Abstract
The books reviewed in this essay are made up of well-chosen selections of Bourdieu’s textual and photographic portrayals of Algerian society in the late 1950s. As such, they respond to a renewed scholarly interest in his decisive years of ‘ethnosociological’ apprenticeship. This essay explores, first, how Bourdieu’s experiences in war-torn Algeria have influenced the theoretical and methodological tenets of his mature sociology. Second, it shows that Bourdieu’s early writings on the historical disruptions he witnessed there display themes and perspectives that depart from the most common images of his work. The practical assent to domination characteristic of ‘symbolic violence’ gives way to open resistance, the ‘ontological complicity’ between subjective dispositions and objective circumstances gives way to their historical mismatch, and the principled suspicion towards lay agents’ representations gives way to a high analytical reliance on long personal testimonies. Connecting these aspects of Bourdieu’s sociological investigations to his use of photography, the third section of the essay surveys the multiple functions that the practice of taking pictures performed in his ethnographic forays into Algerian communities. Finally, the essay presents Bourdieu’s connection between motifs of ‘modernization theory’ and theories of (neo)colonialism as one of the first syntheses in his intellectual career.
Bourdieu’s years of apprenticeship in Algeria: Sketch for an ethnosociological Bildungsroman
The books considered in this essay are made up of well-chosen selections of Pierre Bourdieu’s textual and photographic portrayals of Algerian society in the late 1950s. As such, they respond to a renewed scholarly interest in his decisive experiences in Algeria between 1955 and 1961. Each in its own way, both Algerian Sketches (AS) and Picturing Algeria (PA) offer invaluable insights on the significance of these experiences to the development of the theoretically informed, empirically oriented, and politically motivated style of sociology Bourdieu came to practice.
In 1955, shortly after graduating in philosophy at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, the young man was recruited for military service in what was then a French colony amidst extraordinary turmoil. Such turmoil was brought about both by the cycle of violence of an anti-colonial war and by the socioeconomic disruptions of an abrupt capitalist modernization imposed ‘from above.’ Like many other French intellectuals of his time, Bourdieu was critical of the devastating social-psychological effects of French colonial rule over most of the Algerian population. Nonetheless, once in Algerian territory, first as a soldier (1955–1957), then as a professor at the University of Algiers (1957–1961), he strove to go beyond what he saw as the speculative, utopian, and poorly informed formulae of political engagement widely spread by leftist intellectuals such as Sartre and Fanon (AS, p. 290). Breaking with the philosophical scholasticism infused in his elite educational training, but without forsaking his strong sense of the tragic injustices in the conjuncture around him, Bourdieu began cultivating what would become a lifelong tendency to ‘sublimate’ his political passions with the rigorous tools of social science. Imbued with this kind of passionate objectivity, he dove into a detailed study of Algeria’s internally diverse social conditions, experimenting with a wide variety of research methods, from statistics to ethnography, from depth interviews to photographs and even Rorschach tests (PA, p. 19).
Bourdieu’s entrance into the social sciences soon took the form of a creative merging of theoretical concepts and observational insights in situ, propelled by an urgent need to make sense of the agrarian, mythical-ritual, and ‘pre-capitalist’ ways of life among Algeria’s traditional peoples. Thanks to his own upbringing in the French rural region of the Béarn, he was socially predisposed to sympathize with peasant traditions, and conceived his ethnography of Algerian communities as both a scientific enterprise and a moral mission of ‘rehabilitation.’ First, this meant a rehabilitation of the value, richness, and complexity of these traditional cultures against ethnocentric contempt or pseudo-scientific myths of primitivism. It also meant a rehabilitation of the historical memory of societies that were collapsing under colonial land expropriations, the introduction of capitalist regimes of labor, and the forced ‘resettlements’ of large rural populations into ‘camps’ established by French rulers. By conjoining his ethical-political concerns with a commitment to objective social science, Bourdieu counterbalanced his sympathetic identification with the Algerian peasants through the means of sociological realism, as if he was testing himself in a tragic situation to know ‘how much truth he could bear,’ (to paraphrase Weber). In other words, aware of what Bachelard had called ‘the bipolarity of errors,’ he was intent on not letting his moral concern with the destinies of the dislocated and expropriated peasants of colonial Algeria to devolve into either ill-disguised condescendence or unrealistic political hopes towards them, such as the project of a peasant-socialist revolution nurtured by Fanon and others.
In any case, the ‘reality shock’ entailed by his emigration to a scenario in which time-honored collective structures were speedily crumbling under the strain of a ‘pathologically accelerated’ modernization (PA, p. 228) was decisive in deepening the young Bourdieu’s anti-scholastic proclivities. In both literal and metaphorical senses, he could picture very clearly the disturbing effects of this dissolution on the lives of Algerian women and men. His experiences in war-torn Algeria ultimately detracted him from what had seemed a symbolically more prestigious career in philosophy and led him into the domains of ethnology and sociology. It is interesting that Bourdieu’s first ethnosociological studies were conceived as a provisional deviation dictated by the civic duty of conveying reliable information to a French public whose knowledge of the Algerian situation was slim. An index of the transitory role Bourdieu ascribed to these efforts is the fact that his first daytime ethnographic forays into Algerian communities were interspersed with night-time writing sessions on Husserl’s phenomenology of time experience (AS, p. 6). This combination of daytime ethnography in concrete settings and night-time reflections on rarified philosophy would eventually give rise to a durable disposition of Bourdieu’s social-scientific habitus, namely, the systematic interpenetration of theory and research. As illustrated by the mature Bourdieu’s (2002: 40) amusing comment on using Kant to understand statistics on the consumption of pajamas, such interpenetration subverted traditional scholastic prejudices concerning the prestige of ‘grand’ ideas (e.g., Kant’s categories of understanding) and the stigma over mundane topics (e.g., pajamas).
First published in 1963, the brilliant ‘sketch’ on ‘Traditional Society’s Attitude towards Time and Economic Behavior’ (AS, pp. 52–71) offers one of the first examples of this creative sociological harnessing of philosophical preoccupations in order to explain and understand the concrete conditions, behaviors, and experiences of flesh and blood, ordinary people. The piece analyzes how the fellah, the Algerian peasant whose subjectivity was shaped by temporal attitudes related to a traditional rural economy of gifts and countergifts among neighbors, is thrown into despair and/or disorganized improvisation when forced to deal with time orientations required by an impersonal capitalist economy based on wage labor. Bourdieu cleverly grafts Husserlian insights concerning the structure of temporal experience onto a piece of economic sociology. In it, he criticizes the spurious naturalization and universalization of the neoclassical model of the homo economicus by demonstrating, with rich ethnographic material, its historicity and cultural embeddedness. As Tassadit Yacine, the thoughtful editor and presenter of the Algerian Sketches, puts it, this is a very ‘singular ethnosociology’ (AS, p. 13) indeed!
Why ethnosociology? In its very title, Bourdieu’s first book, Sociologie de l’Algérie (1958), deliberately subverted the orthodox divide between sociology as the study of Western, ‘advanced’ societies on the one hand, and ethnology as the study of non-Western, ‘primitive’ ones on the other. Since then, Bourdieu’s mobilization of theoretical tools forged in, or based on, his extensive fieldwork in Algeria has furthered a sociological practice that counts an ethnological sensibility among its fundamental constituents. This incorporation of ‘ethnology’ into the core of sociological theorizing and research has operated especially through a dialectic between the ethnological ‘familiarization of the exotic’ and the sociological ‘exoticization of the familiar.’ By enlarging the social scientist’s sense of the multiplicity of cultural forms of human action and experience, the study of foreign practices and institutions facilitates an awareness of the historical contingency of the collective world in which he or she is a native. In this sense, it counters his or her spontaneous, socially inculcated propensity to take the properties of such collective world as natural, universal, and self-evident. Within Bourdieu’s praxeological synthesis between objectivism and subjectivism, the detour through sociocultural otherness works, therefore, as a tool of reflexive self-objectivation.
It was thanks to this procedure that Bourdieu was able, for instance, to incorporate Durkheim’s preoccupation with the connection between mental and social structures within ‘primitive’ societies and turn it into a full-blown research program on the symbolic legitimation of power asymmetries within modern, highly differentiated formations of classes and fields (AS, p. 270). In similar fashion, his analysis of how the economic theory of marginal utility neglects its circumscribed ‘historico-cultural’ (Weber) applicability is founded upon his ethnographic studies of Algeria’s turbulent transition from a predominantly agrarian to an urban-capitalist economy to an urban-capitalist economy. In Algeria, Bourdieu established direct contact with agents whose lack of sociocultural training to perform in a rationalized economy showed a contrario, as it were, the subjective habituation and, therefore, ideological naturalization of economic dispositions in modern societies (AS, p. 186).
A less known Bourdieu
With the benefit of hindsight, one can interpret Bourdieu’s initially messy, ‘scholastically irresponsible’ (PA, p. 19) self-training in social research amidst Algeria’s transformations as the cradle of the methodological pluralism that would flourish into another fundamental component of his social-scientific habitus. Furthermore, at the theoretical and empirical levels, this intelligent combination of research techniques was from the beginning directed to grasping the complex interconnections between subjectivity and objectivity, ‘agency’ and ‘structure,’ ‘biography and history’ (to use Mills’s bon mot). Long before the theoretical ‘treatises’ on practice in which he would present his structural praxeology as a transcendence of subjectivist and objectivist modes of social analysis, Bourdieu’s masterly empirical tracing of those interrelations appeared, with hardly a taint of ‘reproductivism,’ in his texts on ‘uprooted’ peasants and urban (sub)proletarians in 1950s and 1960s Algeria.
Even those of us who have no qualms about placing Bourdieu’s theory of practice alongside the ‘theoretical theories’ that tackled issues of structure and agency more or less contemporarily, such as Giddens’s structurationism, cannot but be impressed by the methodological versatility, empirical substance, and ethical relevance that these early co-authored studies bring to bear on those issues. Whilst statistical instruments allowed Bourdieu and his collaborators, like the brilliant Algerian sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad, to ascertain ‘macro-transformations’ in the domains of labor markets and rural–urban demography, their ‘micro-consequences’ to the lives of concrete individuals were closely followed with perceptive ethnography and depth interviews.
Translations of some powerful passages from the books Travail et travailleurs en Algérie (Bourdieu et al., 1963) and Le Déracinement (Bourdieu and Sayad, 1964) sprinkle the pages of Picturing Algeria, whilst extracts from these works are gathered in Algerian Sketches under the respective titles ‘Uprooted Peasants’ (AS, pp. 117–145) and ‘The Algerian Sub-Proletarians’ (AS, pp. 146–161). The latter study focuses on a large category of people that included ‘the unemployed, casual laborers, hawkers, petty employees, porters, messengers, caretakers, those who sell single packages of cigarettes or a bunch of bananas’ (AS, p. 88). This text is one of the most poignant demonstrations of how Bourdieu’s sociology can be compassionate and caring without allowing itself to slide into ‘false solicitude’ (AS, p. 95) towards the people it depicts. On the one hand, Bourdieu and his collaborators (Alain Darbel, Jean-Paul Rivet, and Claude Seibel) are disconcertingly implacable when pointing to the inconsistencies, confusions, ‘absence of shadings,’ and ‘lack of realism’ (AS, p. 154) that marked the sub-proletarians’ views of their present conditions and future prospects. On the other hand, the authors explain the historical-structural sources of these distorted views in such a way as to show that they were ‘necessitated,’ as the later Bourdieu would often say, by those individuals’ situation. The inconsistent and disorganized opinions of these underemployed and unemployed workers contained ‘a form of truthfulness,’ because they were ‘tinged with worry and despair and, like a cry for help . . . dramatically express[ed] a dramatic experience.’ The moving account of their confused testimonies as ‘the adequate expression of an inexpressible experience,’ ‘an incoherent confession of the insurmountable incoherence’ (AS, p. 157) in which they were historically and structurally trapped, therefore combines an unswerving epistemological critique of these lay agents’ representations with a humane concern for their condition. In this sense, it is a good instance of what Bourdieu saw as the paradoxical relationship – ‘objectifying and loving, detached and yet intimate’ (PA, p. 17) – he maintained towards his research subjects, a relationship to which he referred, with a Spinozian touch, as ‘intellectual love’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 614).
The readers of Algerian Sketches and Picturing Algeria who are familiar with Bourdieu’s theoretically informed texts on Kabyle society, but not with Travail et travailleurs en Algérie, Le Déracinement, or his youthful articles on the Algerian war of national liberation, are in for a somewhat different Bourdieu. Instead of the reproduction of power asymmetries through the ‘symbolic violence’ that ensures the dominated agents’ practical complicity with their own domination, one finds accounts of open rebellion against collective humiliation, of cycles of growing physical violence tearing apart the ideological veils that had justified colonial domination, and of the sociohistorical conditions of possibility of revolutionary resistance. Instead of the ontological complicity between social and mental structures, those readers will find the practical and existential difficulties of individuals whose subjective dispositions were cultivated within a rural and traditional milieu, and are now radically out of step with the objective requirements of the urban capitalism in which they have been forced to operate. Instead of a sharp ‘epistemological break’ with common-sense narratives and an overwhelming emphasis on the infra-conscious, nondiscursive dispositions of the habitus, there is rather the systematic recourse to long testimonies of lay agents, some of whom prove to be remarkably reflexive and insightful about the conditions in which they find themselves. Bourdieu was particularly impressed, for instance, by how perceptive a Kabyle cook he had met in Algiers was about the connections between his biographical experiences and the large-scale socioeconomic transformations Algeria was undergoing then. The remarks of this ‘folk economist’ had appeared in the appendices of Travail et travailleurs en Algérie, but come back in a mature article on ‘The Making of Economic Habitus’: . . . this man endowed with barely an elementary education was depicting, in his own words, alternating between French and Berber, the core of what I had been able to discover about the ongoing transformation of social and mental structures wrought by capitalist expansion and colonial war in Algeria, but only by means of a long and arduous effort of data production and deciphering. (AS, p. 191)
Bourdieu does not attribute the cook’s keen insight into his encompassing economic cosmos to some mysterious, sociologically unaccountable factor. Rather, he strives to explain it in terms of this smart man’s positional trajectory within the social space of the colonial order, which had led him to experience the European economic world from the inside while maintaining his personal ties to many Algerian companions who had been unable to adapt to the new social realities. Among these individuals caught within ‘the hysteresis effect’ of a historical disjunction between their subjective dispositions and their new objective conditions were members of the category of ‘em-peasanted peasants’ (paysans empaysannés). These agents had been pressed or forced to leave their rural villages only to find out, in the oppressive atmosphere of resettlement centers or in the precarious life conditions of shantytowns, that their rural villages had not left them. Their most ingrained orientations of conduct betrayed their peasant past and were, therefore, painfully out of tune with the practical requirements of their new objective circumstances under urban capitalism.
The texts on displaced peasants and urban sub-proletarians that Bourdieu published in the early 1960s prefigure some of the most salient features of his late collective project on the structural bases and subjective experiences of social suffering in societies assaulted by what he called ‘the neoliberal invasion’ (Bourdieu, 1998, 1999). These features include a multidimensional account of ‘the misery of the world’ (La Misère du monde, as the original French title goes). Far from restricting itself to material poverty, this account portrays a host of other (often concomitant) painful deprivations: of social value, collectively grounded self-esteem, existential meaning, practical orientation, performative competence, ‘psychological security’ (AS, p. 70), sense of rooting and stability, and so on. Another trace in common between the two sets of writings is the aforementioned loosening of Bachelard’s methodological imperative of the ‘epistemological rupture’ with lay representations. Instead, Bourdieu’s approach places high, though not uncritical, analytical value on personal testimonies. Although some of these are structurally explained as misrecognitions (e.g., the sub-proletarians’ confused views treated above) others are dialogically refined with social-structural contextualizing (as is the case with ‘the folk economist’s’ remarks and some comments by ‘uprooted peasants’ [AS, pp. 117–145]). Finally, in what should be another blow to the evolutionist premises of 1950s-style modernization theory, Bourdieu’s depiction of the chronic uncertainty experienced by unemployed and underemployed workers in the cities of a ‘Third World’ or ‘underdeveloped’ country curiously foreshadows the life conditions of vast sectors of the population in North Atlantic societies after the structural transformations of late capitalism. 1
Bourdieu’s detached involvement: Photography as a tool of ‘participant objectivation’ and ‘intellectual love’
One of the best ways of approaching Bourdieu’s well-known theoretical merging of objectivist and subjectivist ‘moments’ in a praxeological framework is by pointing to his acute sense of the epistemic ‘trade-offs’ involved in distant and proximate relationships between the social scientist and the agents whose practices she or he seeks to explain and understand. What strikes Bourdieu’s praxeology as the utmost challenge is to combine the intellectual advantages of ‘detachment’ and ‘involvement,’ to put it in Elias’s terms, while surpassing their respective limits. Throughout his ethnographic incursions into the different regions and communities of Algerian society, there was one methodological tool that Bourdieu has found particularly adequate to strike this balance between ‘the distance of the observer’ on the one hand, and the ‘familiarity, attention and sensitivity to even the least perceptible details’ (PA, p. 1) that only proximity affords on the other: photography.
Picturing Algeria contains around 150 pictures selected among the many that Bourdieu took during his ethnographic work in that country in the late 1950s. Most of these photographs ‘had been lying around in boxes for forty years’ (PA, p. 8), and would have continued there were it not for the insistence of Franz Schultheis in making them publicly accessible. After some initial reluctance, Bourdieu embarked on the project of setting up an exhibition and a book to disclose his largely unknown photographic archive, although he would not live to see the project taken to its completion. In 2003, about one year after Bourdieu’s death, the French original version of this book came out with the title Images d’Algérie, and exhibitions were held at the Institute of the Arab World (Institut du Monde Arabe) in Paris and at the Kunsthaus art museum in Graz, Austria.
For those whose first knowledge of the Algerian subjects and societies portrayed in Bourdieu’s oeuvre has come from his writings, it is refreshing to connect them to the real women, men, children, houses, artifacts, and landscapes that appear in his photographs. Although there is, unfortunately but understandably, no detailed explication of the circumstances surrounding each photograph, the pictures are accompanied by instructive excerpts from Bourdieu’s writings on Algeria, and also by an interview with his intellectual biographer, Franz Schultheis, where they explore Bourdieu’s ‘use of photography for . . . ethnographic field research and sociological studies on site’ (PA, p. 8). Bourdieu himself, along with the perceptive commentators who also feature in the book (Schultheis, Craig Calhoun, and Christine Frisinghelli), traces interesting connections between his use of photographs as methodological tools and the type of sociological approach he developed. These methodological considerations should be welcome in our contemporary sociological landscape, where technologies for producing and disseminating images still seem to figure more as a research theme than as a systematically deployed asset in generating and communicating social-scientific knowledge.
The functions that photography performed in Bourdieu’s fieldwork were multiple. The photographs had a ‘documentary’ quality in the sense that, while taken amidst situations of ‘ethnographic urgency,’ so to speak, they worked as visual notes to which he could return more attentively later. They served also as a means to express his genuine moral concern for the people whose lives he was studying, many of whom were interested in obtaining photographs of themselves and/or in having their difficult conditions made available for an interested public. The practice of photography heightened Bourdieu’s sensitivity to the minutiae of sociogeographic scenes, leading him to perceive sociologically relevant details that would have eluded his attention were it not for this sensitizing function of regularly taking pictures. Moreover, from an affective point of view, making photographs was a way of interposing some distance between himself and the people whose plights he was portraying, a distance without which, he says, he would have been emotionally overwhelmed and unable to carry on with the work of bearing testimony. Through the condensation allowed by imagistic means, the photographs also helped to communicate complex sociological diagnoses. To give but the most obvious example, the dynamics of metropolitan domination and colonial resistance, and its symbolic mixings to issues of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ in 1950s Algeria, is expressed in a photograph of a veiled woman riding a motorcycle (Bourdieu, AS, p. 31).
Modernization and colonialism
Through Bourdieu’s ‘sketches’ and pictures, one finds that the existential roots of his obsession with epistemological reflexivity do not stem solely from the structural dislocations inherent to the biography of a ‘miraculé’ who came from a small peripheral village and ended up in the Parisian academic elite. This obsession also derives from the foundational experiences of conducting research within a context of war, where knowledge of the social relationship between the researcher and his informants, as well as attention to apparently minute procedural details, were literally a matter of ‘life or death’ (PA, p. 17). Besides the inherent challenges of doing ethnography in such risky circumstances, Bourdieu’s reflexivity was also enhanced by the firsthand ambivalent experience of ethnology’s colonial and violent conditions of possibility: . . . I had set out into the mountains on foot to look at the destroyed villages, and I found houses that had had their roofs taken off to force people to leave [see the pictures in PA, pp. 83, 85]. They had not been burned down, but they were no longer habitable. And I came across clay pitchers in the houses . . . in Kabylia they call them aqoufis, those big clay grain pitchers decorated with drawings. The drawings are often of snakes, snakes being a symbol of resurrection [see PA, pp. 86–88]. And although the situation was so sad, I was happy to be able to take photographs – it was all so contradictory. I was only able to take photos of these houses and immovables because they had no roofs anymore. . . . I was very moved by and sensitive to the suffering of the people, but at the same time I had the detachment of an observer, manifested by the fact that I was taking photos. (PA, p. 18)
Bourdieu’s direct experience of the historical ties between ethnology and colonial violence has not conduced him, however, to suppose that the former’s intellectual resources are inevitably tainted with colonialist ideology. Conceived as ‘participant objectivation’ (AS, pp. 265–279), an ethnosociological inquiry that accounts systematically for its own social and historical conditions of possibility would be able to reflexively control the biases inherent to the ethnographer’s positioning within these conditions. This view of the relationship between ethnology and colonialism is a particular instance of what would become a general point of Bourdieu’s sociological epistemology, namely, a recognition of the structural constraints on viewpoints about the social world that does not forsake the ideal of objective knowledge, but predicates it upon the surpassing of such constraints though self-objectivation. Furthermore, by rebuking the perspectives of both the colonizers and ‘those who merely “react” against them without understanding the social conditions of their work’ (AS, p. 285), Bourdieu has put forward a conception of ethno(socio)logical knowledge that aims at exposing the manifold maladies of colonialism and contributing to emancipatory initiatives not in spite of its scientific objectivity, but because of it (AS, p. 215).
Bourdieu’s youthful writings on the social transformations triggered by, and amidst, the Algerian war of national liberation already show his tendency to carve a synthesizing path between the main opposing perspectives within his intellectual landscape. On a political level, he was unequivocally in favor of Algeria’s full independence from the French state. This placed him, obviously, against the right-wing defenders of the settler regime, among whom were the members of the French Army’s branch that murdered his fellow critical analysts of colonialism Mouloud Feraoun and Moulah Hennine, put Bourdieu’s name on an assassination list and, therefore, led him to leave the country. His defense of a fully independent Algeria also placed him to the left of the ‘center-leftist,’ reformist and reconciliatory proposals put forward by the novelist Albert Camus and the sociologist and ethnographer Germaine Tillion. As we have seen, however, he also criticized the ‘simplifications and mythologies’ of the utopian far left by appealing ‘to the extreme complexity of the real’ (AS, p. 85) – for instance, he held that neither the dispossessed peasants nor the urban sub-proletarians had the objective and subjective means to develop a rational revolutionary consciousness. 2
If Bourdieu’s political stance on the Algerian question is well known, less so is his synthesis between the analytical frameworks associated with modernization theory on the one hand, and theories of colonialism, imperialism, and dependency on the other. Against teleological views of the transition to modernity, the 1960s and 1970s would witness a proliferation of perspectives that no longer conceived ‘development’ and ‘underdevelopment’ as different stages alongside the same evolutionary path, but rather as mutually determined conditions in an asymmetric international system. At the economic level, for instance, these asymmetric relationships were established in such a way that the enrichment of ‘First World’ countries was systematically purchased at the expense of the impoverishment of large portions of their ‘economic satellites’ (AS, p. 43) in the ‘Third World.’ In convergence with this view, Bourdieu’s article ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ (1959; AS, pp. 39–51) contends that the upheavals related to the disintegration of traditional social structures in Algeria could not be explained either in terms of a ‘tardy’ endogenous development or as mere results of cultural contact between two different societies. ‘The phenomena of social, economic and psychological disaggregation’ observed in Algerian communities were not the inevitable result of the encounter between unequally developed societies, but a product of ‘a particular situation, that of colonialism’ (AS, p. 40), with its myriad consequences. The historical replacement of Algerian tribes’ joint possession of lands by strictly divided personal properties, for example, had come about through a series of policies on landownership that, starting with the so-called sénatus-consulte in 1863, amounted to ‘a veritable operation of “social surgery” which should not be confused with cultural contagion’ (AS, p. 45). What this meant for Bourdieu, however, was not that analyses of Algerian underdevelopment conducted in the style of modernization theory, such as Tillion’s study of the Chaouïa society in the Aurès territory, were entirely wrong, but rather that they could only acquire ‘full truth’ (AS, p. 41) if they were seen in the light of colonial domination. Bourdieu adduced a structural-functionalist argument to explain why this was the case: Every culture allows greater or lesser room for change; the alternatives that civilizational contact proposes . . . are . . . resolved as a function of the system of values established in the ‘recipient culture’ . . . [In] a normal situation, modifications likely to disrupt . . . fundamental . . . values are repelled, whereas those in conformity with the specific ‘style’ of the ‘recipient culture’ can be . . . adopted. So long as this selection can be exercised, the ‘culture’ maintains its equilibrium and originality. . . . In the contrary case, the fundamental values themselves may be disrupted and the culture’s vital norms shattered, leading to a more or less catastrophic disintegration of the cultural ensemble. (AS, p. 40)
By ‘the contrary case,’ Bourdieu refers primarily, of course, to the tragic crumbling of traditional Algeria. Because its former existence was that of ‘a totality whose elements are indissociable,’ its collapse could not but be total as well, ‘producing upheavals not just in the economic order but also in the social, psychological, moral and ideological orders’ (AS, p. 43). It is in relation to this ‘modernization by force’ that one should understand, for instance, Bourdieu’s aforementioned diagnosis of how the expectations and capabilities inherent to the Algerian peasant’s habitus hinder his adaptation to modern economy and society. This diagnosis, if detached from a framework that places an explanatory primacy on ‘the colonial system’ and its relational effects, would seem like just another instance of classic modernization theory and its associated psychology of the cultural attitudes that foster or impede the transition to modernity. In the case of Algeria’s predicament, therefore, modernization theory did grasp at something real, but missed its profound structural causes in colonialism.
Conclusion
Although this essay has been chiefly concerned with the light that Algerian Sketches and Picturing Algeria cast upon Bourdieu’s oeuvre and intellectual trajectory, these books can obviously be critically evaluated through other analytical preoccupations, such as the historical accuracy of Bourdieu’s accounts of Algeria (Goodman and Silverstein, 2009) or the epistemology and ethics of photography (Back et al., 2009). In any case, what matters the most is how much we can learn about the actual people whose lives Bourdieu portrayed by means of words and photographs, with a characteristic mixture of analytical sharpness and humane compassion that was rarely equaled in 20th-century sociology.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Cynthia Hamlin, Frédéric Vandenberghe, and ISR editor Mohammed A Bamyeh for their help with this essay’s content and form, for which I remain solely responsible.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.