14 - 20 February 2002
Issue No.573
|
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 February 2002 Issue No.573 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Sociologist of Algeria
Pierre Bourdieu developed his notion of "symbolic domination" -- the dominated's internalisation of the dominant point of view -- through his study of the social structure of colonial Algeria in the 1950s, later enlarging it to take in the other forms of domination, for example that of women in La Domination masculine (Masculine Domination, 1998). Best-known perhaps for his work in France, Bourdieu started his career in Algeria, writing, in Sociologie de l'Algérie (1958), of which a translated extract is given below, a description of that country before its independence from France."The characteristic lifestyle of the Europeans of Algeria was formed during the period of viticulture, during which the country's characteristic rural landscape and the social and regional characteristics of the countryside took on their present form. The first settlers left for Algeria essentially in order to live better there than they could in France itself. With the success of the wine industry in that country, these pioneers, who had come to the new country with the technically minded attitudes of their original society, but also to extend their personal property, were joined by a new group of capitalist speculators who spent their capital both on extending their estates and on developing the means of production used on them.
"Due to the demands of the climate, the colonisers were constrained to work swiftly and to employ complicated technology. This implied financial investment, and, therefore, generalised borrowing to buy machines. True for those growing cereals, this was even more the case for those involved in viticulture ... the colonists, uprooted to a certain extent from their own environment, and often isolated and obliged to create their property and surroundings from scratch, developed a realist spirit more attached to material values than to spiritual reflection. At the same time, a new landscape was coming into being, marked by fields with precise limits and regular furrows and worked by machine, as well as by huge storage silos and vinification centres. At the centre of all this was the colonist's house, witness to this complete taking of possession of the landscape, of this will to arrive carrying one's own mindset and to impose this on the new landscape without the slightest concession to the traditional order.
"Something similar took place in the colonised villages with their regular streets and in the big cities, which were then beginning to take their present form. Slowly, the colonists created an environment that reflected back their own image, and this was the negation of the previous environment in which the colonised had until then felt at home. Now, following this reversal of fortunes, he had ended up looking like a foreigner in his own land.
"To the capitalist speculators, the industrialists of agriculture, must be added the next generation, which had been born into this world and was often motivated by the spirit of the parvenu anxious to defend his privileges. Throughout the history of European colonisation in Algeria, the Arabs were kept at a distance, the Europeans being more and more separated from them by thousands of obstacles. The development of images of Arabs in literature and painting, for example, shows how a romantic and exotic depiction gave way to caricature and ignorance. The Europeans knew less and less about the native populations, a sort of de facto segregation appearing founded on differences in lifestyle and on regional economic segregation. The Arabs were no longer seen only in terms of their economic relationship with the Europeans; relations from now on were always poisoned by paternalism and racism. As colonisation became more secure in the country, Algerian society withdrew, giving the colonist an additional reason to avoid it and to hold it in contempt. Concentrated in the big cities, in the European areas of European cities, the European population lived in its own world, finding every justification in a complacent press for its ignorance and indifference to the plight and revolts of the Algerians.
"However, in the same way that the Europeans distanced themselves from the Arabs they also distanced themselves from France, and not only from the "ideal France" whose values appeared naively opposed to the ruling colonial system, but also to the "French French", who were always suspected of liberalism. They played the role of scapegoat every time it was found necessary to explain the lack of fit between the real and the imaginary universe in which this society lived.
"Considered synchronically, colonial society is a kind of system of castes composed of two distinct communities. Belonging to one or other of these is determined by birth and by physical type, as well as by clothing or family name. Being born in the higher caste automatically gives privileges, and these tend to lead, among those who benefit from them, to feelings of natural superiority. The separation of the castes is shown by the rarity of intermarriage and of exchanges of any sort between them, even of gifts or meals. The two societies are separated by a system of superior and inferior and by a host of invisible barriers, whether institutional or spontaneously arising, meaning that any connection between members of the two castes is kept to a minimum by a sort of tacit agreement between them.
"De facto racial segregation is the result, and racism functions to rationalise this situation, making it appear inevitable. Even the system's paternalism is the privileged behaviour of the superior, in that the system itself is not questioned, and each person stays in his place. The European society, a "minority majority" in social, economic and political terms, attempts, thanks to racist ideology, to change its privileges into rights, in other words to freeze each society just as it is, the dominant dominating and the dominated continuing to be dominated. Probably status-hierarchy is not directly superimposable on the hierarchy of the two societies, each caste itself being further divided into classes. But if each caste contains a hierarchy of statuses, if it is permissible for an individual in the dominated caste to climb the status ladder in his group, it is nevertheless practically impossible to break the boundary that separate the two communities. Caste consciousness suffocates class-consciousness, as can be seen in the attitudes of the European lower classes in Algeria, class consciousness and political life being diametrically opposed.
"However, the colonial system can only function as it does if the dominated society accepts the entirely negative "essence" given it by the dominating (the Arab is uneducable, feckless, etc). Thus, what this society gains in logic it loses in fact, for, in taking the system to its logical conclusion it also prepares itself for its own disappearance ... since it neutralises all attempts at reform, either by turning them immediately to the advantage of the Europeans or by negating their actual effectiveness."
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page