Pierre Bourdieu, Picturing Algeria. Edited by Franz Schultheis and Christine Frisinghelli. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
[This review was originally published in the most recent issue ofArab Studies Journal. For more information on the issue, or to subscribe to ASJ, click here.]
In a poignant interview included in Picturing Algeria, Pierre Bourdieu notes that “Yvette Delsaut wrote a text about me in which she very rightly says that Algeria is what allowed me to accept myself.” Indeed, in recent years, Bourdieu’s early fieldwork in Algeria has been regarded as central to his conceptual apparatus. This edited volume features Bourdieu’s photographs from 1957 to 1960, a period that witnessed some of the most violent episodes of the Algerian war of independence. These images are contextualized by excerpts from Bourdieu’s own writings, a foreword by Craig Calhoun, and an interview with Bourdieu himself. The textual excerpts are mostly taken from Le déracinement and Travail et travailleurs en Algérie, two works that have never been translated into English. The volume also includes two essays by the editors that reflect on the relationship between Bourdieu’s later writings, his use of photography, and his experiences in Algeria.
Bourdieu arrived in Algeria in October 1955, when he was deployed there with the French army despite his well-known opposition to France’s colonialism. He later returned voluntarily to teach at the University of Algiers and conduct fieldwork—fieldwork that was undertaken at great personal risk in the context of the ongoing war. Despite these difficult conditions, he produced work rich in both its use of extensive data and its theoretical reflection on the structural forces that shape attitudes, habits, and reactions to external events. His writings and photographs shed light on the impact of French colonialism on Algerian society, particularly such socioeconomic phenomena as territorial dispossession, the introduction of capitalist forms of logic, and the destruction of traditional forms of social solidarities.
The photos included in this volume range from shots of agricultural workers to street graffiti to individual portraits taken on the streets of Algeria. A few of them—the photograph of a woman wearing the traditional Algerian haik while riding a motorcycle, for example—are spectacular for their mise-en-scène. Yet for the most part the photos are remarkably mundane, given that Algerian society was caught in the grip of a violent war of independence. Rather than serving as a gloss on the dramas of the Algerian revolution, these photographs capture the daily realities of Algerian life. Placed alongside Bourdieu’s more theoretical texts on Algerian society, they offer insight into the work of a sociologist who reflected on the historical contradictions and structural violence of the war, but who was also implicated in its more quotidian manifestations. The result is a glimpse of Bourdieu’s relationship to Algeria that combines a scientific frame with a familiarity that is almost intimate. Indeed, sections of the book oscillate between the structures of respectful distance, such as history or political economy, and a sense of the daily fabric that is touching, if not personal.
Reading Bourdieu’s texts alongside the images highlights that photography was a “way of looking” that is echoed in his sociological methodology. Bourdieu himself notes that for the anthropologist and the photographer, “there was this objectifying and loving, detached yet intimate relationship to the object, something similar to humor.” Photography, then, was not only a way to account for the distance between subject and object, but also a way to capture a personal relationship at a particular historical moment. In this sense, the act of taking photos was intimately related to Bourdieu’s notion of a reflexive sociology, which attempted to account for the role of the observer in ethnographic practice. This methodological intervention also sought to navigate between what Bourdieu viewed as the base materialism of Marxism and the depoliticizing tendencies of phenomenology and existentialism. While Bourdieu’s early writings on Algeria are increasingly read alongside with, and as fundamental to, his later work, his engagement with photography remains relatively unknown. This impressive volume seeks to address this lacuna in the study of Bourdieu’s sociological method and personal trajectory.