SUMMARY:

The article by Tassadit Yacine explores the impact of Algeria on the formation of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological and political views. Bourdieu arrived in Algeria in 1955 as a soldier after graduation from the Ecole Normale Superieur. After his service he began teaching philosophy at the University of Algiers in 1958. Bourdieu became a vocal critic of the colonial war in Algeria while pursuing research into the sociology of transformation of Algerian rural society. Bourdieu’s anti-colonial and anti-war views led to his deportation from Algeria.
According to Yacine, the Algerian experience was formative for Bourdieu. Studying the colonial society, Bourdieu acquired intimate knowledge of power relations and social stratifications, which he later applied in his studies of French rural societies, and French academic and popular cultures. It was in Algeria that Bourdieu developed his “social chirurgic method,” and established an attentive approach not just to conventional, direct violence, but also to predominantly covert forms of domination through language, culture, and different forms of symbolic capital. To a large extent this happened during the process of Bourdieu’s intensive socialization into the milieu of Algerian intellectuals, many of whom provided Bourdieu with detailed information on Algerian society.
In Algeria, Bourdieu’s search for a scholarly identity coincided with the search for a political indentity, and both aspects imbued the sociologist with a methodology attentive to issues of domination. At the same time, his personal background – his origins in provincial France and his knowledge of cultural differences submerged in the French national state – prepared Bourdieu for understanding inequalities in Algeria.