Algerian landing (Pierre Bourdieu)

ARTICLE

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

Algerian landing
■

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

■ In this fragment of a socioanalytic account of his own
social and intellectual formation, the author recounts the motivations,
aims, and circumstances of his fieldwork in Algeria during the war of
national liberation and the ‘epistemological experiment’ that he embarked
upon by simultaneously taking his childhood village as an object of
anthropological inquiry. The conditions of his landing in the French colony,
the material and emotional parameters of research in the shanty-towns
and countryside of a colonial society ravaged by military repression, and
the role of delicate ties with informants are recounted, as are the interplay
between personal dispositions, intellectual models, and the division and
hierarchy between academic disciplines, in an effort to illumine the
conversion of political impulses into scientific endeavours. The author’s
switch from philosophy to ethnology to sociology emerges as driven by
the need to feel useful in the face of harrowing suffering and injustice
and rooted in a deep repugnance for the scholastic posture made all the
more intolerable in a state of social emergency. The quandaries presented
by conducting fieldwork in a situation of war are revealed to be the initial
impetus for his abiding concern for epistemic reflexivity. Such ethnography

of ethnography can enable the researcher to recover the hidden social and
personal springs of her investigations and thereby help convert intuition
bred by social familiarity from intellectual handicap to scientific capital.

ABSTRACT

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

KEY WORDS


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My perception of the sociological field [in the 1960s] owed much to the fact
that the social and academic trajectory that had led me there set me strongly
apart. Moreover, returning from Algeria with an experience as an ethnologist which, having been acquired in the difficult conditions of a war of liberation, had marked for me a decisive break with scholastic experience, I was
inclined to a rather critical vision of sociology and sociologists – the vision
of the philosopher being reinforced by that of the ethnologist – and, above
all, perhaps, to a somewhat disenchanted, or realistic, representation of the
individual or collective position-takings of intellectuals, for whom the
Algerian question had constituted, in my eyes, an exceptional touchstone.
It is not easy to think and to say what this experience was for me, and
in particular the intellectual but also personal challenge represented by that
tragic situation, which would not let itself be trapped within the ordinary
alternatives of morality and politics. I had refused to enter the reserve
officers’ college [École des officiers de réserve, EOR], no doubt partly

because I could not bear the idea of disassociating myself from the rankand-file soldiers, and also because of the lack of sympathy I felt for the
candidates for the EOR, often graduates of HEC [the École des Hautes
Études Commerciales, the leading French business school] or lawyers with
whom I did not feel much in common. After three months of fairly tough
training in Chartres (every week I had to step out from the ranks at the call
of my name to be presented, before the assembled troops, with my copy of
L’Express, the magazine that had become the symbol of a progressive policy
in Algeria, and to which I had somewhat naïvely subscribed), I first landed
in the Army Psychological Service in Versailles, following a very privileged
route reserved for students of the École normale.1 But heated arguments
with high-ranking officers who wanted to convert me to
‘l’Algérie française’ soon earned me a reassignment to Algeria. The Air
Force had formed a regiment, a kind of sub-infantry whose task was to
guard airbases and other strategic sites, made up of all the illiterates of
Mayenne and Normandy and a few recalcitrants (in particular some
communist workers from the Renault works, lucid and congenial, who had
told me how proud they were of ‘their’ cell at the École normale).
On the ship that took us to Algeria, I tried in vain to indoctrinate my
fellow soldiers, who were full of inherited military memories and in particular all the tales from Indochina about the dangerous terrorists who stab you
in the back (even before setting foot in Algeria, from their contact with the
junior officers entrusted with training they had acquired and assimilated the
whole vocabulary of ordinary racism, terrorists, fellaghas, fellouses, bicots,
ratons, etc., and the vision of the world associated with it). We were
assigned to guard an enormous explosives store in the plain near Orléansville. Long and gruelling. The officers were young and arrogant; they had
been educated to the first level of the baccalauréat and done their national


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service, then been recalled, integrated, and promoted. One of them would
do the crossword in Le Figaro and ask me to help him in front of everyone.
My fellow soldiers did not understand why I was not an officer. Finding it
hard to sleep, I would often take their place on guard duty. They would ask
me to help them write to their girlfriends. I would write their letters in
doggerel. Their extreme submissiveness towards the military hierarchy and
everything that it imposes put to a severe test what populism remained in
me, nourished by the muted guilt at sharing in the privileged idleness of the
bourgeois adolescent, that had led me to leave the École normale, immediately upon passing the agrégation, to go take up a teaching post and do
something useful, when I could have benefited from a fourth year at the
École.2
I started to take an interest in Algerian society as soon as, in the last
months of my military service, I managed to escape from the fate that I had
chosen for myself and which had become very hard for me to bear, thanks


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to the intervention of a colonel from Béarn whom my parents had
approached through relatives of his residing in a nearby village. Being
seconded to the military staff of the French administration (Gouvernement
général) in Algiers, where I was subjected to the obligations and schedules
of a second-class private assigned to clerical duties (drafting correspondence, contributing to reports, etc.), I was able to embark on writing a short
book (for the Que Sais-je? series)3 in which I would try to tell the French,
and especially people on the Left, what was really going on in a country
about which they often knew next to nothing – once again, in order to be
of some use, and perhaps also to stave off the bad conscience of the helpless
witness of an abominable war.
While telling myself that I was moving into ethnology and sociology, in
the early stages, only provisionally, and that once I had finished this work
of political pedagogy I would return to philosophy (indeed, during the
whole time that I was writing Sociologie de l’Algérie [Bourdieu, 1958/1962]
and conducting my first ethnological fieldwork, I continued to write every
evening on the structure of temporal experience according to Husserl), I
hurled myself totally, oblivious to fatigue and danger, into an undertaking
whose stake was not only intellectual. No doubt this transition was eased
by the extraordinary prestige that the discipline of anthropology had just
acquired, among philosophers themselves, thanks to the work of Claude
Lévi-Strauss, who had also contributed to this ennobling by substituting for
the traditional French designation of the discipline (ethnologie) the English
label of anthropology, thereby cumulating the prestigious connotations of
the German sense – Foucault was then translating Kant’s Anthropologie –
and the modernity of the Anglo-American meaning.
But there was also, in the very excess of my devotion, a sort of quasisacrificial will to repudiate the specious grandeurs of philosophy. For a long
time, no doubt oriented thus by the dispositions I owed to my origins, I had
been trying to tear myself away from what was unreal, if not illusory, in a

good part of what was then associated with philosophy: I had gravitated
towards the philosophy of science, the history of science, and towards the
philosophers most rooted in scientific thought, such as Leibniz, and I had
filed under Georges Canguilhem a thesis subject on ‘The Temporal Structures of Affective Life’, for which I intended to draw both on philosophical
works such as those of Husserl and on works in biology and physiology. I
found in the work of Leibniz, which I had to learn some mathematics
(differential and integral calculus, topology) and a bit of logic to read,
another opportunity for reactive identification. (I remember my indignation
at a commentary, as worthless as it was ridiculous – because it was always
in the register of the grandiose – that Jean Hyppolite had produced of a
passage in Leibniz’s Animadversiones about a ‘finite surface of infinite
length’, which integral calculus enables us to know, but which Hyppolite

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had converted, at the cost of a gross error on the grammatical agreement
in the Latin text, into ‘an infinite surface of finite length’, something infinitely more metaphysical).4
I thus understood retrospectively that I had entered into sociology and
ethnology, in part, through a deep refusal of the scholastic point of view
which is the principle of a loftiness, a social distance, in which I could never
feel at home, and to which the relationship to the social world associated
with certain social origins predisposes.5 That posture displeased me, as it
had for a long time, and the refusal of the vision of the world associated
with the academic philosophy of philosophy no doubt contributed greatly
to leading me to the social sciences and especially to a certain manner of

practising them. But I was to discover very quickly that ethnology – or at
least the particular way of conceiving it that Lévi-Strauss incarnated and
that his metaphor of the ‘view from afar’ encapsulates (Lévi-Strauss,
1983b/1992) – also makes it possible, in a somewhat paradoxical manner,
to hold the social world at a distance, even to ‘deny’ it in Freud’s sense, and
thereby to aestheticize it.
Two anecdotes seem to me to express very exactly, in the mode of the
parable or the fable, all the difference between ethnology and sociology (at
least as I construe it). In the course of a visit to him, on the occasion of my
candidacy for the Collège de France, an art historian who was very hostile
to me for reasons that were not only political (he had written, for the front
page of Le Monde, a very ill-intentioned article on Panofsky, just when I
had published my translation of Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and
Scholasticism),6 and who, to demolish me, had spread the rumour that I
was a member of the Communist Party, said to me: ‘What a pity that you
did not write only your Kabyle house!’7 An Egyptologist, the Perpetual
Secretary of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, one of the most
conservative institutions of cultural France (which has no lack of them),
told me, at the reception for the new academic year – I had not visited him
during my candidacy, as he was away from Paris – alluding to the extraordinary score (two votes) that I had obtained on the vote by the Institut
to ratify the election by the Collège (a purely formal procedure, despite a
few ‘accidents’ without consequence in the past, tied to the names of Pierre
Boulez, who, reality or legend, obtained two votes, and Maurice MerleauPonty three): ‘My colleagues (or confrères, I no longer remember) did not
much appreciate your writing about the obituaries of the alumni of the
École normale supérieure.’ He was alluding to an article on ‘The Categories
of Professorial Understanding’ in which I had taken as object the obituaries published in the Newsletter of the Alumni of the ENS.8
We have here a good measure of the distance, often unnoticed, between
sociology, especially when it confronts the most burning issues of the
present (which are not necessarily where one thinks they are, namely, on

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the terrain of politics), and ethnology, which authorizes and even fosters,
among authors as much as among readers, the postures of the aesthete.
Never having fully broken with the tradition of the literary journey and the
artist’s cult of exoticism (a lineage within which stand the Tristes tropiques
of Lévi-Strauss but also a good part of the writings of Michel Leiris and
Alfred Métraux, all three linked in their youth to the avant-garde artistic
movements of the time), this science without a contemporary stake, other
than a purely theoretical one, can at best churn the social unconscious (I
think for instance of the problem of the division of labour between the
sexes) but very delicately, without ever brutalizing or traumatizing us.
(I think that, although he always granted me very generous support – it
was he who, along with Fernand Braudel and Raymond Aron, had brought
me, when I was still very young and had yet published next to nothing, into
the École pratique des hautes études, and he was the first to call me to
discuss the Collège de France – and although he always wrote me very kind
and very laudatory things about each of my books, Lévi-Strauss never felt
great sympathy for the fundamental orientations of my work and for the
relation to the social world engaged in my research in ethnology, and still
less in sociology (I remember that he had asked me oddly naïve questions
about the sociology of art in particular). For my part, while I bore an
immense admiration for him, and while I placed myself in the tradition he
had created (or recreated), I had very quickly discovered in him, aside from
the objectivism that I explicitly criticized in Outline of a Theory of Practice

and in The Logic of Practice (Bourdieu, 1972a/1977 and 1980/1990), a
scientistic naturalism which, manifest in the metaphors and often superficial
references to the natural sciences – to cladistics, for instance – with which
he sprinkled his writings, underlay his profoundly dehistoricized vision of
social reality. It was as if the science of nature was for him, aside from a
source of inspiration and of ‘effects of science’, an instrument of order that
allowed him to legitimize a vision of the social world founded on the
denegation of the social – to which aestheticization also contributes.
I remember that, at a time when he was surrounded by an aura of critical
progressivism – he was in debate with Sartre and Maxime Rodinson about
Marxism – Lévi-Strauss had distributed, in his seminar at the École des
hautes études, a text by Teilhard de Chardin to the utter stupefaction of
even his most unconditional followers. But the profoundly conservative
vision that has always been at the basis of his thought unveils or betrays
itself unequivocally in The View from Afar (Lévi-Strauss, 1983b/1992),
with the encomium of Germany and Wagner, the apologia for realist
painting, and the defence of authoritarian and repressive education. He also
wrote in 1968 a rather mediocre text on the ‘student revolt’ which he interpreted as a conflict of generations and, in his Marc Bloch Lecture of July
1983, he had critiqued, under cover of the ambiguous concept – more

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political than scientific – of ‘spontaneism’, both the subversion of the
students of 1968 who (like Aron, Braudel and Canguilhem, and many
others) had profoundly called him into question, and the critique of ‘structuralism’ to which I had contributed, in particular in the Outline.9 He could
only, or wanted only, to see in this critique a regression beneath the objectivist vision that he had imposed in ethnology, that is, a return to subjectivism, to the subject and her lived experience, of which he had purported
to rid ethnology, and which I was revoking just as radically as he with the
notion of habitus.)
With military service over, to be able to continue the investigations that
I had undertaken, which were ever dearer to my heart, I took up a post of
assistant professor in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Algiers and,
especially during the short and long school vacations, I was able to continue
my ethnological inquiries and then my sociological inquiries, thanks to the
Algerian branch of the INSEE [the French National Institute of Statistics
and Economic Studies]. I can say that, throughout the years I spent in
Algeria, I never ceased to be, so to speak, in the field, carrying out more or
less systematic observation of one kind or another (for instance, I collected
several hundred descriptions of sets of clothing with the intention of relating
the various possible combinations of elements borrowed from European
dress and from the variants of traditional dress – chechia, turban, sarouel,
etc. – to the social characteristics of their wearers), taking photographs,
making surreptitious recordings of conversations in public places (I had for
a time intended to study the conditions of the shift from one language to
another, and I continued the experiment for a time in Béarn, where it was
easier for me to do so), in-depth interviews with informants, questionnaire
surveys, archival forays (I spent entire nights copying out by hand the
surveys on housing, locked, after the curfew, in the basement of the HLM
[social housing] office), administering tests in schools, conducting discussions in social-service centres, etc. The somewhat exalted libido sciendi that

propelled me, rooted in a kind of passion for everything about this country,
its people and its landscapes, and also in the dull but constant sensation of
guilt and revolt in the face of so much suffering and injustice, knew neither
rest nor bounds.
I remember for instance this rather gloomy day in autumn when I was
trekking up [with Adbelmalek Sayad] towards Aït Hichem, a village in
Greater Kabylia, the site of my first fieldwork on social structure and ritual.
In Tizi Ouzou, we heard the clatter of machine-guns; we started into the
valley through a road littered all along with carcasses of burnt-out cars; in
the climb up to the pass, above a curve, sitting on top of a kind of alluvial
cone beside the road, we saw a man dressed in a djellaba, with a rifle
between his knees. Sayad showed great sang-froid by acting as if he had
noticed nothing – though, as an Algerian, he was perhaps taking even

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greater risks than I was. We kept going without speaking a word and my
only thought was that we would have to come back on the same path again
in the evening. But my desire to return to my fieldsite and confirm a number
of hypotheses on ritual was so strong that my thinking went no further.
This total engagement and disregard for danger owed nothing to any sort
of heroism but rather was rooted, I believe, in the extreme sadness and
anxiety in which I lived and which, with the desire to decipher a conundrum of ritual, to collect a game, to see such and such artefact (a wedding
lamp, an ancient coffer or the inside of a well-preserved house, for instance)
or, in other cases, the simple desire to observe and witness, led me to invest

myself, body and soul, in the frantic work that would enable me to measure
up to experiences of which I was the unworthy and disarmed witness, and
which I wanted to account for at all costs. It is not easy to describe simply,


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as I lived through them, situations and events – perhaps adventures – that
have profoundly shaken me, to the point sometimes of coming back in my
dreams, and not only the most extreme of them. This is the case of the
accounts that one informant gave me while apologizing for paining me, in
an entirely white cell of the monastery of the missionary White Fathers, and
another at the end of the pier of Algiers, so that no one would overhear us,
of the torture the French army had inflicted on them. At Djemaa Saharidj,
where I had come to gather data on the allocation of land (something I had
not been able to do in Aït Hichem, where I had had to content myself with
drawing up the distribution of the different lineages in the space of the
village), on the day I arrived, the White Fathers were not there – I had
forgotten that it was Sunday, they were at mass). I walked along a path
above the monastery all the way to a small grove where I came upon an old
Kabyle man, with a thin face, an aquiline nose and a superb white moustache – he reminded me of my maternal grandfather – busy drying figs on
wicker trays. I started to speak with him about the ritual and about lakhrif,
the season of fresh figs and of fights . . .
Suddenly, he seemed to me strangely nervous. A shot rang out, very close
to us, and while remaining very courteous, he quickly vanished. I learned a
few days later from a young man who did odd jobs for the White Fathers

and with whom I had spoken at length, that this grove was a place where
the soldiers of the ALN [National Liberation Army] used to come up and
sleep in the afternoon, and that they had fired a shot to warn us to make
off. A few days later, when I had already become quite accustomed to the
village and was well accepted by the residents, thanks no doubt to the sponsorship of my hosts, two White Fathers – Father Devulder, a very friendly
man with a tall frame and a long white beard, whose name I easily recall

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because he was the author of some very fine studies of the symbolism of
murals in Kabylia (Devulder, 1951) that I used extensively in my work, and
another, a younger man linked to the ALN – there was suddenly great agitation as French soldiers (in whom I readily recognized myself since, only a
year earlier, I was still wearing their uniform) were advancing in single file
along a sunken path towards the mountains. I knew from my young friend,
who himself knew it from the children who circled about the soldiers, that
they were setting out to search for a hide-out, which they suspected was on
the side of the mountain, where the ALN held its meetings and kept its
archives. I followed their progress, amidst the men and women of the
village, who, like me, hoped that they would not find the refuge before the
evening and that its occupants would be able to escape. And that is what
happened. But, the next day, the cache was taken, together with the papers
that were found there, which included lists of the names of all the ALN
supporters in the country. My friend, who was directly threatened, asked
me to take him in my car. So I set off the next morning, although my work
was far from finished, and we passed through the military checkpoints,

despite some scares, without too much difficulty.
To conduct sociological fieldwork in a situation of war compels one to
reflect upon everything, to monitor everything, and in particular all that is
taken for granted in the ordinary relation between the observer and the
informant, the interviewer and the interviewee: the identity of the interviewers, even the composition of the interviewing unit – one or two persons,
and, if two, a man and a woman, an Algerian man and a French woman,
etc. (I evoked a fraction of the reflections that were forced upon me by the
conduct of this research in the Foreword to Part Two of Travail et
travailleurs en Algérie [Bourdieu et al., 1963: 260–7]). The very meaning
of the observation and interview is in question, more than ever, for the interviewees themselves (are these people perhaps police or spies?). Suspicion is
generalized: several times, agents of the French intelligence services came
on the tracks of our interviewers, asking their own questions about the
nature of the questioning that had been done (for quite some time, every
morning, when I set off in my car to go and pursue my inquiries in the
bidonville [shanty-town] of Le Clos Salembier, I was followed by a police
car, and, one day, I was summoned in by the young SAS officer responsible
for this district, who wanted to know what I was doing).10
One cannot survive, in the literal sense, in such a situation (also experienced by other fieldworkers who have studied crack dealers, like Philippe
Bourgois [1995], or the gangs of Los Angeles, Boston, and New York, like
Martín Sánchez-Jankowski [1991]) unless one exerts a permanent practical
reflexivity which is indispensable, in conditions of extreme urgency and risk,
to interpret and assess the situation instantaneously and to mobilize, more
or less consciously, the knowledge and know-how acquired in one’s earliest


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social experience. The critical vigilance that I engaged in my later works no
doubt finds its basis in these first experiences of research in situations where
nothing is ever self-evident and everything is constantly called into question.
(Whence, here again, the irritation I cannot help feeling when specialists of
opinion polls, that is, of surveys conducted vicariously and at a distance,
vexed by my purely scientific objections to their practices, make arrogant

and puerile critiques of investigations which, like those in The Weight of
the World, engage all the acquired experience.)11
I remember very clearly, for example, the day when, in a ‘regrouping’
centre on the Collo peninsula, the fate of the interview, and perhaps of the
interviewers, hung momentarily on the answer that I was to give to the
question put to me by the people among whom we wanted to conduct our

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study. It all started in Algiers, at the Institut de statistiques of the rue Bab
Azoun, where Alain Darbel, the INSEE administrator responsible for
‘drawing a sample’ of the population of the regrouping centres – which,
given the lack of information on the parent population, was pretty much
meaningless – chose, as if at random (being more favourable than not to
‘Algérie française’, he was very hostile to the intrusion of sociologists into
the holy of holies of INSEE), two particularly ‘difficult’ regions: Matmatas,
near Orléansville, and the Collo peninsula, the region most fully under the

control of the ALN, which at one point had considered setting up a
provisional government there. It was one of the main targets of the major
military operations (called ‘opérations Challe’) in which armoured vehicles,
helicopters, and paratroopers were being deployed in devastating but futile
attempts at ‘pacification’. Although I was aware of the danger and, more
vaguely, of the arbitrariness of the choice (as I told Darbel on the eve of our
departure), I decided to go to Collo with a small team: two ‘liberal’ piednoir students12 (‘liberal’ in the sense of that place and time, that is to say,
roughly in favour of Algerian independence) but one of them, unable
to bear the tension, opted to leave before the investigation started; a
young Arab, who had told us he was a law student, although he had no
credentials, and who turned out to be an extraordinary interviewer; and
Adbelmalek Sayad, who was a student of mine at the Faculty of Algiers and
himself also involved in the ‘liberal students’ movement. After a long car
journey in my Renault Dauphine we arrived in Constantine, which had the
air of a besieged city: all the doors of the cafés were covered with wire mesh
to protect against grenade attacks, and at four in the afternoon there was
no one on the streets. Our plan to rally Collo by road terrified the souspréfet, a young énarque who hardly dared cross the street to join his mother.
It is he who imposed on us to travel by boat by going through
Philippeville.13 The journey from Philippeville to the small harbour of Collo
seemed to me exhilarating: at last I would see things close up for myself.
Along the whole shoreline, the mountains were in flames.
The sous-préfet of Collo, whose previous post had been at Romorantin,14
had a message conveyed to me that I should be cautious, and that ‘a fake
terrorist attack [organized by the French army] can happen quickly’. Colonel
Vaudrey (I think it was he), the former commander in chief in Algiers, knew
that we were there and who we were. I was on the ‘red list’, no doubt since
my military service; I had learned it on the morning of 13 May 1958 from
one of the pied-noir students. Although fully aware of my views on Algeria
– I had given a lecture whose title, ‘On Algerian Culture’, was perfectly transparent in the context of the time, and which the Algerian students, suspending their strike, had attended en masse – and, although they disagreed entirely
with what I told them, without provocation but also without concessions,

about the difference between the effects of the colonial situation and those


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of the acculturation linked to the ‘contact of civilizations’, a very fashionable
theme in American ethnology at the time, they had cared to warn me that
I would be well advised to vanish and stay in hiding. (To convince me that
they were well informed, they asked me if I knew Gérard Lebrun, who was
indeed a friend of mine, at that time a philosophy teacher at the preparatory classes for the École normale in the lycée of Algiers and himself on the
list of people to be ‘neutralized’, perhaps in the way Maurice Audin had
been.)15 I had also been made aware of the ill-will of the military authorities by a young student from the École centrale [another leading grande
école in Paris], who was opposed to the war and who, in order to be able
to go and judge for himself, had asked to take part in one of the field trips
organized by the army to convert young people to ‘Algérie française’: he
had been sent to Collo and he accompanied us in our fieldwork.
I chose to go to Aïn Aghbel, about 20 kilometres from Collo. The SAS
captain, who could not quite understand (or understood too well) what we
had come for, wanted to lodge us in the army post. I refused the offer and
we went and set ourselves up in the former school, outside of the protected
zone but in neutral territory (this seemed to me to be very important in
order to carry out the fieldwork). At night, as Sayad and I worked until the
wee hours, writing out the day’s observations, shadows would roam
around. Every morning we would travel for a dozen kilometres in my
Dauphine, along a gorge very propitious for real or fake ambushes (the SAS
captain was attacked there by the ALN shortly after we left – I do not

remember how I learned of this, perhaps from Salah Bouhedja, whom I first
met there and who later came to work in our research centre in Paris).16
On the day when we arrived at the regrouping centre, a cluster of men were

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sitting under some big olive trees (I still have a whole series of photographs
taken a few days later). We left the car and walked towards them. Two or
three of them had weapons bulging under their djellabas. One of them, very
dark-skinned, with a round head and a small beard, wearing a grey
astrakhan hat which set him apart from the others (he was one of the
Bouafer sons, who would turn out to be an amahbul, a visionary and unpredictable character, but nonetheless one who commanded attention and
respect; one of his brothers was a harki17 and the other was in the ALN),
stood up and addressed me, although nothing, in my appearance at least,
distinguished me from the others. He asked me with some excitement what
we had come to do there. I replied that we were there to see and hear
what they had to say and to report it; that the French army was several
kilometres away and that we were at their mercy, or words to that effect.


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He invited us to sit down and offered us coffee. I was often helped in my
fieldwork, in Algiers and elsewhere, by characters of this sort, often highly
intelligent autodidacts who, owing to their ambiguous location between
two social conditions and two civilizations, and sometimes between two
religions – the most educated of them sometimes professed syncretic beliefs,
which they explained by invoking René Guénon18 – showed clear signs of
oddity, even ‘madness’ (as suggested by the term amahbul that was applied
to them, from which the French ‘maboul’ [slang for ‘nuts’] is derived), but
were nonetheless endowed with immense prestige. One of them, who many
a time served as my laisser-passer and guarantor in my visits to the kasbah
(in the tensest moments of the Battle of Algiers, he would introduce me to
informants with the words ‘you can talk’, which instantly dispelled
mistrust), contrived things one day so that we would walk, arm in arm,
down the whole street in front of the Faculty of Letters, at a time when the
cafés were packed with pieds-noirs students in favour of Algérie française.
To give the show its full force as a test and a challenge, he was dressed in
ostentatiously oriental style, with silk sirwal trousers and an embroidered
doublet, which, together with his skilfully trimmed black beard, ensured
that he would not pass unnoticed.
As for the Bouafer of Aïn Aghbel, he liked to accompany us in our fieldwork, and often, after the interviews which he had attended (I will not easily
forget the old man, said to be beyond 100 years old, who, when he uttered
the names of the neighbouring tribes, would get fired up with excitement
in his enthusiasm for battle before slumping back on his side in exhaustion),
he would give us his thoughts, each more typical than the last of what I
called the cultural pidgin, and of which I will give just one example: ‘The
Beni Toufout [the name of a tribe] . . . what’s that, what does that mean?’
he would ask. ‘Beni Toufout? Tu votes [you vote, pronounced with an
Algerian accent, ‘tou voot’]. You see, we invented democracy . . .’
Much like the empirical study of the working classes has sometimes

seemed to the prophets of the proletariat as a manifestation of scepticism,
the common-sense step of going in the field to see how things really are
could, in those days of political certainties, seem strange, and even suspect,
especially when it concerned military operations such as the ‘regrouping’ of
populations. And it sometimes happened in Paris in the 1960s that people
would call me to account for my fieldwork, almost as if the fact that I came
back unharmed had something fishy about it. (My only safe-conduct – I
remember one day when I was driving alone in my car towards a Kabyle
village and, having come upon a long column of military vehicles, I was
stopped and forced to turn back – was a letter from the INSEE in Algiers
saying that I was authorized to carry out research, which I would show to
the military authorities, who were always surprised to encounter me in such
impossible places.)

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Whence all the situations of disconnection, by excess or by default, or
better of being ‘out of phase’ or ‘out of place’, in which I have continually

found myself in my relations with the intellectual world. For example, the
observation of the ‘regroupings’ made it possible to anticipate and
announce, in a quite counterintuitive – and unseasonable – way that these
sites, hastily described by some as in the mould of concentration camps,
would for most of them outlive independence. In some places, through an
irony of history, the old villages of origin have become almost ‘holiday
homes’ for the villagers ‘regrouped’ in the plains; or that the farms under
self-management that fed the imagination of some ‘pied verts’,19 carried
away by revolutionary enthusiasm, would fall into the hands of an Algerian
petty bourgeoisie of authoritarian technocrats or of the army, or even of the
barons of a ‘socialist neo-feudalism’, as Mohammed Boukhobza (1982)
would later say of the great estates that some high officials of ‘socialist’
Algeria had carved out for themselves in the south of the province of
Constantine. I must acknowledge here the immense support that my realistic, and often rather disenchanted and therefore, in those times of excessive
collective enthusiasm, somewhat scandalous anticipations received from
Algerian friends – I think, among many others, of Leila Belhacène, Mouloud
Feraoun, Rolande Garèse, Moulah Hennine, Mimi Bensmaïne, Ahmed
Misraoui, Mahfoud Nechem and Abdelmalek Sayad. These Algerian friendships, no doubt born of affinities of habitus, helped me to elaborate a
representation of Algerian reality that was at once intimate and distant,
attentive and, if I might say so, affectionate and warm, without for that
being naïve or fatuous.
The transformation of my vision of the world that accompanied my transition from philosophy to sociology, of which my Algerian experience was
without contest the pivotal moment, is, as I have already said, not easy to
describe because it is made up of the imperceptible accumulation of the
changes that were gradually imposed on me by the experiences of life or
that I brought about at the cost of a work on myself inseparable from the
work I was doing on the social world. To give an approximation of this
apprenticeship, which I have often described as an initiation (I know that
this idiom will surprise those who are wedded to the brutally reductive
vision of sociology which is ritually described in philosophy teaching as

simplifying and flatly positivist), I would like to return to the research
project that I carried out, in parallel with the work I was doing in Algeria,
regarding the bachelorhood of eldest sons in Béarn, and which led to three
successive articles, each separated from the previous one by 10 or 15 years
(Bourdieu, 1962b, 1972b, 1989). Indeed, it is perhaps not entirely
misplaced to see a kind of intellectual Bildungsroman in the history of that
research, which, taking as its object the sufferings and dramas linked to the
relations between the sexes in peasant society – which is more or less the

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

title I gave, long before the emergence of ‘gender studies’, to the article in
Les Temps modernes devoted to that object (Bourdieu, 1962a) – was the
occasion and the operator of a veritable conversion. That word is not too
strong to describe the transformation, at once intellectual and affective, that
led me from the phenomenology of emotional life (springing perhaps also
from the affections and afflictions of life, which had to be learnedly denied)
to a scientific practice implying a vision of the social world at once more
distanced and more realistic. This intellectual reorientation was fraught
with social implications: it was in effect accomplished through the shift
from philosophy to ethnology to sociology, and, within the latter, to rural
sociology, a specialty situated at the very bottom of the social hierarchy of
specialties. And the deliberate renunciation implied in this negative

displacement within the hierarchies would no doubt not have been so easy


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if it had not been accompanied by the confused dream of a reintegration
into the native world.
In my fieldwork in Kabylia, to defend myself against the spontaneous
sociology of my informants, I would often think back to the peasants of
Béarn: did the social unit that the Kabyles called either adhrum or thakharrubth have any more ‘reality’ than the vaguely defined entity that in Béarn
we call lou besiat, the ensemble of neighbours, lous besis, upon which some
ethnologists of Europe, following a local erudite, had conferred a scientifically recognized status? Was it not necessary to conduct fieldwork directly
in Béarn in order to objectivate the experience that served, consciously or
unconsciously, as my point of reference? Thanks to Raymond Aron, who
had known him, I had just discovered the work of Alfred Schütz, and it
seemed to me instructive to question, like the phenomenologist, the familiar
relationship to the social world, but in a quasi-experimental manner, by
taking as object of an objective, even objectivist, analysis a world that was
familiar to me, in which I was on first-name terms with all the agents, where
the ways of speaking, thinking, and acting were entirely self-evident to me,
and by the same token to objectivate my relationship of familiarity with that
object, and the difference that separates it from the scientific relationship

A peasant and his wife ploughing their field in Béarn.

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that one arrives at, as I did in Kabylia, through an effort armed with instruments of objectivation such as genealogy and statistics.
In the first text, written in the early 1960s, at a time when the ethnography of European societies barely existed and when rural sociology
remained at a respectful distance from the ‘field’, I undertook to resolve the
social enigma constituted by the bachelorhood of eldest sons in a society
known for its fierce attachment to the principle of primogeniture (Bourdieu,
1962b).20 Remaining very close to the naïve vision from which I nonetheless intended to break away, I threw myself into a somewhat frantic total
description of a social world that I knew without truly knowing it, as always
with a familiar universe. Nothing escapes the scientistic frenzy of someone
who discovers with a kind of wonderment the pleasure of objectivating, as
taught in the Guide pratique d’étude directe des comportements culturels
by Marcel Maget (1962), a tremendous hyper-empiricist antidote to the
fascination then exerted by the structuralist constructions of Lévi-Strauss
(as well attested by my article on the Kabyle house, which I wrote at about
the same time). The most visible sign of the conversion of the gaze implied
in adopting the posture of the observer was the intensive use I made then
of maps, ground plans, statistics, and photography: everything went into it,
whether it was a sculptured door in front of which I had walked daily on
my way home from school or the games played at the village feast, the age
and make of the cars; I even offered the reader the anonymous ground plan
of a house familiar to me because I had played in it throughout my childhood. The immense work required for the statistical construction of a great
many double- or triple-entry tables on relatively large populations without
the aid of a calculator or computer, partook, as did the very many interviews associated with in-depth observation that I carried out then, of the
somewhat perverse trials of an initiatory ascesis.
But, proving that the heuristic trajectory also has something of an initiatory journey about it, through total immersion and the happy reunions that

accompanied it, I accomplished a reconciliation with things and people
from which the entry into another life had imperceptibly removed me and
which the ethnographic posture causes one to respect quite naturally: childhood friends and relatives, their manners, their routines, their accent. A
whole part of myself was thus given back to me, the very part by which I
was bound to them and which distanced me from them, because I could not
deny it without disowning them out of the shame of both them and myself.
The return to my origins was accompanied by a return, but a controlled
return, of the repressed. Of that, the text itself bears hardly any trace. While
the few vague and essayistic final remarks, on the gap between the primary
vision and the scientific vision, may give a glimpse of the intention of reflexivity that was at the basis of the whole undertaking (to do a ‘Tristes
tropiques in reverse’), nothing, except perhaps the pent-up tenderness of the


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description of the ball, evokes the emotional atmosphere in which my fieldwork was conducted. I think back, for example, to what was the starting
point of my project, the school class photograph that one of my fellow
pupils, by then a low-level clerk in the nearby town, commented on, pitilessly chanting ‘unmarriageable’ with reference to almost half of those who
appeared in it. I think of all the interviews, often very painful, that I
conducted with old bachelors of the generation of my father, who frequently
accompanied me and, through his presence and his discreet intercession,
helped me to elicit trust and confidence. I think of this old school buddy,
whom I was very fond of for his keenness and tactfulness, and who, having
retired with his mother into a magnificently maintained house, had chalked
on the stable door the birthdates of his mares and the girls’ names he had
given them. And the objectivist restraint of my remarks is no doubt partly

due to the fact that I felt the sense of committing something like a betrayal
– which led me to refuse to this day any re-publication of texts whose
appearance in scholarly journals with small readerships protected them
against ill-intentioned or voyeuristic readings.21
No doubt because the progress it manifests lies in the order of reflexivity
understood as the scientific objectivation of the subject of objectivation, the
second text marks in a fairly clear manner the break with the structuralist
paradigm (Bourdieu, 1972b), through the shift from rule to strategy, from
structure to habitus and from the system to the socialized agent, himself
inhabited by the structure of the social relations of which he is the product;
that is to say, the decisive moment of the conversion of the gaze which is
accomplished when, underneath the rules of kinship, one discovers matrimonial strategies, thus recovering the practical relationship to the world.
This reappropriation of the truth of the logic of practice is what, in return,
made possible the discovery of the truth of the ritual or matrimonial practices, at first sight so strange, of the Kabyle stranger, thereby constituted as
an alter ego.22
The final text, which opens the way to the most general, the most simple
and also the most robust model, is also the one which makes it possible to
understand most directly what was both displayed and disguised in the
initial scene: the small ball that I had observed and described, and which,
with the pitiless necessity of the word ‘unmarriageable’, had given me the
intuition that I was dealing with a highly significant social fact, was indeed
a concrete and palpable realization of the market in symbolic goods
(Bourdieu, 1989). In becoming unified at the national level (as it is, today,
with homologous effects, on a global scale), the matrimonial market had
condemned to an abrupt and brutal devaluation those who were bound up
with the protected market of the old-style matrimonial exchanges controlled
by the families, the eldest sons of the leading families, ‘good catches’
suddenly converted into ‘empeasanted’ peasants, hucous (‘men of the

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woods’) repellent and savage, forever excluded from the right to reproduce.
Everything, in a sense, was thus present from the inception, in the initial
description, but in a form such that, as the philosophers would say, the truth
unveiled itself there only by veiling itself.
This kind of experimentation on the work of reflexivity that I carried out
in fieldwork on Béarn which was also, and above all, an ethnography of
ethnography and on the ethnographer, shows that one of the rarest springs
of the practical mastery that defines the craft of the sociologist, a central
ingredient of which is what we call intuition, is perhaps, ultimately, the scientific use of a social experience which, so long as it is first subjected to sociological critique, can, however lacking in social value it may be in itself, and
even when it is accompanied by crises (of conversion and reconversion), be
converted from a handicap into capital. Thus, as I have said elsewhere, it was
likely an entirely banal remark of my mother’s, which I would not even have
picked up if I had not been on the lookout – ‘they’ve become very “kin” with
the X’s now that there’s a Polytechnicien in the family’ – that, at the time of
my study of bachelorhood, triggered the reflexions that led me to abandon
the model of the kinship rule for that of strategy (Bourdieu, 2003). I shall not
undertake here to try and understand and set out the profound transformations of this privileged relation of kinship that was necessary for a remark
that could only be made in a ‘natural setting’, in a casual exchange of domestic
familiarity, to be received as a piece of information liable to being integrated
into an explanatory model. And I will simply indicate that, in a more general
way, it is only at the cost of a veritable epistemological conversion, irreducible
to what phenomenology calls the épochè, that lived experience, which is in
itself devoid of relevance, can enter into scientific analysis.

Acknowledgements
This article is excerpted from Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse pour une auto-analyse
(Paris: Raisons d’agir Editions, Cours et Travaux, 2004, pp. 53–86). It is published
here for the first time in English translation by kind permission of Jérôme
Bourdieu. The full text will appear as Outline for a Self-Analysis (Cambridge:
Polity Press and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). The title and
endnotes are by Loïc Wacquant, as are the bibliographical references (listed here
in their initial French publication to respect their chronological ordering).

Notes
1 The École normale supérieure of the Rue d’Ulm is one of France’s top
grandes écoles (competitive graduate schools). It was the traditional


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6

7
8

9
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breeding ground of intellectuals, and especially of social scientists, during
much of the long 20th century: among its alumni are Durkheim, MerleauPonty, Sartre, Aron, de Beauvoir, Foucault, Derrida, and Bourdieu.
The agrégation is a highly selective national examination leading to a post
in secondary or higher education. Bourdieu passed his agrégation in philosophy in 1953, after which he taught for one year at the public high school
of Moulins in central France.
This book series, published by Presses Universitaires de France, was then
considered the top outlet for short academic primers on the range of topics.
It was unusual for a scholar as young and inexperienced as Bourdieu to be
an author for it (although the series continues to be published, it is now a
dim shadow of its old self).
A professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne and later at the Collège de
France, Jean Hyppolite (1906–68) introduced Hegel’s thought in France
and embodied a strand of philosophy anchored in the internalist history of
philosophical thought. His best-known works are Introduction to Hegel’s
Philosophy of History and Logic and Existence.
For an elaboration of the social roots and effects of the ‘scholastic fallacy’
in the social sciences, read Bourdieu (1990, 1997/2000).
This translation, which brought together Panofsky’s studies of the mental
structures and architectural forms characteristic of the Scholastics, contains
an afterword in which Bourdieu (1967) elaborates for the first time his
reconceptualization of habitus.
This is a reference to Bourdieu’s (1970) classic ethnographic dissection of
‘The Berber House, or the World Reversed’.

The obituaries were analysed for ferreting out ‘The Categories of Professorial Understanding’ (Bourdieu and de Saint Martin, 1975), much as one
would analyse the structure of a primitive myth, in a move deemed inappropriate if not sacrilegious by some alumni of the École normale.
See Lévi-Strauss (1983a) and Bourdieu (1985) for a fuller response to the
charge of ‘spontaneism’.
The Sections Administratives Spécialisées (SAS) were army units created in
1955 by the colonial governor Jacques Soustelle to foster a ‘policy of integration’ of the native Algerian population. They combined a civil mission
(of administrative, economic, social, and medical assistance) with a military
task (intelligence gathering and order maintenance). In 1960, about 700
SASs combed the Algerian territory.
This is a reference to a review of Bourdieu’s team study of social suffering
in contemporary France, The Weight of the World (Bourdieu et al., 1993),
by Nonna Mayer (1995), a researcher at the CEVIPOF, the research centre
on French politics of the Institut d’études politiques de Paris, one of the
country’s leading producers of opinion surveys policy – and a frequent
target of Bourdieu’s critique of polling.

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