Bourdieu’s Algerian crossroads

Abstract

The books reviewed in this essay are made up of well-chosen selections of Bourdieu’s textual and photographic portrayals of Algerian society in the late 1950s. As such, they respond to a renewed scholarly interest in his decisive years of ‘ethnosociological’ apprenticeship. This essay explores, first, how Bourdieu’s experiences in war-torn Algeria have influenced the theoretical and methodological tenets of his mature sociology. Second, it shows that Bourdieu’s early writings on the historical disruptions he witnessed there display themes and perspectives that depart from the most common images of his work. The practical assent to domination characteristic of ‘symbolic violence’ gives way to open resistance, the ‘ontological complicity’ between subjective dispositions and objective circumstances gives way to their historical mismatch, and the principled suspicion towards lay agents’ representations gives way to a high analytical reliance on long personal testimonies. Connecting these aspects of Bourdieu’s sociological investigations to his use of photography, the third section of the essay surveys the multiple functions that the practice of taking pictures performed in his ethnographic forays into Algerian communities. Finally, the essay presents Bourdieu’s connection between motifs of ‘modernization theory’ and theories of (neo)colonialism as one of the first syntheses in his intellectual career.