The odyssey of reappropriation (Pierre Bourdieu)

ARTICLE

graphy
Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
www.sagepublications.com Vol 5(4): 617–621[DOI: 10.1177/1466138104048830]

The odyssey of reappropriation
■

Pierre Bourdieu
Collège de France
Translated by Loïc Wacquant

T R A N S L A T O R ’ S N O T E ■ A prolific writer, playwright, poet,
linguist, and anthropologist of his native Kabylia and of the range of
Berber-speaking populations, Mouloud Mammeri was born in 1917, the
son of the mayor of his mountain village and a traditional poetic bard
(anusnaw). He was schooled in Algiers, Rabat, and Paris, where he
graduated in literature from the Sorbonne in 1938. After fighting in World
War II, he taught French in the interior of Algeria, published his first essays
on Kabyle culture and the colonial question, and earned a growing
reputation as a novelist, especially due to his trilogy of ‘ethnographic
novels’, La Colline oubliée (1952), Le Sommeil du juste (1955), and L’Opium
et le bâton (1965). He spent the war of national liberation in forced exile
in Morocco before coming back to Algiers in 1962, where he became
president of the Union of Algerian Writers and a professor of Berber
language and North-African ethnology at the University of Algiers. He
directed its Center for Anthropological, Prehistorical, and Ethnographic
Research from 1969 until 1982, fostering the ‘Algerianization’ of social
research and the development of field studies covering the gamut of
regions and ethnicities of Algeria, with a strong focus on Berber oral

cultures and interdisciplinary cooperation, despite the growing hostility of
the authorities towards anthropological research. In 1985 he founded the
Center for the Study of Amazigh Culture (CERAM) and its journal Awal
(‘the word’) in Paris, which Pierre Bourdieu helped baptize with a joint
article entitled ‘On the Proper Uses of Ethnology’ (Bourdieu and Mammeri,
1985). Mammeri is the author of numerous books on Berber language and
grammar, poetry, ethnography, and literature, and he was a leading
exponent of Kabyle resistance to the forced ‘arabization’ of his people by


618

E t h n o g r a p h y 5(4)

the Algerian state that entailed popular uprisings and ferocious repression
over the past two decades. When Mammeri died from a car accident on 25
February 1989, Pierre Bourdieu wrote his eulogy in Le Monde (Bourdieu,
1989). This article is the text of a presentation read in absentia at a
conference held in Algiers on ‘The Maghrebine Dimension of Mouloud
Mammeri’ (for more on Mammeri’s work, its intellectual impact and social
import, see Awal, 1990, Chaker, 2001, and Yacine, 2001).

I would have wanted to be amongst you, today, to take part in the homage
given to Mouloud Mammeri and his work, and say what in my eyes constitutes his major contribution to the culture of this country.
I would like to show, briefly, that the history of the relation of Mouloud
Mammeri to his originary society and culture can be described as an
odyssey, with a first movement of distancing towards shores unknown and
full of seductions, followed by a lengthy and slow return dotted with traps,
toward his native land. This odyssey is, in my view, the path that all those
who are issued out of a dominated society or a dominated class or region

inside dominant societies, must tread in order to find or recover themselves.
It is in this sense that the itinerary of Mouloud Mammeri is for me exemplary.
The first stage, then, is the movement that one must make to appropriate culture, culture tout court, that which needs no qualifier and which
experiences itself as universal, that which is officially taught in universities
and that one can acquire only by leaving at the door a whole world of things
– often one’s native tongue and everything that goes with it. This movement
of repudiation, of disavowal, more often than not ignores itself as such: it
is always effected, at any rate, with the consent of those who effect it, and
it is accompanied by a certain form of happiness.
The process could stop here and many are those who, being integrated
within the dominant universe, being known and recognized by the society
and culture they recognize, ask for no more. Mouloud Mammeri begins
where so many others would have ended: the French-language writer goes
back to listen in on the poets-blacksmiths, the poets-demiurges (Homer
repeatedly uses the word demiourgos to designate the poet), and he records
the poems they craft, often as sophisticated as those of the symbolist poets
of the late 19th century. He who had to pay his access to legitimate culture
with a sort of symbolic murder of the father joins again with the paternal
culture.
But with respect to this long-repressed culture, it is still a dominated
intention of rehabilitation that propels him to get interested in it. And he
remains attached to models that lead him to seek ennobling references in
the most high-ranking figures of Western poetry, such as Victor Hugo. It is


Bourdieu

■

The odyssey of reappropriation

only when, on the occasion of our dialogues,1 he discovers a figure of
Homer that his academic masters were not able to reveal to him, that his
inquiries on the ancient Kabyle poets and his ethnological research cease to
develop onto two separate planes. A Homer constituted in his anthropological truth, and thus snatched from the unrealness of academic fiction, is
thus joined in the Berber amusnaw, upon whom he confers an incontestable
form of consecration.
Thus, as we see, the journey is long which leads to find again the hill,
for a moment forgotten.2 The work that leads to a reappropriation of one’s
culture of origin, through a victory over cultural shame, is a veritable socioanalysis that one is never sure to have accomplished to the full. Especially
because the overcoming of the initial disavowal cannot take the form of a
disavowal of that which determined it, that is, of all the resources offered
by the dominant culture. What no doubt makes for the difficulty of the
advance toward self-reconciliation is that the instruments that enable one
to reappropriate one’s renounced culture are supplied by the very culture
that imposed renunciation. The final cunning of dominant culture resides
perhaps in the fact that the revolt it elicits risks to forbid one from appropriating the instruments, such as ethnology, whose mastery is the condition
for the recovery of the culture of which it fostered the disavowal.
Mouloud Mammeri succeeded in spoiling this ultimate cunning. He was
one of the first to impose ethnology in Kabylia and to accompany his
personal work of reappropriation of self with an effort to develop a collective work of reappropriation of a culture forgotten or repressed.
I would not want to reduce to only one of its aspects an oeuvre that is
fundamentally plural, multifaceted, and no one is more concerned than I to
protect it from all the attempts at appropriation of which it will be the
object. Nonetheless, I believe that the personal conversion that Mouloud
Mammeri had to effect in order to find again the ‘forgotten hill’, to return
to the native world, is no doubt what he wanted, more than anything else,
to share with all, not only with his fellow-citizens, his brothers and sisters
in repression, in cultural alienation, but also with those who, subjected to
whatever form of symbolic domination, are doomed to this supreme form

of dispossession that is the shame of self.

Acknowledgements
This article is the translation of Pierre Bourdieu, ‘L’odyssée de la réappropriation’, Awal. Revue d’études berbères, 18, November 1998, pp. 5–6 (which first
appeared in Algiers in the weekly Le Pays, 27 June–3 July 1992). It is published
here by kind permission of Jérôme Bourdieu and the journal. The notes and
references are by the translator.

619


620

E t h n o g r a p h y 5(4)

Notes
1

2

This exchange took place in Paris in 1977 and was published as ‘A dialogue
on oral poetry in Kabylia’, in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales
(Mammeri and Bourdieu, 1978). It is translated into English in this issue.
This is a reference to Mouloud Mammeri’s best known novel, La Colline
oubliée (1952), a meditation on the overturning of the traditional cultural
order of the Kabyle highlands by war and colonial intrusion that was made
into a movie of the same title by noted Kabyle director Abderrahmane
Bouguermouh in 1997. This novel made Mammeri the co-founder of
(French-language) ‘Algerian literature’, along with Mouloud Feraoun’s Le
Fils du pauvre (1951) and Mohammed Dib’s La Grande maison (1952).

References
Awal. Cahiers d’études berbères (1990) Special issue in homage to Mouloud
Mammeri.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1989) ‘Mouloud Mammeri ou la colline retrouvée’, Le
Monde, 3 March (also in Awal. Cahiers d’études berbères [1989] 5
(November): 1–3).
Bourdieu, Pierre and Mouloud Mammeri (1985) ‘Du bon usage de l’ethnologie’, Awal. Cahiers d’études berbères 1: 7–29.
Chaker, Salem (2001) ‘Mouloud Mammeri’, in Dictionnaire Biographique de
la Kabylie. Vol. 1. Hommes et Femmes de Kabylie. Aix-en-Provence: Edisud.
Mammeri, Mouloud (1958) La Colline oubliée. Paris: Plon. (Pocketbook ed.
Gallimard/Folio, 1992.)
Mammeri, Mouloud and Pierre Bourdieu (1978) ‘Dialogue sur la poésie orale
en Kabylie’ (Translated in this issue). Actes de la recherche en sciences
sociales 23 (September): 51–66.
Yacine, Tassadit (2001) ‘Écrivain et chercheur: le cas de Mouloud Mammeri’,
in Chacal ou la ruse des dominés. Aux origines du malaise des intellectuels
algériens, pp. 229–50. Paris: La Découverte.
PIERRE BOURDIEU held the Chair of Sociology at the Collège
de France, where he directed the Center for European Sociology
and the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales until his
passing in 2002. He is the author of numerous classics of sociology
and anthropology, including Reproduction in Education, Society,
and Culture (1970, tr. 1977), Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972,
tr. 1977), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste
(1979, tr. 1984), Homo Academicus (1984, tr. 1988), and The Rules of
Art: Genesis and Structure of the Artistic Field (1992, tr. 1996).

■

Bourdieu

■

The odyssey of reappropriation

Among his ethnographic works are Le Déracinement. La crise de
l’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie (with Adbelmalek Sayad,
1964), Algeria 1960 (1977, tr. 1979), The Weight of the World (1993,
tr. 1998), and Le Bal des célibataires (2002). ■

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

621