Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria at War Notes on the Birth of an Engaged Ethnosociology

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DOI: 10.1177/1466138104050703

2004 5: 487EthnographyTassadit Yacine

ethnosociologyPierre Bourdieu in Algeria at war: Notes on the birth of an engaged

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Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria at warNotes on the birth of an engaged

ethnosociology Tassadit Yacine

cole des Hautes tudes en sciences sociales, Paris, France

Translated by Loc Wacquant and James Ingram

A B S T R A C T Pierre Bourdieus early trajectory is retraced to highlight

the foundational role his fieldwork in colonial Algeria played in his

intellectual development and subsequent sociological theorizing. Plungedwithout forewarning into the midst of a caste society torn by capitalist

development and a brutal war of national liberation, the young

philosopher turned to empirical investigation in order to understand

Algerian society from the inside and to take apart the mechanisms of

imperial rule. This article reconstitutes the proximate academic milieu, the

intellectual signposts, the personal contacts, and the tragic political

conjuncture within which Bourdieus youthful inquiries took shape. These

inquiries, which entailed dangerous fieldwork in regions fought over by

the French military and the guerrillas of the Algerian National Liberation

Front, were facilitated by Bourdieus social and regional dispositions as a

colonized of the interior of France and led him to erase the established

intellectual division of labor between sociology, ethnology, and Oriental

studies. It is in the Algerian crucible, suffused by fear, risk, and ambient

fascism, that an engaged ethnosociology was forged, alive to the

complexity of the real and resistant to theoretical simplification.

Bourdieus first field studies of the uprooting of the Algerian peasantry

and the birth of that countrys urban (sub)proletariat are essential to

understanding the formation of his intellectual dispositions and bring to

light the organic linkage that existed from the outset between hisscientific and political engagements.

graphyCopyright 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)www.sagepublications.com Vol 5(4): 487509[DOI: 10.1177/1466138104050703]

A R T I C L E


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K E Y W O R D S Bourdieu, colonialism, war, dispossession, intellectuals,

engagement, science, politics, Kabylia, Algeria

Algeria occupies a pivotal place in Bourdieus thought and work, such thatit is impossible for a serious analyst to ignore it when seeking to understandhis distinctive intellectual approach (especially his ethnographic vision) andhis core problematics, as well as the Kabyle references that frequently dothis analyses, including those having nothing to do with this region andculture. These references are sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit or evenallusive, but they are omnipresent.1 Thus it behooves the reader or listenerto decode them in order to grasp their deeper meaning. For Pierre Bourdieu,

it goes without saying that his Algerian and Kabyle experience is at the basisof his epistemological position and of the original political perception thatanimates his works and led him, like Durkheim before him, to fuse ethnol-ogy and sociology, and thereby to set off the ongoing scientific revolutionhenceforth associated with his name.

It is only possible to grasp the specificity and originality of Bourdieusthought by situating it within the particular social and political context thatwas the trigger of its unfolding: Algerian society caught in the vise ofcolonization and a war of independence. The aim of this article is not totrace the trajectory of an intellectual immersed in an exotic society but,starting from selected elements of this journey issued from a long work ofrecollection carried out over the past several years by the protagonists ofthe Algerian scene (among them Bourdieu himself), to suggest how thisyouthful field formed and transformed a brilliant young academic from amodest social background in a culturally dominated region of France. Thepresent article relies on published documents from the period as well as aseries of interviews with those who knew and were associated with PierreBourdieu during this formative period and, above all, on continuousintellectual exchange with him over the past three decades.2 We will see

that, thanks to the dispositions of an internally colonized Frenchman, theuprooted young man from Barn acquired an acute awareness of theeffects of external colonization exerted by France on a North Africanpeople dispossessed of their material possessions and collective dignity andsubmitted to an implacable imperial domination. This forced encounterwith a harsh field site and topic at a dramatic historical moment hatchedin Bourdieu a new relationship to the world that led him to question theacademic knowledge and the scholastic posture he had practically masteredbut which remained constitutively foreign to him.

Thus the ethnological detour through the Algerian countryside ledBourdieu to renew contact with his originary peasant culture by integrat-ing it with the cognitive culture he had acquired at the university. From this

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one can understand, first, why Kabylia served him as an enlarging mirrorrendering intelligible the acculturation of the Barn peasants he had grownup amongst, and, second, how the investigations he conducted in his native

Barn shed new light on Kabylia by offering, at the village level, the imageof an accelerated process of uprooting that was operating on the scale ofan entire country on the other side of the Mediterranean. The relationbetween Barn and Kabylia established on the basis of crisscrossing fieldobservations conducted during the same years (195961) led Bourdieu toexamine closely the behavior of the empeasanted peasants of his childhoodvillage of Lesquire and of the uprooted peasants of Aghbala and DjemaSaharidj.

A colonized of the interior discovers the colony of the exterior

French colonization in Algeria was the longest and most destructive in thewhole of North Africa, as shown by comparison with Morocco and Tunisiaunder the French protectorate (Ageron, 1997). This was due to a populationpolicy favoring colonists from the north European and Christians, French,but also Italian, Spanish, Sicilian, Maltese, etc. at the expense of theindigenous, Arab or Berber-speaking, Muslim majority, who were rapidlydispossessed of their land as well as the countrys natural resources (alfa,cork, mines, gas and oil). In order to attract and settle Europeans, thecolonial system relied on systematic discrimination that favored the colonistby granting him economic means and cultural and political guaranteeslegitimating his supposed superiority in matters of language, customs, andideals. Thus, up to the 1950s, there were two electoral colleges in Algeria:one for the Europeans and another for the indigenous, with one Europeanvote being equal to ten indigenous ones.

Colonial Algeria operated on a caste system, that is, a rigid hierarchy ofcultural groups cemented by strict endogamy. The Algerians revolted repeat-

edly against the French hold on their territory (1871, 1877, 1881, 1916,1945); resilient opposition turned into open rejection of the colonial modelwith the general insurrection of 1 November 1954. This insurrectionlaunched a decade of bloody war that pitted a systematic and methodicalmilitary destruction of the Algerian nationalists by French power, on oneside, against fierce resistance and then counterattack by rural guerrillawarfare and urban terrorism, on the other. Between these two forces,initiatives for rapprochement and reconciliation of the two communitieswere initiated by various figures and political groups, but the dominant

colonial minority, which opposed any change and was willing to concedenothing, ended up dragging the country into a spiral of murderous confron-tation culminating in Algerian independence in July 1962.3 This troubled

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period was decisive for a whole generation of French intellectuals, amongwhom it produced a particular awakening of consciousness and politicalmaturity (Le Sueur, 2001). Bourdieus development during this period is not

without interest in this regard, since it moreover allows us to discern theplace and role of ethnology and sociology in this time of war.What happened for this son of Barn of popular origins (his father was

a sharecropper in a small village in the Pyrnes mountains who laterbecame a postal employee) to be diverted from his initial career path uponleaving the Ecole normale suprieure teaching and writing philosophy and to embrace instead a destiny that then appeared very gloomy and, inmany respects, contrary to his own expectations and those of his masters?To answer this question, one must reconstitute the fabric of the intellectual

and political milieu of the era. The years Bourdieu spent in Algeria at warcoincided with those when the socialists of the SFIO were in power in Paris.In 1956 Robert Lacoste was named Resident Minister in Algiers, whereintellectuals well-known among the national academic universe frequentedthe General Government (nicknamed the GG), a highly political but alsocultural location. These included the left Catholic mile Dermenghem, astate archivist and librarian; the illustrious patriot and ethnologistGermaine Tillion, a member of the cabinet of Jacques Soustelle (the anthro-pologist specializing in the Aztecs), who preceded Lacoste as GovernorGeneral; Vincent Monteil, an army officer and scholar of Islam; and LouisMassignon, an Orientalist who was later elected to the Collge de France.

In an open political and military conflict of the colonial type, intellectualautonomy is not to be had: at the University of Algiers there reigned aclimate of extreme tension and overt hostility toward the few partisans ofan Algerian Algeria. Within the local society a cascade of contemptcovered the large majority of the population who fell under the heel of theprivileged caste of colonists: Muslims (whether Arabs or Berbers), Jews,Spaniards, Italians, and Maltese. Sent by a disciplinary decision to do hismilitary service under these circumstances, the young philosophy graduate

found a rigidly hierarchical world that seemed to him like a veritable sociallaboratory:

I left for Algeria while I was in the army. After two hard years during whichit was not possible to do anything, I devoted myself to fieldwork. I began bywriting a book with the purpose of casting light on the drama of the Algerianpeople and also on the colonists, whose situation was no less dramatic,beyond their racism. (Bourdieu, 1986: 38)

Expression beyond the closed framework of colonial institutions in a

time of war pertained to heresy, at least for those who did not reside in themetropole. In Algiers, a veritable climate of intellectual terror hung overresearch circles (Nouschi, 2003; Sprecher, 2003). Despite the risks run even

Ethnography 5(4)490


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in Paris, some academics took brave public stands on the Algerian questionbut without possessing the tools required to disentangle the issues, inparticular the necessary empirical knowledge at ground level.4 How would

the young Bourdieu produce this knowledge when the threat of deathweighed on him as well as on his object as soon as he constituted it assuch?

Bourdieu was 25 when he first set foot on Algerian soil in October 1955.He was first assigned to an air unit in the Chellif Valley, 150 kilometers westof Algiers, as an air force rampant(a crawler, a term used to distinguishground personnel from pilots) with administrative duties, before returningto Algiers thanks to the personal intervention of a member of the Lacostecabinet from Barn, Colonel Ducourneau. Bourdieu was then assigned to

Algiers from 1956, in the documentation and information service of theGeneral Government, where he worked with Jacques Faugres andRollande Garse, until completion of his military service. The GeneralGovernment then had one of the countrys best-stocked libraries. ThereBourdieu avidly read everything written on the colony in view of preparinga first synthetic work on Algeria (Bourdieu, 1958), and also met importantfigures who were well-informed about the country: the nonpareil archivistEmile Dermenghem, author of a painstaking study ofThe Cult of the Saintsin Maghreb Islam (1954), and historian Andr Nouschi, working on hisStudy on the Living Standards of the Populations of Rural Constantine(1961), as well as the researchers of the University of Algiers and SocialSecretariat (a social science research center founded by the Church thatsought to reconcile the Muslim and Christian communities), in particu-lar Henri Sanson (2003). The compulsory passage through this observationpost that the General Government represented, from where he couldembrace and absorb the existing knowledge on a colonial society being tornapart before his eyes, allowed the young academic to perceive the unfold-ing of present history from a new angle: I was struck by the accelerationof the disintegration of this society, he told me in 1997. Direct access to

documentation, publications, and journals, as well as the personal relation-ships he established during those months with local researchers, providedhim with the keys to a first synthetic grasp of the Algerian predicament,even as he knew the country almost only from his readings.

As soon as he finished his service in 1957, Bourdieu joined the Universityof Algiers, where he took up a post as an assistant professor, teaching phil-osophy and sociology while conducting research from 1958 to 1961. Fromthe outset, he mixed statistics and ethnography in a series of studies on thetransformations of the urban and rural worlds, focusing on the genesis of

the subproletariat in shantytowns, the forced displacements of peasantpopulations into resettlement camps at the initiative of the French army,and the functioning of the family and household economy. Rapidly, his



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teaching, research, and proximity to the Algerians especially the smallminority of Algerian intellectuals (a term used in a broad sense here sinceAlgerian society sported an astronomical rate of illiteracy) that emerged

during those years did not fail to attract the attention of elements of thefar-right, who regarded him as a dangerous troublemaker. His friendshipsand his first writings (Bourdieu, 1959a, 1959b, 1960) led to his beingforced, on the advice of a high-ranking officer, abruptly to leave Algeria inMay 1961 at night by military plane lest he risk being assassinated byadvocates ofAlgrie franaise: after the Algiersputsch, his name was on thelist of personalities to be eliminated. Upon landing overnight in Paris, it wasRaymond Aron, who had noticed him during a trip to Algiers as presidentof the baccalaureate jury for Algeria and Tunisia, who enabled Bourdieu to

enter the Sorbonne as his assistant before finding a post the following yearteaching at the University of Lille.5

The intellectual microcosm of Algiers University

How to make the object Algeria exist, to render it visible and intelligiblein the chaos of a war denied and euphemized by colonial ideology underthe term events?6 This was one of the central questions confronting theyoung philosopher and future sociologist, and it explains his decision topursue empirical research to set in relief the disintegration of the structuresof the indigenous society. His position and dispositions as an uprooted intel-lectual a member of the dominant class and culture in view of his dazzlingascent but always shaped by his dominated social and regional origins constituted a decisive advantage for taking apart the mechanisms of colonialdomination at their most destructive, especially since the memory of thesocial and mental upheavals caused by the Second World War was still vividfor the rising intellectuals of his generation.

The intellectual field of the 1950s did not allow the young researcher to

find his place at once. The vast majority of academics produced by coloniz-ation continued to represent the system as the guardians of a colonizingthought verging on fascism (as Bourdieu once put it in a private conver-sation). Free expression was then impossible in this closed and guardedspace even forbidden for those who were foreign to it by their origins asmuch as by their thinking. During this period, the Algiers universitypossessed a quasi-autonomy vis--vis the universities in France, with its ownhierarchies, its local modes of recruitment, its nearly-independent repro-duction (Bourdieu, 2000: 7).

Schematically, two large currents structured the local academic field. Thefirst, of the right, was composed of French Algerians and the French fromFrance (i.e. metropolitans marginalized by the pieds noirs) who favored

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maintaining imperial tutelage. Set against them was a left current, a verysmall minority but more structured and dominated by the communists. Forthe world of left intellectuals was in the grip of the Party, which imposed

its ideas and directives in the colonies just as it did in France (the PCA, theAlgerian Communist Party, was then perceived as a simple appendage ofthe PCF).7 Beginning in 1956, the war reached its peak in the countrysidebefore gradually taking hold of the cities until the socialists in power inParis turned to heavy-handed repression (the French Minister of the Interiorat the time was Franois Mitterrand). French thought in the metropolis,whether of the left or of the right, generally favored prosecution of the war,with the exception of certain currents like the liberals or the left Christiansand certain communists such as Henri Alleg (1957), famous for having

denounced torture in Algeria; Maurice Audin, a mathematician andcommunist activist who disappeared following a round-up by French para-troopers in Algiers; and Fernand Yveton, another communist militantexecuted to set an example (Vidal-Naquet, 1961).

The University of Algiers was dominated by a powerful far-right lobby.It was practically impossible to overtly position oneself outside of the farright bloc, led by those known as the ultras: the soon-to-be OAS represen-tative8 Philippe Marais and Jean Bousquet, a professor of sociologyknown for his quasi-fascist ideas, were the masters of the campus(Bourdieu, 2000). This climate of extreme intolerance accounts, forexample, for Professor Andr Mandouze, a Catholic known for hisengagement in favor of Algerian independence, being expelled from theuniversity for want of having him lynched by his own students, fiercepartisans ofAlgrie franaise. The same attitude prevailed among studentsof this persuasion toward Marcel merit (1951), a historian who hadwritten a highly-regarded book on the Emir Abdelkader (a religious andpolitical leader who resisted French occupation for several years after the1830 conquest): he was hung in effigy bypieds noirs students for havingshown that the schooling rate was higher in Algeria before 1830 than after

colonization, thus disturbing the intellectual comfort of the colonialacademic establishment.

The struggle was fierce between the partisans of continued colonial ruleand their opponents, and this favored Orientalists close to political power,who used this advantage to establish a quasi-monopoly on social scienceresearch on Algeria from the sole fact of knowing Arabic. They consideredmastery of this language as a necessary and sufficientbasis for claimingknowledge of Algerian society. The Marais family provides an example ofArabists, without any specialized training, who reigned over the Algiers

faculty, allocated research topics, and represented what was calledcolonial anthropology (Bourdieu, 2000: 8). The Algiers sociologists andethnologists, most often educated on the job, were almost always Arab or



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Berber linguists, civil administrators, army officers, and clerics. ButBourdieu did not restrict his contacts to the Algiers campus, which wasclosed to new ideas in contrast to earlier periods, especially the late 19th

and early 20th century. The White Fathers, the Jesuits, primary-schoolteachers (indignes said to be evolved), journalists, and students suppliedhim with essential information for developing the intimate knowledge ofAlgerian society that gradually became his. Thus Bourdieu was able todevelop solid intellectual relations with several researchers connected to theChurch, such as Fathers Jean-Marie Dallet and M. Devulder, and otherssituated on the margins of the university, like the geographer JeanDresch, author of an important book on Agrarian Reform in the Maghreb(1963).

In this quest to understand Algerian society, and the cultural practices oflinguistic minorities within it, the young ethnosociologists attention wasdirected equally toward the condition of emergence of Kabyle intellectualswho practiced without knowing it ethnology in the form of ethno-graphic novels. Mouloud Feraoun, a school teacher become novelist,assassinated by the OAS in 1962, was one of the first to read and commenton Bourdieus early texts on Kabylia.9 Malek Ouary, a writer and journalistfor Radio Algiers (a Kabyle station), also served as an informant. Later, thewriter, poet, and Kabyle ethnologist Mouloud Mammeri maintained anintellectual relationship with Bourdieu from 1962 to 1989 (Yacine, forth-coming).10 Along with these intellectuals recognized nationally and acrossthe Mediterranean, there were also spontaneous ethnologists, who,influenced by the works then available (descriptive studies by the WhiteFathers and by military officers), declared themselves researchers by theforce of circumstances. Many of them, like Amar Boulifa, SlimaneRahmani, and Brahim Zellal, gathered important materials for under-standing the traditional social world, materials to which Bourdieu (1980)made extensive reference in The Logic of Practice.

In this situation marked by political tension and the absence of reliable

data on a society in rapid and dramatic transformation, Bourdieu wasforced to conduct his own inquiries by turning to the nodal category ofAlgerian society at the time: the uprooted peasants. The philosophygraduate, who had worked and sacrificed so much to acquire the dominantculture, thus had to renounce the prestigious symbolic capital of philosophyand break with the scholastic vision inculcated by his academic training inorder to render intelligible through empirical observation the material andmoral misery of an entire people. I had to abandon my dear studies to writea book of social service, Bourdieu (2003: 232) explains, speaking of his

first book, Sociologie de lAlgrie. By the same token, he was led to forsakethe position of witness, marked by culpability, to adopt the posture of theengaged analyst. Fieldwork in a country at war gave Bourdieu the

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opportunity and obligation to make ethnology a vital instrument ofsymbolic struggle and not merely an academic discipline deprived of anypolitical function (Bourdieu, 1986: 37).

It was in the Algerian crucible, drenched in fear, suffused by daily risk(bombs, assassinations, round-ups) and ambient fascism (to use JeanSprechers expression), that an original thought was forged, nourished bythe most abstract philosophical debates and yet attuned to the calling of thequotidian, alive to the complexity of the real, and fiercely resistant to theor-etical simplifications. In turning to empirical research, Bourdieu activatedon a scientific plane the political dispositions that had been his since hisyears at the Ecole normale suprieure, where he had been part of a smallleft fringe that battled at once against the right and against the govern-

mental and communist left (Bianco, 2003). These dispositions, far frombeing a handicap, were to be a formidable asset in conducting empiricalwork that would render intelligible the mechanisms of colonial dominationin Algeria before feeding a theory of symbolic power equally applicable todiverse societies.

Anthropology in the service of decolonization

Postwar France saw a renewal of the social sciences and particularly ofanthropology. With Race and History and Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lvi-Strauss (1952, 1955) gave that discipline unprecedented intellectualnobility. This change of status in the hierarchy of disciplines enticed anumber of researchers notably Georges Balandier, Louis Dumont, MichelLeiris, and Jean Pouillon to produce an engaged anthropology that, bydefinition, questioned colonization and the cultural discrimination onwhich it was premised. Many important figures in the French intellectualfield, such as philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Ricur and historiansPierre Vidal-Naquet and Fernand Braudel, also contributed at that time,

in different ways and to different degrees, to breaking down the wallsseparating the different social sciences with regard to the Algerianquestion.

The transformations internal to the intellectual world reinforced thebudding sociologist Bourdieu in his convictions, despite the impossibility ofexpressing himself openly on the colonial question where he was conduct-ing his investigations. For the significant advances in the intellectual field inmetropolitan France were not followed in Algeria, especially in ethnology,whose field of study shrank like heated leather as the war expanded. If

researchers such as Germaine Tillion (1957), Thrse Rivire (1995, anethnologist specializing on the Aurs), Ren Maunier (1930, an ethnologistwriting on the Berber world), or Robert Montagne (1921, a Morocconist)



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had produced distinguished field studies of the Maghreb in earlier years,there was nothing of the kind when Bourdieu made his entry at theUniversity of Algiers. The field of sociology was then dominated by

staunchly conservative figures, like Jean Bousquet (a professor of North-African sociology at the Law School and leader of its extreme-rightmilitants), Philippe Marais (a member of the OAS), and Berber specialistJean Servier (1962). It was in this context marked by rigid political cleav-ages that one must fully appreciate the importance of rigorous works suchas those of Jacques Berque (1955, 1960, 1962), who was a key intellectualbeacon for Bourdieu during the years of his field training.

But, even more than Berque, it is Germaine Tillion, a figure from Germandeportation close to General de Gaulle,11 who attracted Bourdieus

attention for the firmness of her early fieldwork, her closeness to her objectsof study, and her engagement with them, even if the young sociologistimmediately marked his distance from the culturalist approach of theeminent anthropologist:

It seems dangerous to try [with Germaine Tillion, Algeria in 1957] to under-stand all the phenomena of social disintegration observed in Algeria as merephenomena of acculturation. . . . Thus, the major land laws were conceived,by their promoters themselves, as a methodical project of dismantlement ofthe fundamental structures of the traditional economy. A veritable social

surgery that cannot be confused with cultural contagion, a result of merecontact, these measures (mainly the cantonment, the Senate decree of 1863,and the 1873 Warnier Act), undertaken with total lucidity in the short term,no doubt constitute one of the essential causes, if not the essential cause, ofthe disintegration of traditional rural society. (Bourdieu, 1958: 118)

It is in relation to Tillion that the young Bourdieu positioned himselffrom the beginning when he analysed the origins of Algerian under-development, by choosing the very same society, the Chaoua of the

Constantine region (East of Algiers), which had been hitherto perceived asa closed universe whose poverty was attributed solely to cultural factorsand thus without relation to colonial policy. Bourdieu refuted this thesis asearly as 1958 by drawing on the work of Georges Balandier (1951), anAfricanist anthropologist and director of studies at the cole des Hautestudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, well known for his support fordecolonization.

Indeed, as Balandier observes, contact occurred in a particular situation, thecolonial situation [characterized by] the domination of a numerically

minoritarian but sociologically majoritarian society over an indigenous,technologically and materially inferior majority; the distance between thetwo societies that coexist without mixing; economic satellitism; a system of

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rationalizations, more or less tinged with racism, meant to justify theprivileged situation of the Europeans; and, finally, latent or patent tension.If contact between a highly industrialized civilization with a powerful

economy and a non-mechanized civilization with an archaic economy, if, tospeak the language of Tillion, gawky godsends and unconscious misdeeds,could suffice to determine the disintegration of the structures of thetraditional society, it nonetheless remains that, to these perturbations, theinevitable consequence of contact between two civilizations separated by anabyss in the social realm, one must add the upheavals that were deliberatelyand knowingly provoked. (Bourdieu, 1958: 118)

At the dawn of the 1960s, Bourdieu was still only an apprentice soci-ologist, but his first publications Sociologie de lAlgrie (1958), a syntheticwork that appeared in the Que sais-je? series, and two articles publishedby the governments Social Secretariat in a mimeographed document distrib-uted locally already contributed to an important and innovative reflectionon the colonial question. In spite of their scientific object and tone, TheInternal Logic of Traditional Algerian Society and The Clash of Civiliz-ations (Bourdieu, 1959a, 1959b) were published with considerable diffi-culty by the Social Secretariat, according to Father Henri Sanson, thepublication director. From the beginning, Bourdieu established a umbilicalconnection between social science and politics, between civilized and primi-

tive societies, and between the observer and the observed, that constituteda radical epistemological rupture and a real advance for sociology in theclimate of tension caused by far-right pressure within the University ofAlgiers. He also questioned the separation of disciplines that expressed thecolonial hierarchy in the intellectual order: sociology stricto sensu wasrestricted to the study of the societies of Europe and North America, whileethnology concerned itself with so-called primitive peoples and Orientalismwith peoples with universal religions but non-European languages.

One need not say how arbitrary and absurd this classification was. Be thatas it may, being about Kabyle society, my work found itself in a ratherstrange position, in a way caught between Orientalism and ethnology.(Bourdieu, 2000: 8)

This will to abolish the hierarchical and racializing division between soci-ology and ethnology marked the writing ofSociologie de lAlgrie and ledto the book being noticed in foreign academic circles and by the fewAlgerian intellectuals, who readily perceived its political import. It earnedBourdieu the acerbic criticism of his colleagues at the University of Algiers.

In an undated letter to the historian Andr Nouschi, then in the metropole,which we can date at the end of 1958 or the beginning of 1959, the youngapprentice sociologist wrote:



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Will I surprise you by saying that Ive heard a thousand venomous andrancorous compliments? You will guess that the specialists . . . of Algiersdid not spare perfidious and syrupy allusions. . . . They quickly developed a

unique doctrine . . . about my little book: bookish, theoretical (what vocabu-lary!), lacking in sustained experience of Algerian realities, this note on theEuropeans, etc. In short, this little metropolitan who meddles in talkingabout Algeria when so many old specialists, etc., etc. One thinks of thegardeners dog who doesnt eat the lettuces and will not let them be eaten.

The discontent of the Algiers academics derived from the fact that theyoung metropolitan professor disrupted the local intellectual game byquestioning their conception of anthropology founded on cultural discrimi-nation. With Lvi-Strauss, Bourdieu affirmed the principle of the equality

of cultures and cast doubt on the naturalizing vision by which the coloniz-ers affirmed their superiority. Bourdieu described the difference between thetwo worlds, European and Algerian, not as an inherent and eternal dispar-ity, but as the product of a clash of civilizations caused by colonization.The phenomena of social, economic, and psychological disintegrationobserved within the traditional society had to be grasped as the ineluctableconsequence of an interaction of external forces (the irruption ofWestern civilization) and internal force (the original structures of theindigenous civilization) (Bourdieu, 1959b: 54).

From his first publications, Bourdieu thus pointed to the causative roleof colonization, the source of the main economic and social evils visitedupon Algeria, without pronouncing himself on the nationalist claim.Nonetheless, a resolutely engaged orientation against the war and in favorof independence is clearly evident in his youthful essays War and SocialMutation in Algeria, Revolution within the Revolution, and From Revol-utionary War to Revolution, three texts published in Etudes mditer-ranennes, Esprit, and LAlgrie de demain, a collected volume edited byFranois Perroux, professor at the Collge de France (Bourdieu, 1960,

1961, 1962b) that established him at once as a significant new voice in thescientific-political debate on decolonizing North Africa.Returning to this first research allows us to draw out two axes that

organize this segment of Bourdieus overall work. The first axis concernsthe present Algerian society (what interests us here) in the throes of war andof the upheaval of all orders that accompanied it, which runs through thebooks Work and Workers in Algeria and The Uprooting(Bourdieu et al.,1963, Bourdieu and Sayad, 1964) and extends to the articles of the early1960s that accompanied their publication. The second is devoted to a laterand more pointed analysis of the social and symbolic structures oftraditional Kabyle society, treated as an ethnological laboratory from whichBourdieu endeavors to extract the anthropological foundations of the

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Mediterranean mythical-religious system but also the bases of his generaltheory of the practice of domination (Bourdieu, 1972, 1980).

For the historian of the social sciences and of the tradition of field

research in particular, the interest in these two books and of their earlysketches12 lies in allowing us to grasp, on the one hand, a scientific modusoperandi and, on the other, the radicality characteristic of a work andpolitical action (Bianco, 2003). For Bourdieu, efficacy in the defense of theAlgerian cause could only come from a real scientific investment. Under thepen of this witness of history, the war appears as a magnifying glass reveal-ing the deep structures of a national body in convulsions and enables theanalyst to renew ethnology by cutting its umbilical cord with the coloniz-ation and racism that both sustained and shackled it then. In Bourdieus

hands, ethnosociology served as an instrument for rehabilitating peasantcultures, which, in the Algerian context, constituted a symbolic revolutionthat dismissed with one and the same stroke colonial fantasies and the revol-utionary propaganda of the emerging Algerian elites and their intellectualallies in Western countries. Bourdieus attitude diverged from the discourseof nationalist leaders in that its goal was not to encourage this new elite inits unconscious project of destruction of its own culture but to help themperceive the cultural contradictions at the heart of their project of nationalconstruction. His own cultural uprooting is at the origin of the special atten-tion that Bourdieu accorded to the least legitimate objects of study in theindigenous tradition, such as rituals:

I would never have come to study ritual traditions if the same intention ofrehabilitation that had led me first to exclude rituals from the universe oflegitimate objects and to distrust all the works that gave it a place had notpushed me, from 1958 on, to try to tear it from phony primitivist solicitudeand to attack, to its last defenses, the racist contempt that, through the shameof self it manages to instill on its very victims, contributes to prohibiting themfrom knowing and recognizing their own culture. Indeed, no matter how

great the effect of respectability and encouragement that can be produced,more unconsciously than consciously, by the fact that a problem or methodcomes to be constituted as highly legitimate in the scientific field, it could notmake one overlook the incongruity, even the absurdity, of fieldwork on ritualpractices carried out in the tragic circumstance of the war. (Bourdieu,1980: 10)

How to tickle the snake in its hole

With the outbreak of the war, the violence that had bathed Algerian colonialsociety from its beginning became open and declared, especially in the



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countryside, where, in response to the 1956 insurrection, the armyconducted sweeps and mass arrests as well as aerial bombardments. In1957, the violence spread to the hearts of the urban centers, as attested by

the famous battle of Algiers, with the result that terrorism and repressiondominated the lives of the countrys urban population. It was in this climateof horror and dread that Bourdieu conducted two large field studies, theone devoted to the emergence of labor in the city, Work and Workers inAlgeria (Bourdieu et al., 1963), the other to the upheavals of the traditionalpeasant society caused by the establishment of resettlement centers at thebehest of the French military, under the title The Uprooting(Bourdieu andSayad, 1964; see also Cornaton, 1998; Rocard, 2001).

Conceived as the extension ofThe Algerians and his first articles, these

two investigations constitute major contributions to an anthropology ofpeasant wars and a dying colonialism (Wolf, 1971; Gosnell, 2002). Theyare also pillars of Bourdieus Algerian uvre; yet they remain little known,even among francophone scholars. Though distinct, these two books comefrom the same period, 195961 for the first and 19591960 for the second,and partake of a single research program, since the study of work was alsocarried out in the resettlement camps (Bourdieu et al., 1963: 13).13 Under-taken at the request of ARDES (the Association for Demographic Economicand Society Research) and financed by the Algerian Development Fund,these two studies both resort to statistics, charts, and documents as well asextended interviews, direct observation, and photography.14 For the firsttime, Algerian students worked with a research team directed by Europeans.Miss Azi, Mr Azi, Sedouk Lahmer, Ahmed Misraoui, Mahfoud Nechem,Titah and Zekkal Marie-Aime Hlie, Raymond Hlie, Raymond Cipolin,and Samuel Guedj participated in the first field study on work; AbdelmalekSayad, Alain Accardo, Trad and Moulah Hnine joined some of them forthe resettlement camp study.15

Having already perceived the weight of cultural factors in the operationof the economy (Bourdieu, 1958, 1959b), Bourdieu had no difficulty

approaching the unemployed confronted with the harsh law of marketcapitalism in the cities and shantytowns in order to grasp the distress thatanimated this floating population whose traditional economic dispositionswere deeply at odds with the demands of the monetary economy and whofound refuge in the despair of tradition (Bourdieu, 1979). Ground-levelknowledge of the urban world and underworld enabled Bourdieu touncover the genesis of the Algerian subproletariat and of its malaise.Disoriented, maladapted, caught between heaven and earth, the empeas-anted peasant (i.e., attached to the land and its values) suffers from aban-

doning his ancestral culture and his inability to face up to the exigenciesof a rationalized capitalist culture that remains inscrutable for want ofhaving the needed mental tools. Bourdieu discovered in the course of this

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field study that it is not possible to reduce economic agents to merebearers of objective structures; on the contrary, it is necessary to poseempirically and theoretically the question of the genesis of economic

dispositions and of the economic and social conditions of this genesis(Bourdieu, 1979: 7, 2000).Although it was completed during this period, due to what was then-

judged to be its subversive content, The Uprootingwas published only aftera delay, in 1964, that is, two years after Algerian independence. But thisfirst field study provided Bourdieu with an opportunity to meet, minglewith, and interview displaced populations in resettlement centers incollaboration with Abdelmalek Sayad. To carry out direct observation inthe regions hit hardest by the war (Collo, Kabylia, Ouarsenis) was a chal-

lenge. Bourdieu met it in a dogged effort, as the Kabyles say, to tickle thesnake in its hole, braving the converging injunctions of the French militaryand the guerrillas of the FLN who battled for control over these territories.An eyewitness of the horrors of war, the sociologist became through theforce of historical circumstance this messenger for whom speaking the truthhic et nunc constitutes a vital mission. This could not but accelerate thescientific maturation of the young ethno-sociologist:

There is no question that the exceptional, extraordinarily difficult (anddangerous) conditions under which I had to work could not fail to sharpen

my vision through the ceaseless vigilance that they imposed. The verypractical problems that carrying out such field research continually posed,often in a quite dramatic way, forced one to engage in a continuous reflec-tion on the reasons and the raisons dtre of the study, on the motives andintentions of the researcher, on all these questions that positivist methodol-ogy spontaneously takes as resolved. (Bourdieu, 2000: 9)

The close and conjoint reading ofWork and Workers in Algeria and TheUprootingenables one to grasp the germinal role that field observation ofthe transformations of the colonial society of Algeria under the extreme

conditions of a war of national liberation played in shaping not onlyBourdieus youthful writings, but also his durable scientific dispositions.They bring to light the plinth of his inseparably scientific and politicalengagements and set the whole of his work in a new light.

Notes

1 The connections between Kabyle and Barnais society and the research

themes related to Algeria and France are particularly emphasized in theessays collected in Practical Reasons. Thus, concerning the idea of symboliceconomy, Bourdieu (1998[1994]: 98) explains:



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The question I am going to examine is one that I have not ceased askingfrom my first ethnological works on the Kabyle to my more recent researchon the world of art and, more precisely, on the functioning of artistic patron-

age in modern societies. I would like to show that, with the same instru-ments, one can analyze phenomena as different as exchanges of honor in aprecapitalist society, or, in societies like our own, the action of foundationssuch as the Ford Foundation or the Fondation de France, exchanges betweengenerations within a family, transactions on the markets of cultural orreligious goods, and so forth.

2 It suffices here to say that Pierre Bourdieu played a decisive role in my ownintellectual development. But I can also not avoid acknowledging the force

of the close relationship with Abdelmalek Sayad, one of Bourdieus firststudents in Algiers, who later became a long-term collaborator and leadingsociologist of immigration (cf. Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2000), and withMouloud Mammeri, a novelist and researcher on the Kabyle world, whowas encouraged by Bourdieu to speak up in France, especially after 1983,when Algeria prohibited all speech from the Berbers (see Mammeri andBourdieu, 1978 ; Bourdieu, 1992).

3 One will find a chronological sketch of the main political and cultural eventsof this period in the appendix. For a history of the war, see Horne (1978),Droz and Lever (1982), and the essays gathered in Harbi and Stora (2004).

4 I was struck by the gulf between the positions of French intellectualsconcerning this war and its end and what I experienced in the army as wellas with the embittered pieds noirs, the coups dtat, the insurrections bylower-class whites, the inevitable turn to de Gaulle, etc. (Bourdieu, 1986:40).

5 Aron had also helped anthropologist Jean Cuisenier, originally establishedin Tunisia, who later became Lvi-Strausss assistant at the Collge deFrance.

6 Officially, there was no Algerian War and France does not recognize the

veterans of this war only soldiers and civilians who experienced theevents.

7 For a description of the extraordinary hold of the French Communist Partyon intellectual life in France in the postwar decades, read Boschetti (1988).

8 The OAS (Organisation Arme Secrte) was a conspiratorial faction of theFrench army in Algeria founded to sow terror in order to force the centralgovernment to go back on its agreements with the Algerian LiberationFront in favor of independence.

9 See Bourdieus evocation of Feraoun in his preface to Le Sueurs (2001)

book on intellectuals during the Algerian war.10 After independence, Mammeri searched for the instruments of objectiva-

tion necessary to analyse the evolution of Kabyle society within the

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Algerian nation. He was to play a key role in the development of fieldworkin North Africa over the ensuing two decades. His relations with Bourdieuare well illustrated by their dialogue on oral poetry in Kabylia (Mammeri

and Bourdieu, 1978 translated in this issue).11 When Bourdieu arrived in Algeria, Germaine Tillion was already a

major intellectual and social figure. A student of Marcel Mauss, she hadconducted extensive fieldwork among the Chaoua of the Aursmontains from 1936 to 1940. She was also a founder of the FrenchResistance network of the Muse de lHomme and survived deportationto the death camp of Ravensbrck. In 1955 she returned to Algeria tocreate centers of social help dedicated to fighting poverty and illiteracy.During the Algerian war, she was involved with her friend Albert

Camus in public campaigns against torture by the French army, andlater led campaigns against the death penalty and for prisoners rights(see Tillion, 2001).

12 This expression is Bourdieus, who always considered the state of research at the time of publication as a draft (or, according to the consecratedexpression, a work in progress calling for subsequent revision and amplifi-cation). Whence his obstinacy in returning to the same subjects and some-times earlier writings in order to refine his thinking by applying newanalytical instruments or shedding new comparative light on the empiricaldata (Delsaut and Rivire, 2002).

13 Bourdieu did not make a purely self-directed decision to study employmentin Algeria. The opportunity to collaborate with a group of statisticians inthe capacity of sociologist was offered to him by the ARDES, through themediation of Jacques Breil, a left Catholic in charge of statistics in Algeriawho had worked with Bourdieu on underdevelopment in the colony(Bourdieu, 1959a). Breil was among those who facilitated field research atthe administrative level during this troubled period.

14 During this period, Bourdieu took over a thousand photographs whichconstitute a veritable visual testimony of the transformations that were

shaking and shaping Algerian society.15 One of these students, Moula Henine, was murdered by the OAS in 1961.

Le Dracinementis dedicated to him.

References

Ageron, Charles-Robert (1997) La Guerre dAlgrie et les Algriens. Paris:Armand Colin.

Alleg, Henri (1957) La Question. Paris: Editions de Minuit.Balandier, Georges (1951) La situation coloniale, Cahiers Internationaux de

Sociologie 11: 4479.



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Berque, Jacques (1955) Structures sociales dans le Haut-Atlas. Paris: PressesUniversitaires de France.

Berque, Jacques (1960) Les Arabes dhier demain. Paris: Editions de Minuit.

[Trans. The Arabs: Their History and Future. London: Faber and Faber,1964.]

Berque, Jacques (1962) Le Maghreb entre deux guerres. Paris: Seuil. [Trans.French North Africa: The Maghrib Between Two World Wars. London:Faber, 1967.]

Bianco, Lucien (2003) Nous navions jamais vu le monde, Awal27/28, Specialissue on Lautre Bourdieu: 26777.

Boschetti, Anna (1988[1985]) The Intellectual Enterprise: Sartre and LesTemps Modernes. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1958) Sociologie de lAlgrie. Paris: Presses Universitaires deFrance. [Trans. The Algerians (preface by Raymond Aron). Boston, PA:Beacon Press.]

Bourdieu, Pierre (1959a) Logique interne de la socit algrienne tradition-nelle, in Le Sous-dveloppement, pp. 4051. Algiers: Secrtariat Social.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1959b) Le Choc des civilisations, in Le Sous-dveloppement,pp. 5264. Algiers: Secrtariat Social.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1960) Guerre et mutation sociale en Algrie, tudes mditer-ranennes 7 (Spring): 2537.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1961) Rvolution dans la rvolution, Esprit 1 (Spring):2740.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1962a) Clibat et condition paysanne, tudes rurales 56(April): 32136.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1962b) De la guerre rvolutionnaire la rvolution, inFranois Perroux (ed.) LAlgrie de demain, pp. 513. Paris: Presses Univer-sitaires de France.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1972) Esquisse dune thorie de la pratique. Geneva: Droz.[Trans. Outline of a Theory of Practice, rev. and extended edn. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1977.]

Bourdieu, Pierre (1979[1977]) Algeria 60. Economic Structures and TemporalStructures. Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press and Editionsde la Maison des Sciences de lHomme.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1980) Le Sens pratique. Paris: Editions de Minuit. [Trans.Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity, 1990.]

Bourdieu, Pierre (1986) The Struggle for Symbolic Order: An Interview withPierre Bourdieu, Theory, Culture and Society 3(3): 3751.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1992) La rappropriation de la culture renie, in TassaditYacine (ed.) Amour, phantasmes et socit en Afrique du Nord et au Sahara,

pp. 1722. Paris: LHarmattan.Bourdieu, Pierre (1998[1994]) Practical Reasons: On the Theory of Action.

Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Bourdieu, Pierre (1998) Lodysse de la rappropriation, Awal Revue dtudesberbres 18 (November): 56. [Eng. trans. in this issue].

Bourdieu, Pierre (2000) Entre amis, Awal21: 510.

Bourdieu, Pierre (2003) Entretien avec Hafid Adnani et Tassadit Yacine, Awal27/28, Special issue on Lautre Bourdieu: 22947.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Abdelmalek Sayad (1964) Le Dracinement. La crise delagriculture traditionnelle en Algrie. Paris: Editions de Minuit.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Loc Wacquant (2000) The Organic Ethnologist ofAlgerian Migration, Ethnography 12 (Fall): 173182.

Bourdieu, Pierre, Alain Darbel, Jean-Paul Rivet and Claude Seibel (1963)Travail et travailleurs en Algrie. Paris and The Hague: Mouton and Co.

Cornaton, Michel (1998) Les Camps de regroupements et la guerre dAlgrie.

Paris: LHarmattan.Delsaut, Yvette and Marie-Christine Rivire (2002) Bibliographie de PierreBourdieu. Pantin: Le Temps des Cerises.

Dermenghem, mile (1954) Le Culte des saints dans lislam maghrbin. Paris:Gallimard.

Dresch, Jean (1963) Rforme agraire au Maghreb. Paris: Maspro.Droz, Bernard and Evelyne Lever (1982) Histoire de la guerre dAlgrie

(19541962). Paris: Seuil.merit, Marcel (1951) LAlgrie lpoque dAbd-el-Kader. Paris: Editions

Larose.Gosnell, Jonathan (2002) The Politics of Frenchness in Colonial Algeria,

19301954. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press.Harbi, Mohammed and Benjamin Stora (eds) (2004) La Guerre dAlgrie,

19541962, la fin de lamnsie. Paris: Laffont.Horne, Alistair (1978) A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 19541962. New York:

Viking.Le Sueur, James D. (2001) Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during

the Decolonization of Algeria. Preface by Pierre Bourdieu. Philadelphia, PA:University of Pennsylvania Press.

Lvi-Strauss, Claude (1952) Race and History. Paris: UNESCO.Lvi-Strauss, Claude (1955) Tristes Tropiques. Paris: Plon. [New York: Modern

Library, 1997.]Maunier, Ren (1930) Mlanges de sociologie nord-africaine. Paris: Alcan.Mammeri, Mouloud and Pierre Bourdieu (1978) Dialogue sur la posie orale

en Kabylie, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 23 (September):5166. [English trans. in this issue.]

Montagne, Robert (1921) Note sur la kasbah de Mehdiya. Rabat: Larose.Nouschi, Andr (1961) Enqute sur le niveau de vie des populations rurales

constantinoises. Paris and Tunis: Presses Universitaires de France.Nouschi, Andr (2003) Autour de Sociologie de lAlgrie , Awal 27/28,

Special issue on Lautre Bourdieu: 2935.



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Rivire, Thrse (1995) Aurs-Algrie, 19351936: Photographies. Paris:Editions de la Maison des Sciences de lHomme.

Rocard, Michel (2001) Rapport sur les centres de regroupement. Paris: Les

Mille et une nuits.Sanson, Henri (2003) Ctait un esprit curieux, Awal27/28, Special issue on

Lautre Bourdieu: 27986.Servier, Jean (1962) Les Portes de lanne. Paris: Robert Laffont.Sprecher, Jean (2003) Il se sentait bien avec nous, Awal27/28, Special issue

on Lautre Bourdieu: 295305.Tillion, Germaine (1957) LAlgrie en 1957. Paris: Editions de Minuit. [Algeria:

The Realities. New York: Knopf, 1959.]Tillion, Germaine (2001) Il tait une fois lethnographie. Paris: Seuil.

Vidal-Naquet, Pierre (1961) La Raison dtat. Paris: Editions de Minuit.Wolf, Eric (1971) Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper.Yacine, Tassadit (forthcoming) Pierre Bourdieu asmusnaw kabyle, in Pierre

Bourdieu, Dialogues sur la Kabylie.

Chronological highlights of Algerian colonial history

1830: French troops land at the beach of Sidi-Ferruch with 103 warships.

1832: The Emir Abdelkader organizes resistance to the French invasionin the Oran region.

1837: Treatise of Tafna, whereby Abdelkader recognizes French ruleand is granted control over the western and central regions ofAlgeria.

1840: General Bugeaud launches the policy of settlement with hissoldier ploughers.

18445: Ordinances confiscating land from native Algerians. Frenchtroops reach 108,000.

1847: General Bugeaud occupies Lower Kabylia.1848: Deportation of the Republicans to Algeria; volunteer settlers

(from the Paris and Lyon region) are given 10 hectares and ahouse.

1857: With the occupation of Higher Kabylia by Randon, Kabylia isunder French rule.

18712: Bachagha Mokrani insurrection in Kabylia.18771912: Insurrection of the Touaregs of the Hoggar led by Cheikh Amoud

Ben Mokhtar.

1916: Unrest in the Aurs.1919: The 1915 Clmenceau Law grants French citizenship to a small

number of Algerians recognized as pro-France.

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1927: Created in Paris the previous year, the North-African Star (toilenord-africaine) demands Algerian independence. Ferhat AbbassFederation of Elected Indigenous claims equal rights and duties

for all the colonys inhabitants.1930: Grandiose celebrations for the Centennial of the Conquest in the

presence of the French President.1942: British and American troops land in Algiers.1943: Ferhat Abbas publishes the Manifesto of the Algerian People,

demanding that the Allies recognize the equality of the Europeanand Muslim communities of Algeria.

1945: 8 May: on the day of Allied Victory, popular demonstrations inStif, Guelma, and Kherrata are brutally repressed, resulting in

45,000 dead.1946: Ferhat Abbas founds the Union Dmocratique du ManifesteAlgrien (UDMA).Emmanuel Robls brings together Algerian intellectuals of alltendencies in his journal La Forge.

1954: Night of 31 October: launch of the national insurrection. TheNational Liberal Front (FLN) is founded in Cairo.

1955: The disintegration of the Algerian situation leads to a politicalcrisis in France.1 April: Declaration of a state of emergency in the colony inresponse to an increase in nationalist attacks.

1956: 22 January: Albert Camus speaks in favor of a cease-fire.March: Formation of the Guy Mollet government and parlia-mentary vote granting it special powers to respond to theAlgerian events.August: the FLN Congress at the Soummam ushers in theformation of a National Council of the Algerian Revolution(CNRA).

1957: Series of attacks in Algiers. French paratroopers react violently.

Arbitrary arrests, torture, and summary executions begin to bedenounced in the metropole.

1958: 13 May: a French-Algerian crowd occupies the Palace of Govern-ment. Creation of a Committee of Public Safety.10 September: creation of a Provisional Government of theAlgerian Republic (GPRA), with Ferhat Abbas as President.

1959: Autumn: the GRPA declares itself ready to negotiate. De Gaullepromises a referendum on self-determination, which is opposedby the partisans of French Algeria. The vote on a motion in favor

of Algerian independence is avoided at the United Nations.1960: 24 January to 2 February: the pro-France Ultras set up barri-

cades at the tunnel of the University of Algiers.



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June: the French government opens serious negotiations with thenationalist insurgents in Melun.December: De Gaulle visits Algiers; large-scale demonstration of

the Muslim population triggers mass shootings by the Frenchparatroopers.

1961: January: referendum on self-determination.Creation of the Organization of the Secret Army (OAS), a pro-French resistance organization led by generals Challe, Jouhaud,Zeller and Salan, leading to the Putsch of the Generals (April).

1962: 15 March: the OAS assassinates Mouloud Feraoun.18 March: signature of the vian agreements, followed by acease-fire declaration.

1 July: Referendum on Algerian independence (99.7% in favor).5 July: Proclamation of Algerian independence.

Key cultural works of the period on Algeria

Camus, Albert (1942) Ltranger. Paris: Gallimard. [Trans. The Stranger. NewYork: Knopf, 1946.]

Camus, Albert (1947) La Peste. Paris: Gallimard. [The Plague. New York:Knopf, 1948.]

Camus, Albert (1951) LHomme rvolt. Paris: Gallimard. [Trans. The Rebel.New York: Knopf, 1956.]

Fanon, Franz (1952) Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil. [Trans. BlackSkin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 1968.]

Mammeri, Mouloud (1952) La Colline oublie. Paris: Plon.Dib, Mohammed (1952) La Grande Maison. Paris: Seuil.Dib, Mohammed (1954) LIncendie. Paris: Seuil.Fraoun, Mouloud (1954) Le Fils du pauvre. Paris: Seuil.Yacine, Kateb (1956) Nedjma. Paris: Seuil.

Alleg, Henri (1957) La Question. Paris: Editions de Minuit.Tillion, Germaine (1957) LAlgrie en 1957. Paris: Minuit.Bourdieu, Pierre (1958) Sociologie de lAlgrie. Paris: PUF, rev. and expanded

1961. [Trans. The Algerians (preface by Raymond Aron). Boston: BeaconPress, 1962.].

Plgri, Jean (1959) Les Oliviers de la justice. Paris: Gallimard.Fanon, Franz (1961) Les Damns de la terre. Paris. [Trans. The Wretched of

the Earth. New York: Grove, 1963.]

TASSADIT YACINE is Matre de confrence and Researcher atthe Laboratoire danthropologie sociale at the cole des hautestudes en sciences sociales, Paris, as well as a member of the

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Instituto Orientale de Napoli. She is the Editor ofAwal, the journalof Berber studies founded by Mouloud Mammeri with thesponsorship of Pierre Bourdieu. Her research deals with Berber

culture and society, with a focus on oral poetry and history. She isthe author of Posie berbre et identit (1987), LIzli ou lamourchant en kabyle (1988), Les Voleurs de feu. Elments duneanthropologie sociale et culturelle de lAlgrie (1992), and Chacalou la ruse des domins. Aux origines du malaise culturel des

intellectuels algriens (2001). She is currently at work on ananthropology of gendered emotions and on a volume of the earlywritings of Pierre Bourdieu on Algeria.Address: EHESS, 54 BdRaspail, 75006 Paris, France. [email: yacine@msh-paris]


Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria at War Notes on the Birth of an Engaged Ethnosociology

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