Bourdieu and Algeria: an elective affinity
A year after the death of Pierre Bourdieu, a Paris exhibition has put the French sociologist's photographic work in Algeria on show for the first time, writes David Tresilian
Part of "the Year of Algeria in France", a series of events taking Algeria as a theme happening across France throughout 2003, Images d'Algérie, an exhibition of photographs taken by the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu that closed at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris last week, cast new light on the early and close relationship between Bourdieu and Algeria, the country in which he conducted his first sociological fieldwork, and shows Bourdieu's photographs of the country to the public for the first time.
Arriving in Algiers in 1958 fresh from philosophical studies in Paris, Bourdieu was confronted at first hand by the reality of the "pacification" being carried out by the French authorities in Algeria, at that time still a part of France. Algeria subsequently became the subject of Bourdieu's first sociological works, re- appearing throughout his career as a source of examples and a frequent reference. However, less well-known is the fact that Bourdieu also took hundreds of photographs of Algeria at this turning- point in its history, a few years before the country's independence from France in 1962, and a selection of these forms the Paris show and accompanying catalogue, published by Actes Sud.
Extracts from Bourdieu's sociological work on Algeria illustrate the Paris exhibition, and fuller versions of these extracts are given in the catalogue. Writing in the journal Etudes Méditerranéennes in 1960 on the sociological consequences of the Algerian war of independence against France, for example, Bourdieu wrote that the war, the first "radical questioning of the colonial system" in Algeria since its inception, had led to a new willingness on the part of the Algerian population to "reject the Western civilisation identified with the colonial order, to affirm their sense of self....to refuse the negation of the self and to defend a selfhood that was threatened and under siege."
The "colonised personality" of the "Arab-for-the-French", result of a colonial system that had removed from the Algerian population all responsibility for its destiny, had led to "an attitude of resignation, of self-questioning and of indifference with regard to the future" among that population, Bourdieu felt. However, this personality was now disappearing with the victories being won both in Algeria and among international public opinion, and "we are seeing in Algeria the end of a [colonial] world, which is being lived as the beginning of a new one."
That new world, however, was accompanied by profound social and economic disruption, recorded by Bourdieu in his early writings on Algeria, among them Sociologie de l'Algérie (Sociology of Algeria, 1961), Travail et travailleurs en Algérie (Labour and Labourers in Algeria, 1963) and Le Déracinement, la crise de l'agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie (Loss of Roots: Crisis of Traditional Agriculture in Algeria, 1964), as well as the later Algérie 60, structures economiques et structures temporelles (Algeria 60: Economic and Temporal Structures, 1977).
Such disruption, particularly studied by Bourdieu among the rural populations then being driven from the land by the mechanisation and modernising of agriculture practices, and the feeding of a dispossessed urban population of the unemployed amid growing shanty towns, was leading to changes in family structure, in the traditional division of labour and in ideas of the value of work and of group identity.
As Bourdieu wrote in Le Déracinement, economic change meant that "there is no longer any such thing as 'dishonour', no longer a fear of abandoning the land or selling it to strangers, no longer a feeling of shame at abandoning a father or a mother in poverty. Now there is no hesitation before taking up any expedient, any ruse, in order to live... There is no longer any obstacle to the individualism that is part and parcel of the modern economy: within large groupings, or large masses of isolated individuals, each is protected by his or her anonymity. Each feels responsible for himself or herself, but for himself or herself alone."
In a 2001 interview with Franz Schultheis that prefaces the exhibition catalogue, Bourdieu explains his photography, which he always felt to be part of his sociological work. Using a Zeiss Ikoflex camera, "the best German camera available at the time", developing the photographs at a local Algiers laboratory, sticking the prints in scrapbooks and storing the negatives in old shoeboxes, Bourdieu took around a thousand photographs of Algeria between 1958 and 1960, of which some hundreds remain.
Photography, he says, was a means "of intensifying my way of looking at Algeria... I would photograph a marriage lamp, for example, in order to study it afterwards and find out how it was made, or I would photograph a pestle and mortar with the same idea in mind." Slowly, Bourdieu began to photograph "situations that spoke to me because they expressed dissonance", expressing conflicting features of a common reality. However, looking back at the photographs after 40 years, Bourdieu says that the ones he values most are the most amateurish, the ones that are more like holiday snaps and less the product of theoretical working over.
"Among my most 'typical' photographs, there is one of a veiled woman riding a scooter.... which represents the 'easiest' aspect of what I was trying to get at," he says. But this photograph, included in the present exhibition, because too concerned to make a pre- arranged point expresses a stale way of looking that misses the kinds of detail that give "despised popular photography" its peculiar meaning.
"For this reason," Bourdieu says, "I have never stopped conducting interviews and making observations, breaking with the routines of bureaucratic sociology -- best expressed for me by Lazarsfeld at Columbia [University] who introduced taylorism into research methods -- which operates through researchers and .... looks neither at the person being questioned nor at that person's immediate environment. Photographs taken during an enquiry that one re-examines at leisure, like recordings, can allow one to find details unnoticed at first glance, that one could not have had the opportunity to look at in detail during an interview."
The photographs in the exhibition are arranged in sections under the headings of "war and social change", "habitus and habitat", "men -- women", "uprooted farmers", and "the economy of poverty". There are also sequences of photographs taken by Bourdieu at Algiers and Blida and arranged according to his instructions. One such sequence shows different subjects in the same town, while two others show passers-by, always taken at the same angle, at a Blida street corner and passing in front of a news stand.
As Christine Frisinghelli notes in her contribution to the catalogue, the photographs have been selected for exhibition on the basis of those that Bourdieu himself used in his publications during his lifetime, as well as those that he personally chose for exhibition.
The present exhibition has been organised by Franz Schultheis of the magazine Camera Austria, and a further exhibition is planned for autumn 2003 in Graz, Austria.
Pierre Bourdieu, Images d'Algérie, une affinité élective, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, 24 January - 2 March 2003; catalogue published by Actes Sud, Paris, ed. Franz Schultheis & Christine Frisinghelli.
Continuing across France throughout 2003, events held within the "Year of Algeria in France" include, at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, an Algerian film series (Hommage aux cinéastes algériens, 11 January - 1 June), as well as L'Algérie des musiques (Musics of Algeria, 25 January - 24 May). Details of events elsewhere are available at www.djazair2003.org
C a p t i o n :
Rural Algerian scene from Bourdieu's archives
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 13 - 19 March 2003 (Issue No. 629)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/629/cu5.htm