Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria at war

Abstract

Pierre Bourdieu’s early trajectory is retraced to highlight the foundational role his fieldwork in colonial Algeria played in his intellectual development and subsequent sociological theorizing. Plunged without 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 Bourdieu’s 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 Bourdieu’s 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. Bourdieu’s first field studies of the uprooting of the Algerian peasantry and the birth of that country’s 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 his scientific and political engagements.

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