Table Of ContentA R T I C L E
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
ABSTRACT ■ 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.
KEY WORDS ■ reflexivity, ethnography, colonialism, war, danger,
emotion, scientific vocation, intellectuals, academic disciplines, Algeria,
Béarn, France
416 Ethnography 5(4)
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 ethnolo-
gist which, having been acquired in the difficult conditions of a war of liber-
ation, 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 rank-
and-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 particu-
lar 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 Orléans-
ville. Long and gruelling. The officers were young and arrogant; they had
been educated to the first level of the baccalauréat and done their national
Bourdieu ■ Algerian landing 417
418 Ethnography 5(4)
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, immedi-
ately 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
Bourdieu ■ Algerian landing 419
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 correspon-
dence, 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 quasi-
sacrificial 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 Struc-
tures 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
420 Ethnography 5(4)
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 infi-
nitely 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 extra-
ordinary 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 Merleau-
Ponty 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 obituar-
ies 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
Bourdieu ■ Algerian landing 421
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 inter-
preted as a conflict of generations and, in his Marc Bloch Lecture of July
1983, he had critiqued, under cover of the ambiguous concept – more
422 Ethnography 5(4)
Bourdieu ■ Algerian landing 423
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 ‘struc-
turalism’ to which I had contributed, in particular in the Outline.9He could
only, or wanted only, to see in this critique a regression beneath the objec-
tivist vision that he had imposed in ethnology, that is, a return to subjec-
tivism, 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 discus-
sions in social-service centres, etc. The somewhat exalted libido sciendithat
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
424 Ethnography 5(4)
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 conun-
drum 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,
