romanticized the peasants. In The
Uprooting (written with Abdelmalek Sayad) he makes a thinly veiled attack on
both when he writes, ‘it was only by ignoring the material conditions of the
peasantry and sub-proletariat that one could lend any credence to the eschato-
logical prophesies which see in the peasantry of the colonized countries the
only true revolutionary class’ (170). According to Bourdieu, the fellah are no
less embedded in the social hierarchy than any other group, they are merely
at the very bottom. Adopting a somewhat Marxist position, he argues that this
fellah can only break out into senseless revolt, and does not have the direction
necessary to provoke a revolution. For him, dissatisfaction with the current
system, and a desire to revolt against it, does not lead to the organization
and vision of the future necessary to enact drastic change; the position of the
peasants in Algeria did not constitute an instance of ‘raised consciousness,’
as Fanon and others believed, but rather of disorganized rebellion. Bourdieu
wrote that Algerians’ support for the War did not necessarily make them—
sociologically speaking—‘revolutionaries.’ He viewed the Algerian peasants as
caught up in the ‘millenarian utopianism’ that was motivated by ‘an incoherent
resentment’ against the colonial situation rather than a ‘true revolutionary
consciousness.’
For Fanon, this resentment against the colonial situation could indeed
provide the basis for a revolutionary consciousness, while for Bourdieu it
could not. For Bourdieu, it is the urban proletariat that has the most revolu-
tionary potential, precisely because their employment provides them with the
stability necessary to launch a revolution under the leadership of intellectuals.
In other words, while employment for Fanon means having something to lose
(and therefore being more conservative and less revolutionary), for Bourdieu
it provides the stability needed realistically to lead a revolution.

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Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies

Tradition and Modernity under Colonialism

The different assessments of Bourdieu and Fanon with respect to the revolu-
tionary potential of the peasants and working classes is closely related to
their understanding of the relationship between tradition and modernity
in the colonial system. Whereas Fanon generally insists on the separation
between the time before the beginning of the Algerian conflict and the
period that follows, Bourdieu considers the divide as occurring before and
after colonization. While Fanon emphasizes the effect of the War on practices
and analyzes attitudes towards modernity more generally, Bourdieu seeks to
illustrate the different ways in which colonialism has disrupted the traditions
of the inhabitants of the small villages he observed. In doing so, Bourdieu
sometimes appears to go back over a hundred years, idealizing the time
before the initial arrival of French colonizers in 1830; Jane Goodman writes,
‘Bourdieu argued that almost from the moment the French set foot in Algeria,
they had profoundly and irremediably disrupted the traditional socioeconomic
organization’ (15). Fanon, on the other hand, never idealizes the precolonial
past, and instead promotes the postcolonial future, when the Algerian people
will be free of oppression. In fact, he is highly critical of such idealizations of
the past, whether by French ethnographers or Negritude writers.
In their fieldwork on the Kabyle, Bourdieu and Fanon formed vastly different
theories about how peasant societies approach modernity. For Bourdieu, the
rural classes in Algeria held traditional practices that impeded them from
adapting to a modern way of life. He views the peasants as experiencing a clash
between their traditional habitus (which precedes the arrival of the French) and
the modern field that is imposed by colonization (technological instruments
and a capitalist economy). This disconnect between habitus and field can
lead to a splitting of the ego, resulting in hysteresis, much like the identity
crisis Fanon describes in relation to the Antillean’s black skin and white mask.
In Bourdieu’s ethnographic studies of Algerian peasants, Work and Workers
in Algeria (1963) and most notably Sociology of Algeria (1958), as well as his
extensive photography, he describes the traditional practices of the Kabyle
population in the villages he visited, and explores how they were affected by
the advent of colonialism. Bourdieu presented traditional Algerian society as
very delicate, a system disrupted by the slightest intrusion from colonialism
and/or modernity, and collapsing due to the unwelcome contact with the
outside world from which it had previously been isolated: not only the French
colonial presence, but also modern elements such as photography.2

2 As Goodman writes, ‘In Bourdieu’s implicit equilibrium model of traditional

Algerian society, to alter such a significant element […] was to produce a domino
effect in which the entire social and cultural edifice would come crumbling down’
(16). She further notes that both Travail et travailleurs en Algérie and Déracinement
are predicated on a ‘clash of civilizations (choc de civilizations) model that
Bourdieu had initially outlined in an article of that title’ (14).

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 Bourdieu and Fanon on Algeria

Bourdieu constantly portrays peasants as irremediably torn between a

traditional and modern habitus, ‘in a permanent state of social liminality’ or
what he calls a ‘split habitus.’3 In The Uprooting (1964), Bourdieu suggests that
Algerians are incapable of adapting to certain elements of modernity, due to
the highly traditional nature of their lifestyle. Bourdieu and Sayad write: ‘The
peasant lives rooted in his land, the land where he was born, to which he is
tied by his habits and memories. Uprooted, there is a good chance he will die
as a peasant, that the passion that makes him a peasant will die within him’
(115).4 For Bourdieu, all peasants—whether Béarn or Algerian—are caught
between two worlds: modernity and tradition. He argues that the opposition
between modernity and tradition is an example of ‘hysteresis’: behaviors
learned in one field (rural/traditional) impede adaptation to another (urban/
modern). According to Bourdieu, the ‘traditional peasant faces a modern wage
economy but cannot easily cast off his or her prior socialization in the field of
so-called traditional traditionalism’ (Go 62). In other words, Bourdieu claims
that Algerians were held back by a traditional habitus, which was incompatible
with the adoption of modern practices.
For Bourdieu, the traditional habitus assumed by the peasants, which
he believes is not easily cast off, impedes them from adopting the forward-
looking outlook that he considers necessary for revolutionary consciousness.
According to him, fighting for change requires being open to a modern habitus
and imagining a future, which he does not think the Algerian peasants are
capable of doing, due to their adherence to traditions. Focusing on time
horizons, Bourdieu equates revolutionary consciousness with perceptions of
time, and for him, the peasants are stuck in an eternal present consisting of a
repetition of the past, and therefore cannot look to the future like the working
classes/urban proletariat can. For Bourdieu, ‘modernity involves an orientation
to a future that is rationally planned whereas traditionalism involves a becoming
of the future out of the present, a repetition of the present’ (Burawoy 11).
Different social classes possess different habitus that entail diverse notions
of time, and of modernity and tradition. Burawoy continues, ‘[Bourdieu] pins
modernity and tradition on different classes within the colonial context’; ‘a
stable working class has the security to think imaginatively and rationally
about future alternatives whereas the peasantry is stuck in an eternal cycle

3 On the level of the individual, Bourdieu argued that ‘the antinomies of modernity
and tradition lead to what he will later call hysteresis, in which learned behaviors
from one field (rural/traditional) impede adaptation to another field (urban/
modern)’ (Burawoy 12).
4 Goodman has astutely critiqued this position: ‘Yet although Bourdieu criticized
the French Left for its utopian view of the revolutionary potential of Algerian
peasants, his ethnography of rupture is predicated on an equally untenable myth:
that a precolonial Algerian society had existed in relative equilibrium prior to the
imposition of colonialism’ (20). Bourdieu felt his project was urgent, due to ‘his
distinct sense that “traditional” Kabyle culture was in danger of disappearing’
(Goodman 22).

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Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies

of the present’ (11–12). For a revolutionary consciousness, one needs to have

‘the formation of the system of rational projects and forecasts’ (Burawoy 12).
Bourdieu’s contention that peasants are stuck in an eternal present,
incapable of casting off their traditional habitus and imagining the future,
is completely at odds with Fanon’s observations. Fanon’s views are in clear
opposition to Bourdieu, as if they are in response to him:5 he emphasizes the
malleability and adaptability of Algerian peasant societies, who only reject
the colonial order due to its outrageous violence, rather than an inherent
resistance to all change, including technological. In ‘This is the Voice of Algeria’
(1957), an essay originally published in the FLN newspaper El Moudjahid, Fanon
makes a compelling argument about how traditional and modern practices
can be in synch, using the example of the radio. While discussing the changing
views of Algerians with regard to this technological instrument, he performs
a stringent critique of French ethnographers stationed in Algeria, including
Bourdieu and Tillion (although he does not cite specific studies), who explain
the refusal of Algerians to buy and listen to radios by characterizing the
Arab population as backward, tied to tradition and therefore inherently
unaccepting of science, technology and medicine. He declares that there
is no clear evidence of organized resistance to technology or practices of
‘counter-acculturation.’ In a highly ironic tone, speaking from the point of
view of the colonizer, he describes the reasons given by ethnographers and
white colonizers for the hesitancy of Algerian families to acquire a radio. One
is the content of radio programs, whose erotic and burlesque allusions make
it uncomfortable for the families to listen to the broadcasts together, and thus
challenges the stability of the traditional mode of life led by most Algerians.
Increasingly sarcastic, Fanon continues by declaring that the radio programs
do not correspond with the strict, patriarchal hierarchy, almost feudal in
nature, and the numerous prohibitions of the Algerian family (54).
Notably, in his analysis of how information spread among the Arab
population in Algeria before the radio, Fanon suggests that oral traditions, far
from causing Algerians to reject new communications technologies such as the
radio, actually facilitate their acceptance. He insists that the important role
of orality in Arab culture promotes the use of the radio—once it is detached
from its associations with the colonizers—rather than impedes it. In fact,
Fanon describes how village communities, which were already accustomed to
spreading information via word of mouth, and slightly altering it, continued
to do so once radios were propagated; the only difference was that now the

5 Another important French ethnographer of Algeria of the same era, Germaine

Tillion also bases her analysis on a division between traditional Algerian culture
and modern French society. Tillion published the influential study, L’Algérie en
1957, in which she refused to attribute economic decline among Algerian Berbers
to French colonialism (Goodman 17); this differs from Bourdieu who does posit
a correlation between economic decline and colonization. However, I have not
found an explicit reference to either Bourdieu or Tillion in Fanon’s writings.

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 Bourdieu and Fanon on Algeria

radio became the initial source of information, as opposed to a person. Fanon

writes that the general illiteracy of the Arab population makes it indifferent to
written texts, and particularly responsive to the oral form of communication
represented by the radio. He suggests that the Arab population, including the
fellah, had already developed a means of spreading knowledge throughout
large distances orally; he compares this process, as well as the use of tam-tam
drums in Francophone West Africa to transmit signals, to communications
technologies such as the telephone or the radio. Paradoxically, Fanon’s essay
suggests that the fellah (the most traditional, indigent and rural social class)
are perhaps the most open to modern communications technologies. This
flies in the face of the claims of French ethnographers such as Bourdieu
that this class is too uneducated and traditional to be capable of accepting
modern technologies.
For Fanon, the peasants’ openness to new technologies and objects of
modernity is part of what makes them the most revolutionary class. In
contrast to the conclusions of the French ethnographers whom he mocks
at the beginning of ‘This is the Voice of Algeria,’ he presents extensive
arguments that traditional culture can actually promote the appropriation
of modern technologies—once they are detached from their associations
with the colonizers. Fanon also differs strongly from Bourdieu in his beliefs
about the difficulty in changing a peasant’s habitus. For Fanon, the peasant
possesses an artificial habitus that has been imposed by colonization. If he/
she rejects all marks of modernity, it is not due to a strict adherence to a
traditional habitus, but rather, a result of negative associations between
elements of modernity and the violent, oppressive colonial order. He believed
that once the revolution was successful and the colonial order overturned, the
revolutionary classes would adapt to modernity.
For Bourdieu, the urban proletariat (and not the peasantry) possesses the
forward-looking outlook, and ability to adapt to modernity, that is necessary
in order to have a class consciousness. He does not believe that the peasantry
can do anything but break out into senseless revolt, because they are too
beaten down by resettlement, tied to their traditions, and stuck in an eternal
present anchored in the past that makes them incapable of adapting to
modernity. Fanon clearly disagrees with this assessment on multiple levels: he
believes that the peasantry can be forward-looking, and capable of adapting to
modernity; he also thinks that they can—and will—establish a revolutionary
class consciousness (albeit with the guidance of revolutionary intellectuals);
and he considers the Algerian working classes to be complacent in an alliance
with the national bourgeoisie.

Conclusion

Both Fanon and Bourdieu highlight the splitting of the ego and hysteresis
that can occur when there is a disconnect between an individual’s habitus

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Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies

and field, whether it is due to a clash between a black corporal identity

and white European outlook, or between traditional and modern practices.
Fanon emphasizes the role of race in this clash, while Bourdieu focuses on
how field positions are determined by access and acquisition to different
forms of capital. Both thinkers describe how the colonial system imposes the
colonizer’s cultural field (the notion of black inferiority, modern technologies,
a capitalist economy), upon the colonized’s habitus (traditional practices) in
a way that leads not only to symbolic domination but racial, economic and
social oppression.
Fanon and Bourdieu differ, however, in how they view the colonized’s
response to this imposition. For Bourdieu, the disconnect between habitus
and field leads to hysteresis and a vague, directionless despair that he does
not consider productive; this is because the fellah are too tied to a traditional
way of life, not forward-looking and not stable enough (due to their lack of
education and employment), such that they can only break out into senseless
revolt. Fanon, on the other hand, believes that the clash between habitus and
field in the colonial system is so extreme, and maintained by brute force, that
it dehumanizes the colonized who as a result has nothing to lose and is thus
inclined to violent revolt.
For Fanon, the fellah may be traditionally minded, but this does not
necessarily make them stuck in the past or incapable of assimilating modern
practices. On the contrary, at times these traditional ways can actually make
them more inclined to adapt to modern ones, such as the case in which the
orality of Algerian culture actually made it more open to appropriating the
radio. Moreover, Fanon’s analysis, when considered alongside Bourdieu’s,
emphasizes the importance of considering the tradition/modernity divide
within the context of the colonial system, including its maintenance through
systematic physical and psychological violence. For Bourdieu, the problem is
the clash between traditional and modern habitus and fields; for Fanon, it’s
the rejection of all elements of modernity due to their association with the
colonizer’s culture.
The similarities and differences between Fanon and Bourdieu mentioned
above have a number of implications for how these authors are approached
within postcolonial studies, especially given the extent to which their
theories are applied to broader contexts. In particular, a new perspective
can be gained on the question of race in Bourdieu. When applying Bourdieu’s
theories to situations of colonialism, postcolonialism and even migration,
a key element appears to be missing. While Bourdieu offers many useful
concepts for describing the power dynamics involved in colonial contexts
such as Algeria, in general he discusses relations between different groups
in terms of social classes and a ‘caste system,’ somewhat sidestepping the
central question of race, as Michael Burawoy has noted.6 Similarly, in ‘Sensing

6 In ‘Colonialism and Revolution,’ Burawoy states that ‘Bourdieu avoids the concept
of race, reluctant to use it not only in his analysis of colonialism, but also of

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 Bourdieu and Fanon on Algeria

a Post-Colonial Bourdieu: An Introduction,’ Nirmal Puwar writes that ‘Bourdieu

is still overwhelmingly received in the UK, as a theorist of class, who has very
little awareness of racism or post-colonial conditions in France’ (371). Although
Bourdieu’s discussion of ‘caste’ in Algerian culture is presumably a combination
of class and race, he tends to reduce it to the possession of different forms of
‘capital,’ while ignoring the importance of race in acquiring them; this creates
a difficulty when applying his theories to colonial and postcolonial contexts,
in which questions of race and racism cannot be ignored.
Similarly, in his emphasis on race to analyze the Algerian Revolution, Fanon
lacks some subtlety in his division between classes and groups, a dimension
that can be added by reading him in tandem with Bourdieu. Bourdieu brings
much to an analysis of Fanon, through his emphasis on symbolic domination
and different perspective on the revolutionary potential of the peasant versus
working classes. Bourdieu’s analysis of the revolution also calls into question
Fanon’s glorification of the peasant class as having ‘nothing to lose,’ and his
idea of the working classes as complacent and conservative. In The Wretched
of the Earth, Fanon emphasizes the role of physical and psychological violence
in colonization.7 While Bourdieu does acknowledge the role of brute force in
the colonial order, he emphasizes the social mechanisms by which this order is
maintained, an element somewhat lacking in Fanon’s analysis in The Wretched
of the Earth, but eminently present in Black Skin, White Masks, which illustrates
how the clash between habitus and social field leads to hysteresis resulting in
symbolic domination in the colonial context.
Ultimately, the theories of Fanon and Bourdieu put together and placed
into dialogue can provide a framework for examining not only relations
between races and classes within societies, but between larger groups on a
global scale, including how to approach issues of alienation and assimilation,
tradition/modernity and violent and symbolic domination.

Works Cited

Bourdieu, Pierre. Sociologie de l’Algérie (The Sociology of Algeria). Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France, Que sais-je?, 1958.
Bourdieu, Pierre. ‘Le Choc de Civilisations.’ In Le Sous-développement en Algérie, 52–64,
Algiers: Secrétariat social, 1959.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Algerians, trans. Alan C.M. Ross, preface Raymond Aron. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1962.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Travail et travailleurs en Algérie (Work and Workers in Algeria). Paris,
The Hague: Mouton, 1963.

French society, where he is far more comfortable deploying class as his critical
concept’ (78).
7 Although I tend to agree with Nick Nesbitt that the extent to which he advocates
violence has been overstated in large part as a result of Homi Bhabha’s introduction
to the translation of the work.

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Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies

Bourdieu, Pierre. ‘Le paysan et le photographe.’ Revue française de sociologie 6.2 (1965):
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