Tristes Paysans:

Bourdieus Early Ethnography in Barn and Kabylia

Deborah Reed-Danahay
University of Texas at Arlington

Abstract
Pierre Bourdieu conducted ethnographic research in his native region of Barn and in Algeria during the late 1950s and early 1960s. He rarely drew explicit comparisons between the two sites, despite striking parallels in themes such as notions of honor in Mediterranean peasant ethos, the habitus as internalized dispositions, and peasant malaise in the face of socioeconomic change. Bourdieu called his Barn ethnography an inversion of Lvi-Strauss Tristes Tropiques, as a way to objectify the familiar. I suggest that constructions of traditional and modern that informed Bourdieus early research in both sites led to a nostalgic view of tristes paysans. [key words: Bourdieu, habitus, Mediterranean, ethnography, rural France, Algeria]

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Having worked in Kabylia, a foreign universe, I thought it would be interesting to do a kind of Tristes tropiques but in reverse: to observe the effects that objectification of my native world would produce in me. (Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Introduction to Reflexive Sociology) Penned inside this enclosed microcosm in which everybody knows everybody...beneath the gaze of others every individual experiences deep anxiety about peoples words... (Bourdieu 1966, The Sentiment of Honor in Kabyle Society) In this enclosed world where one senses at each moment without escape that one is under the gaze of others... (Bourdieu and Bourdieu 1965, The Peasant and Photography)

ierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) was from a rural family of modest origins, and a native of the region of Barn, in southwestern France. He went back there to

do fieldwork in 1959-60, after having conducted his initial research among the Kabyles in Algeria. In the above quotation, Bourdieu employed terms such as foreign, native, and objectification that articulate a long-standing (some would say, defining) opposition in anthropological fieldwork between near and far (Fabian 1983; Gupta and Ferguson 1997). As with much of his ethnographic work, Bourdieu returned to material from his original study in Barn at several points over the course of his career. In his introduction to a recent volume that collects key writings on Barn, Bourdieu reiterated his desire to invert the LviStraussian move to seek the other in Tristes Tropiques (1992). Bourdieu wrote of throwing himself into this very familiar world of his own region that he knew without knowing (2002:10) and which he could now objectify because he had distanced himself by immersion in another way of life (and here one assumes he means Algeria although he does not explicitly say so). What is the meaning of Bourdieus construction of his research in Barn as the inverse of Lvi-Strauss part-ethnography, part-travelogue, and part-autobiography Tristes Tropiques? What are the implications of his research at home and away for the development of his theoretical approachesin particular, the concept of habitus? Barn and Kabylia served as parallel worlds in which Bourdieu worked on similar themes. In this essay, I will draw out the connections between the two regions of research to each other, to Mediterranean studies, and to Bourdieus theory of habitus. Bourdieu placed both of these peasant societies within a framework that opposed traditional vs. modern society. I will critically examine Bourdieus construction of Barn and Kabylia as familiar vs. foreign uni88

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verses, and his assumptions about objectification, closeness, and distance in ethnographic research. I will also examine Bourdieus claims to ethnographic authority. In his work on Barn, he stressed his objectification and a scientific approach, so as to avoid any claim that he was too close to the material, but at the same time also used his insider perspective to legitimize his work there. He also sought to legitimize his work in Algeria by using his own rural roots in France to claim a sort of insider status among Kabyle peasants, and to distance himself from others associated with the colonial power of France. The work in Algeria and rural France was carried out during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and published at around the same time. It operated within, to use of one of Bourdieus own terms, the same intellectual field. It is significant to point out, however, that the Algerian work reached English-speaking audiences over a decade earlier than the rural French research, and most of the latter has never been translated into English.1 Bourdieus publications on these two regions constituted part of the interest in peasant studies generally during the 1960s and 70s and, more specifically, the Mediterranean as culture area. His work in southwestern France may also be placed in the context of Occitan studies in France, as Vera Mark (1987) has pointed out. Among Anglophone anthropologists, Bourdieu is best known for Algerian ethnography, studies of education, social class and distinction among the French bourgeoisie, and/or theoretical constructs such as the habitus. The lack of attention to Bourdieus ethnographic research in rural France,2 as well as, to a lesser extent, the lack of attention to the early Algerian ethnographic work he carried out, has kept the parallels between the work in Algeria and the work in rural France from being fully recognized. Michel de Certeau is one of the few to have noticed the relationship between the two sites. He asked which is the doublet of the other? and wrote that they represent two familiarities, the one determinedand hauntedby its distance from the native land, the other by the foreignness of its cultural difference (Certeau 1984:51). Although he did not pursue this beyond these brief remarks, Certeau pointed to a significant area for critical interrogations of Bourdieus work. Bourdieu himself continued to reference this early work, and used both rural cases as contrasts to modern French society, up until his very last writings.3

Bourdieu as Native and Outsider

Bourdieus roots in rural France informed both the Algerian and French work. Bourdieus position in Algeria was, as a Frenchmen, that of member of the dominant society and colonizerand he was keenly aware of this. He first arrived in
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Algeria as a young soldier, conscripted to military duty, and assigned to the resettlement camps.4 Bourdieu (2003:44) has written that he experienced a conversion from philosophy (in which he had received his university training thus far) to ethnography and sociology after that experience as well as through his ethnographic experiences in Barn (Bourdieu 2002:9). In his preface to the sociological/ethnological study he conducted among Algerian workers (Bourdieu 1963), Bourdieu cited Michel Leiriss 1950 article on ethnography and colonialism (Leiris 1950), in which Leiris wrote of the complicity of the ethnologist working in colonial contexts and of the impossibility of any pure science. Leiris stated that, whether or not they wish to be complicit, ethnographers are funded by their governments to do research in areas colonized by these governments. Anticipating discussions in Anglophone anthropology two and three decades later about position of the native anthropologist, Bourdieu asked Must we think like those who often say that there is no pure ethnology other than that done by the natives? But why this ethical and epistemological privileging? (1963:258). When conducting ethnographic research in rural France, however, Bourdieu positioned himself as the native anthropologist. Bourdieu was from a family in rural France with peasant roots. As a child, Bourdieu was surrounded by those who spoke the local dialect and he was raised in an agricultural milieuif not strictly on a farm, since his father was a postman. Bourdieu drew few explicit connections between his two sites of fieldwork in his ethnographic or theoretical writing, but he did discuss his understandings of the relationships between the two in later reflexive essays and interviews. Bourdieu remarked several times upon the reciprocal relationship between his fieldwork among the Kabyles and Barnaise, and the ways in which this influenced his own theoretical development. In his preface to the Logic of Practice (1990: 15), Bourdieu made reference to his social origins and the advantage this gave him as a rural ethnographer in Algeria. He wrote: Perhaps because I had a less abstract idea than some people of what it is to be a mountain peasant, I was also, and precisely to that extent, more aware that the distance is insurmountable, irremovable, except through self-deception. Here Bourdieu legitimized his claims to understand the Algerians, despite his association with the colonial power of France, through reference to both his rural origins and his theoretical stance. He continued in this passage to make a point about the need to be conscious of distancing oneself in the ethnographic situation and to avoid nave perceptions of understanding the other through participant-observation research. He wrote: the distance lies perhaps not so much where it is usually looked for, in the gap between cultural traditions, as in the gulf between two relations to the
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world, one theoretical, the other practical (1990:15). These themes of the difference between practical logic and theoretical logic, and between the objective and subjective approach, were central to Bourdieus work in both the Algerian and rural French contexts. Although I have not found this phrase in Bourdieus own work, one can speak of the internal colonialism (Hechter 1975) that occurred in France as regional populations with their own languages and local particularisms were brought into the control and under the hegemony of the dominant French society and culture. It is clear, however, that Bourdieu viewed the position of the Barnaise peasants as comparable to that of the Kabyles in the colonial and postcolonial regimes. Bourdieus 1977 article on the class position of the peasantry, and his 1980 article on the social construction of the idea of region, both focus on the peasantry in France and highlight the symbolic domination to which they have been subject. In these articles, he discussed the ways in which local culture and local language are devalued by dominant French culture. The French school, which Bourdieu has treated at length, but which is beyond the scope of this article, was instrumental in the project of reinforcing social class divisions, and constructing understandings of the nation and its regions.5 When Bourdieu died in January, 2002,, he was in the process of writing a memoir of his childhood that dealt with his rural origins and the symbolic violence he encountered as a boarding-school student when he left to continue his secondary education in the city of Pau. Excerpts from this memoir were published in the French magazine le Nouvel Observateur.6 Bourdieu and I had discussed the emotional consequences of becoming educated for natives of rural villages a few years earlier, when I met with him in Paris while I was working on a study of published schooling narratives in France.7 Although I cannot quote directly from his memoir, he did address this theme in an earlier published interview. Bourdieu referred to himself as a class defector, unveiling the shame of his origins and guilt at being upwardly mobile, but also noted that his research in Barn was part of a personal quest: I spent most of my youth in a tiny and remote village of Southwestern France, a very backward place as city people like to say. And I could meet the demands of schooling only by renouncing many of my primary experiences and acquisitions, not only a certain accent Anthropology and sociology have allowed me to reconcile myself with my primary experiences and to take them upon myself, to assume them without losing anything I subsequently acquiredThe research I did, around 1960, in
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this village helped me to discover a lot of things about myself and about my object of study (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:205). Those experiences of being the other at school, and thereby being made to be self-conscious of ones difference and of ones own ways of thinking, dressing, etc., are central to some of Bourdieus eventual theoretical positions about reflexivity. For Bourdieu, reflexivity was not about personal autobiographical details, confessional modes of writing, or fieldwork accounts per se; rather, it was about being self-consciously theoretical, and realizing that this is different from the practical logics of oneself and ones informants. He has explicitly acknowledged that the experience of boarding school and upward class mobility afforded him a unique perspective on social life, the ability to cross different social milieu (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:205). This is a similar role to what I have identified elsewhere as that of the autoethnographer (Reed-Danahay 1997a). Toward the end of the chapter called Disintegration and Distress in Bourdieus early book The Algerians (1962a), there is a moving passage about the man between two worlds that I cannot help but read as part-autobiography for Bourdieu.8 Although the explicit referent is the young Algerian intellectual in a rapidly changing Algeria, I think Bourdieu himself was also this man between two worlds: for him, the two worlds were the traditional world of rural France in which he grew up and the world of the urban intellectual, the social scientist, he was becoming. I read this passage as one speaking to his identification with young Algerian men, due to his own background. He wrote: Constantly being faced with alternative ways of behavior by reason of the intrusion of new values, and therefore compelled to make a conscious examination of the implicit premises or the unconscious patterns of his own tradition, this man, cast between two worlds and rejected by both, lives a sort of double inner life, is a prey to frustration and inner conflict, with the result that he is constantly being tempted to adopt either an attitude of uneasy overidentification or one of rebellious negativism. (1962:144) This figure is compelled, Bourdieu suggested, to make a conscious examination of the implicit premises or the unconscious patterns of his own tradition and this was later to be part of the methods involving reflexivity in Bourdieus work. Bourdieu made a strong statement regarding his stance toward reflexivity and postmodernism in his 2002 Huxley Memorial Lecture delivered in 2000 (Bourdieu 2003). He rejected any form of what he disparagingly referred to (fol92

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lowing Geertz and Derrida) as the diary disease, and advocated the reflexivity of what he called the knowing subject. Promoting what he referred to as participant objectivation, he wrote that one does not have to choose between participant observation, a necessarily fictitious immersion in a foreign milieu, and the objectivism of the gaze from afar of an observer who remains as remote from himself as from his object (2003:282). Bourdieu distanced himself in this lecture from his own autobiographical reflections, such as those quoted above, lending them the aura (and legitimacy) of scientific authority.9

Bourdieu and the Field of Mediterranean Studies

Three conferences held in Europe in 1959, 1961 and 1963 shaped the development of notions of the culture area of the Mediterranean (Peristiany 1966: 9). At that time, this field consisted of studies of peasant societies undertaken in the region from southern Europe to northern Africa through the lens of preoccupations with tradition and modernity, issues of kinship and family, and the value complex of honor and shame. Bourdieu had essays published in two edited volumes in English that resulted from these conferences: Mediterranean Countrymen (Pitt-Rivers, ed. 1963) and Honor and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (Peristiany, ed. 1966). These essays, drawing upon his ethnographic research among the Kabyles (one on concepts of time; the other on concepts of honor), appeared alongside articles written by ethnographers of rural France, such as Lawrence Wylie (working in southern France) and Isac Chiva (who worked in Corsica.) It was Chiva, then editor of the French anthropological journal Etudes Rurales, who published Bourdieus first lengthy ethnographic article on bachelors in rural France in 1962. Bourdieu does not seem to have maintained ties to the field of Mediterranean studies, as his own research in France led him in different directions, and there is little evidence in the recent literature on the Mediterranean of his important early contributions. There is, to take just one example, scant reference to his work in a recent collection of essays on the state of Mediterranean studies (Albera, Blok, Bromberger 2002). The assumptions of Mediterranean anthropology have been challenged by several authors, most notably Michael Herzfeld (1987). Herzfeld points out that societies in this region of the world are neither exotic nor wholly familiar (1987:7), a dilemma that Bourdieu scarcely overcame in his characterizations of either Barn or Kabylia. The notion of honor, claimed to be so central to the Mediterranean region, is seized upon, according to Herzfeld, as a Eurocentric move to exoticize the region and differentiate it from a more bureaucratic and
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rational modern Europe. Bourdieu himself used the concept of honor in his analyses of both rural French and Algerian societies but, as Herzfeld points out (1987:8), did not explicitly use this concept to create any pan-Mediterranean unity in his earlier work.10 Mediterranean studies during the early 1960s were informed by a dichotomy between urban vs. rural societies influenced by wider historical ideas central to European social thought (Baroja 1963; Williams 1973). This had been reinforced by scholarship such as Redfields (1956) rural-urban continuum and the suggestion that peasant societies were part-societies, and by Tnnies GemeinschaftGesellschaft dichotomy (1957), in which the community of the village was privileged over the anonymity and anomie of the city. This theme is also, of course, present in the work of Emile Durkheim (cf. 1951[1897]). The concept of honor in Mediterranean studies was tied to this system of ideas. In his introduction to one of the volumes cited above, Peristiany revealed this position with his statement that Honor and shame are the constant preoccupation of individuals in small scale, exclusive societies where face to face personal, as opposed to anonymous, relations are of paramount importance and where the social personality of the actor is as significant as his office (Peristiany 1966:11). Although he employed the concept of honor in both the Barn and Kabyle ethnography, seeming to find similar cultural uses of this, Bourdieu made few explicit references to this similarity. Most of the comparisons he did make were in the form of footnotes, or asides. Bourdieu wrote extensively in several publications on the concept of honor among the Kabyles (cf. Bourdieu 1966 and 1972), but much less about it in his Barn writings, of which there are fewer in any case. In a footnote to his article on honor among the Kabyles, he stated that he deliberately avoided comparisons with western society in order to avoid ethnocentric identifications. (1966:241, n.36). He claimed that in the west, there is more of an individual orientation in behavior concerning honor, while among the Kabyles, behavior is connected to relationships between groups. What is left unclear, however, is whether or not Bourdieu would have included rural society in Europe within the same category as western society in this opposition. Bourdieu drew an explicit (albeit brief) parallel between the Barn and Kabyle contexts and uses of honor in an early article co-written with his wife, Marie-Claire, on the uses of photography in the French village of Lesquire. In describing the rigid, full-frontal posture and solemn expression among those posing in rural photographs, especially on the occasion of marriage, Bourdieu described Lesquire as a society that holds up the sentiment of honor, of dignity and responsibility and in which it is important to provide the most hon94

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orable image of oneself to the other (Bourdieu and Bourdieu 1965: 172). He added in a footnote that among the Kabyles, a man of honor is he who faces you, who holds his head high, who looks others straight in the face, unmasking his own face. (1965:7; my translation). There is a similar description in Outline of a Theory of Practice, where Bourdieu compared the two societies as those in which frontality and honor are connected (Bourdieu 1997: 94). The concept of honor also came into play in Bourdieus analyses of marriage strategies among rural French peasants (cf. 1962 and 1972b). Another theme of similarity between the two ethnographic locations is that of Bourdieus understandings of peasant life and its emotional implications for the individual. This is illustrated in two passages that twin Kabylia and Barn. In his article on The Sentiment of Honour in Kabyle Society, Bourdieu referred to Kabyle society as a primary society in which the group is central to the individual. He described the feelings engendered by this: Penned inside this enclosed microcosm in which everybody knows everybody, condemned without the possibility of escape or relief to live with others, beneath the gaze of others every individual experiences deep anxiety about peoples words (1966:212). Despite Bourdieus claims that he did not compare the two regions in his work, in his article on the uses of photography in Lesquire he described village life in Barn as an enclosed world where one senses at each moment without escape that one is under the gaze of others (Bourdieu and Bourdieu 1965:172; my translation). In reading these two almost identical descriptions of peasant village life, I cannot help but wonder why Bourdieu did not make these resemblances between the two locations more a part of his theoretical analysis. Bourdieu rarely, however, made such an explicit bridge in his writing between the two examples, preferring for the most part to compare Algeria to a west that is urban, individualized, etc. (as I have discussed elsewhere in terms of Occidentalism; cf. Reed-Danahay 1995), rather than to a rural France of peasants who share some features of life with the Kabyles. And he more often than not contrasted Barn to urban France as well.

Habitus and Disruptions in Peasant Life

Bourdieus early ethnographic work focused on the disruption of traditional societies, in which he embraced an equilibrium model of social organization as the natural state of affairs. He continued to view both his rural French and Algerian field sites as places to observe an experiment having to do with the before and after of social change, in a way that seems to characterize society as
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not always changing but, rather, being disrupted at certain moments. There are parallels, therefore, between his characterization of the experimental situation (Bourdieu and Bourdieu 1965:164; my translation) of the village of Lesquire in the early 1960s and his statement in a much later publication on Algerian workers that the war offered a quasi-laboratory situation (Bourdieu 2000:17.) In the first case he was referring to the diffusion of a modern technique (photography) into the peasant milieu; in the second, he was referring to the mismatch between precapitalist and rationalized economic systems. His model of peasant societies was marked by nostalgia and by a view of a sort of pristine traditional society (the before) that most likely never existed. For both Algeria and France, Bourdieu provided examples of how traditional societies reproduced themselves (in the past), and he eventually came to use the concept of habitus to explain how this happened. Bourdieu attributed disruption of these traditional systems in the Algerian case to colonization and then war and rebellion. For France, Bourdieu argued that urbanization and changing economic relations created conditions of social disruption.11 In The Logic of Practice, Bourdieu, in a very Durkheimian voice, explicitly addressed the breakdown of honor in terms of a rural/urban dichotomy: Urbanization, which brings together groups with different traditions and weakens the reciprocal controls (and even before urbanization, the generalization of monetary exchanges and the introduction of wage labour), results in the collapse of the collectively maintained and therefore entirely real fiction of the religion of honour. (Bourdieu 1990 [1980]:110) The themes of urban vs. rural societies, and peasants vs. city-dwellers, is a strong thread linking Bourdieus early work in these two societies also linked through a relationship of colonialismFrance and Algeria. The penetration of a capitalist mode of production into traditional peasant economic arrangements was the main source of social disruption for Bourdieu. In later work (1989), he referred to global transformations that led to a unification of the market of symbolic goods with different types of effects in different types of peasant families. He would also later draw an analogy between the disruptions for peasants in both postcolonial Algeria and postwar France and the current problems of salaried workers in contemporary France, due to the policies of neoliberalism (Bourdieu et al. 1999; Bourdieu 2003). The concept of habitus was central to Bourdieus theoretical positions elaborated during the early 1970s in Outline of a Theory of Practice (orig. French ver96

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sion, 1972), in which Bourdieu elucidated his meanings of this concept and the ways in which he was breaking with structuralism in his theory. This concept also figures prominently, associated with the cultural capital, in his educational writings of the same periodReproduction in Education, Society and Culture (orig. French version, 1970). It is likely that the first example of the use of habitus by Bourdieu, however, was in his 1962 article on the condition of bachelorhood in the village where he grew up. In these earliest uses of the term, Bourdieu associated habitus with the traditional and with the family, and it referred primarily to bodily habitus. This meaning of the term also appears (but less prominently than in the rural French material) in some Algerian writings of the early 1960s, as in the 1964 article on uprooted (dracins) peasants. Bourdieus concept of habitus in its more developed form as articulated in Outline and the Logic of Practice was in part a synthesis of the more psychological theory of habitus used by Norbert Elias (1982 [1939]) and that of the theory of bodily habits and habitus in the work of Marcel Mauss (1979 [1950]). For Elias, habitus was associated with drives and impulses that determine tastes and habits. It was connected to what Elias called the civilizing process, through which he referred to a certain way of understanding the relation of the individual to the social and the manners and tastes that reflected the perceived civilized person. In his essay on Body Techniques, Mauss used the concept of habitus to refer to customary habits of moving the body which, as he wrote, do not vary just with individuals and their imitations; they vary especially between societies, educations, proprieties and fashions, prestiges. In them we should see the techniques and work of collective and individual practical reason (1979[1950]:101). Although Mauss was primarily describing the physical manifestation of this in bodily movement, rather than mental or psychological qualities, he did mention that these body techniques were connected to modes of life and manners. These techniques were the product of training, and so could be connected with what he noted was the psychological a well as sociological concept of dexterity or cleverness. Here we see some origins of Bourdieus later use of the term habitus as a feel for the game in which the individual can exercise various strategies within the generative capacities of his or her habitus. There are telling parallels in Bourdieus thinking about peasants and his use of the concept of habitus in two articles published in Etudes Rurales within two years of each otheran article on French bachelors (Bourdieu 1962) and an article on uprooted and resettled Algerians (Bourdieu and Sayad 1964a). The theme of rupture and a break with tradition is prevalent in both works, despite important differences in the ethnographic context. In the article entitled
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Paysans Dracins: Bouleversements Morphologiques et Changements Culturels en Algrie (trans. Uprooted Peasants: Structural Disruptions and Cultural Changes in Algeria), which draws from material also appearing in Le Dracinement (Bourdieu and Sayad 1964b), Bourdieu and Sayad described what they called the cultural contagion occurring as a result of peasant groups from the mountains being resettled with other groups with whom they would not normally have had contact. Bourdieu drew an analogy between these resettlement camps and citiesboth of which were contrasted with traditional clan social organization. Algerian peasants mixed with those having had more contact with the city in these camps, and Bourdieu noted the devaluation of peasant virtues, the breakdown of collective controls (1964a:79) on behavior, generational conflicts, and changes in womens roles. Changes in greetings, caf behavior, food and eating habits were also noted. It was the traditional peasant (paysan empaysann) who was left most emotionally displaced in this setting, according to the analysis, no longer feeling comfortable in his bodily habitus (1964a:87). The language of the peasant body was out of place in the resettlement camp. The term empaysann, for which there is no direct translation into English, implies a condition of being locked or enclosed within ones peasant-ness, unable to escape the inculcated habitus. By choosing this term, Bourdieu was referring to a disconnect between the traditional habitus (geared toward a traditional socioeconomic and kinship system) and the changing economic structures in which the peasant was living. In the earlier article on Barn, Clibat et Condition Paysanne (Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition), similar themes of a rupture with the past and dislocation for the traditional male peasant are present. Here, Bourdieu also made reference to paysans empaysanns, enclosed within the condition of peasanthood. It was in this article that he first made extensive use of the bodily habitus in his work. This article on bachelors was produced during the postwar period in France, a time of alarm about rural exodus and the high rate of bachelorhood in many regions. Bourdieu argued that the traditional social system, in which marriage was primarily a concern of the peasant family and its interest in inheritance, had been disrupted by socioeconomic changes affecting the meaning of the dowry itself but also attitudes toward the individual. Marriage had become, by the 1960s, more a matter of individual choice than of the authority of the patriarchal family system. As girls became more educated, Bourdieu argued, and had more access to urban ways of life, they increasingly ignored male peasants from isolated hamlets as potential husbands, despite concerns of inheritance. In the article, Bourdieu addressed the ways in which unmarried men
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were produced within a marriage system that favored male primogeniture, and in which women tended to marry up the economic and social scale. Men from isolated hamlets were the most likely candidates for remaining in an unmarried state. They were also, he maintained, most aware of their condition and the limitations of peasanthood. This article includes short narratives about marriage and bachelorhood told by married and unmarried men, mostly translated from the local dialect, that Bourdieu collected in the field. In its collection of interview statements about experiences of dislocation, Bourdieu used similar methods in this study to those he used in his study of dislocated Algerian workers (Bourdieu, Darbel et al. 1963). He collaborated with one of the demographers from the Algerian study, Claude Seibel, in the work in Lesquire. Just as he and his collaborators had done in Travail et Travailleurs en Algrie, Bourdieu combined a statistical and objective analysis with subjective material from interviews. In order to explain the high rate of bachelorhood, he outlined statistical patterns in the marriage system and supplemented this with short first-person narratives. Bourdieu provided more ethnography here than he had in his Algerian research, which was based largely upon interviews. He wrote a thick description of the setting of various dances in Lesquirein particular, the Christmas-time dance. Here we also see the developing theory of habitus, which Bourdieu would later characterize as having to do with symbolic domination and the internalization of feelings and habits so as to generate behavior. In this early work of Bourdieus, he used the terms bodily habitus (habitus corporal) and hexis interchangeably. He wrote: This is not the place to analyze the motor habits particular to the Barnaise peasant, this habitus, which reveals the backward peasant, the lumbering peasant. The folk observation perfectly captures this hexis which fuels the stereotypes: The peasant of olden times, remarked an elderly villager, always walked with his legs curved in an arc, as if he were knock-kneed, with his arms bent backwards. (2002:114-5; my translation) The structural position of these bachelors made it difficult for them to marry, but the bachelors themselves embodied ways of moving and dressing and acting that made it difficult for them to attract a wife. Due to gender segregation in the community, chances for young males and females to socialize together were limited, and the dances permitted a rare occasion for social mixing. The bachelors were clumsy in their movements, Bourdieu wrote, and their clothing was in outdated styles. They didnt really know how to dance or to talk
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to girls. The bachelors had a way of dressing, a way of moving, a way of drinking, a way of singing, etc. that was part of their bodily hexis, or habitus. At this point, Bourdieu had not yet articulated a theory of habitus that saw it as the generating structure of the structure, or as a set of dispositions that created various limits to strategies (cf. Bourdieu 1977b and 1990). Although there is also evidence of the development of these later theories in his early Algerian work, for example, the descriptions of riposte and honor among the Kabyles (1966), he did not use the term habitus in that early work. In his description, Bourdieu first set the scene of the dance, which took place in the backroom of a caf. There were smartly dressed couples, dancing to popular tunes. There were also some unmarried girls and boys there. Bourdieus style of writing is distant, clinical, avoiding the I (as he later pointed out himself); and yet, it cant help but convey the emotional reaction he had to this scene. The picture he painted is bleak, conveyed through terms like somber mass. He wrote: Behind, on the margins of the dance floor, gathers a somber mass, a group of men who are older, who look on, without speaking: all at least 30 years old, they wear a beret and a dark suit, of outdated style. Almost as if tempted to dance, they come forward, taking some of the space of the dancers. They are there, all the bachelors. The men of their age who are already married no longer attend the dances (2002:111; my translation). We can see in the passage the internalized body image and ways of moving associated with this habitus, in turn associated with traditional forms of behavior confronting emerging modern ways of operating that have been adopted by the youth of the community. Bourdieu briefly described other dances where the entire community came either to dance or to gossip about possible marriages. This dance, however, was a dance primarily for the youth, and he wrote that At the dances like this one at Christmastime or New Years, the bachelors have nothing to do. Those are the dances for the youth; that is to say, those who arent yet married. They [the bachelors] arent yet old, but they know they are unmarriageable. These are the dances to which one goes to dance; yet they dont dance (2002:112; my translation). Occasionally a young girl would ask one of these bachelors to dance just to be polite, and they would reveal their heaviness and clumsiness as they danced with the girls. As the night grew later, Bourdieu wrote, they stay there, until midnight, barely speaking, in the light and noise of the dance, gazing at the inaccessible girls. Then they will go into the bar and drink face to face. They will sing together the old barnaise tunes and ,
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by twos or threes, they will slowly take their leave, at the end of the evening, toward their isolated farms (2002:112; my translation).

Tristes Tropiques/Tristes Paysans

The dance at Christmas time was a setting in which Bourdieu was native and outsider, objective and subjective observer. The article does not, however, state that this is Bourdieus natal region, and an uninformed reader would not know this. The stance of distance and objectivity toward this material with which he was so familiar was deliberate. As Bourdieu explained many years after writing the initial article, The point of departure of this research is a very personal experience that I recounted in the article, but in a veiled form, because at the time I felt compelled to disappear (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:162). He also expressed his attachment to this dance: I can say that I spent nearly twenty years trying to understand why I chose that village ballI even believethis is something that I would never have dared say even ten years agothat the feeling of sympathy (in the strongest sense of the term) that I felt then and the sense of pathos that exuded from the scene I witnessed were surely at the root of my interest in this object (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:164).12 In neither the case of his ethnographic research in late colonial Algeria, nor that of rural France, did Bourdieu seek what Lvi-Strauss described as the no more thrilling prospect for the anthropologist than that of being the first white man to visit a particular native community (Lvi-Strauss 1992:326). In both cases, Bourdieu immersed himself in fieldwork situations that were impossible to close off from the west, or its influences. Lvi-Strauss also wrote: While remaining human himself, the anthropologist tries to study and judge mankind from a point of view sufficiently lofty and remote to allow him to disregard the particular circumstances of a given society or civilization. (Lvi-Strauss 1992:55) Bourdieu intended to invert such a stance by going to his own environment in rural France in order to conduct ethnographic fieldwork. It was what Bourdieu called the objectification associated with structuralism that he later came to reject as he developed his theory of practice. Bourdieu did, however, distance himself from familiar surroundings while undertaking research in Barn. Bourdieus early writings on Algerian and French peasants show how he was beginning to move from the bodily habitus to a more complex theory of habi101

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tus which incorporated internal states as well as external movements and behaviors, tied to a notion of the structure as generated by these internalized dispositions. We also see, however, that these writings betray a nostalgic view of peasant societya melancholy, or triste, portrait of the disruption and rupture with past which produced dislocated, marginal people. While cultural mediators were key figures in the Franco-Algerian colonial discourse and in colonial policy (as, for instance, Colonna 1975 has shown in the case of teacher training), Bourdieu focused on the tristesse associated with being between worlds. And he found it not only in Algeria, but also in a French system that produced marginality through the educational system, as in his own case. Bourdieu substituted Lvi-Strausss tristes tropiques, and its critique of modern civilization, with an image of the tristes paysans, and an attendant critique of the influences of modern capitalism on traditional socioeconomic peasant societies. As I have tried to show in this article, much of this is due to his life trajectory as a man of rural roots who positioned himself as dislocated in the bourgeois milieu of academia and felt that he had a privileged view of peasants due to his own origins. It might not be taking this too far to suggest that Bourdieus own tristesse and feelings of alienation played a part in his analyses of peasant societies. We must not lose sight however, in seeking the origins of his thought in some of his own explanations arising from his autobiographical experiences, of influences on his work that he did not explicitly acknowledge in his later reflexive writings. While he often cited the influences of philosophy and of his reactions to French structuralism in his work, Bourdieu rarely addressed other ethnographic research in the regions where he worked. His earliest writings were, however, marked by a dichotomy of traditional vs. modern society that was also part of Mediterranean studies in general during the 1960s, and which overshadowed at times even Bourdieus own experience, so that he made little explicit connection in his writings between his ethnographies of Algeria and France. His early writings were also marked by his desire to portray an objective, scientific gaze even in situations that evoked familiar emotional reactions.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This article is a much revised version of a paper delivered at the 2002 American Anthropological Association Meetings in New Orleans. I would like to thank Jane Goodman, and the anonymous reviewers for Anthropological Quarterly, for insightful comments and suggestions on this essay. Sections of this article are drawn from material that will also appear in a forthcoming book, Locating Bourdieu (Indiana University Press).

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ENDNOTES
1

For example, The Algerians appeared in 1962, and other articles on the Algerian work appeared in English translation during the 1960s. The earliest French article dealing with his rural French ethnography also appeared in 1962 (Bourdieu 1962). It has never been translated into English. It was not until 1976 that the first English-language publication of the Barn research appeared, in an article on marriage strategies included in a compilation of Annales articles translated into English. Although Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) is devoted strictly to the Algerian material, the reworking of some of this material in the Logic of Practice (1990) was accompanied by a chapter on marriage strategies in Barnbut this did not appear in English until 1990; moreover, it is from the same Annales article already translated in 1976. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only piece of writing specifically drawing upon Bourdieus early ethnographic work in rural France that has been translated into English.

Loc Wacquant (1993) has usefully drawn attention to fragmented readings of Bourdieu in the U.S. He does not, however, address the lack of attention to Bourdieus ethnographic work in rural France and makes only passing mention of this body of Bourdieus work in his essay.
3

This is particularly evident in Masculine Domination (2000), where Bourdieu compared traditional Barnaise and Kabyle societies to contemporary France, and foregrounded a shared Mediterranean culture of androcentrism. That he worked on two books, published posthumously, that dealt with the earliest research in both sites (Le Bal des Clibataires (2002) and Images dAlgrie (2003) is also evidence of his intellectual return to these sites later in life. In none of his later autobiographical reflections did Bourdieu discuss his role as soldier or much about the violence he might have observed. For some of his recollections of that period, see the recent Images dAlgrie (2003). The two classic works on education are Bourdieu and Passeron (1964 and 1970). A more recent study of education is The State Nobility (1996) I have dealt with the nation-building aspect of rural French education in my own work (Reed-Danahay 1996). Bourdieu never explicitly addressed the content or historical significance of French schooling in national, ethnic, or regional terms in his scholarly writings and sociological studies of education, choosing to focus on the social class reproduction of the school.

This material appeared with the title Javais 15 ans. (I was fifteen) le Nouvel Observateur, Jan. 31, 2002. There is controversy surrounding this as the memoir was viewed as unauthorized by Bourdieus family, who sued the magazine, claiming that it been given to the press by the journalist Didier Eribon without their permission. Due to the legal battle and subsequent retraction of the memoir excerpts by the magazine, I will not quote from it here. I did, however, read the published version when it first appeared in early 2002. It is available online at www.nouvelobs.com/dossiers/p1943/a10243.html. Some of that work has been published as Reed-Danahay 1997b and 2002.

7 8

On the man between two worlds, see also the chapter on Le Sabir Culturel in Le Dracinement (Bourdieu and Sayad 1964b).
9

Bourdieu would have more to say about reflexivity and science in his books Science de la Science et Rflexivit (2001b) and Pascalian Meditations (2000 [1997]).

An exception is his more recent book Masculine Domination (2000b). In a different register, Bourdieu (1996) employed some concepts, such as honor, from his Kabyle materials, to analyze processes of social reproduction in elite education in France in a more recent study. While Bourdieu could not truly escape the violence and war in Algeria in his descriptions of Kabylia, although he did do so in Outline, he managed to avoid any direct references to the Second World War in his writings on Barn. Although the region of Pau, where he grew up, was in the free zone, Bourdieus early youth was spent in a country also at war. Bourdieu attributed the dislocation of French peasants to the economic consequences of increased urbanization and population shifts following the war, but did not, even in his later autobiographical
11

10

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reflections, consider the effects of the war itself. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing to this important omission on Bourdieus part. Bourdieu focused almost exclusively on what he termed the symbolic violence associated with social class domination in France. In a fascinating turn of events, Bourdieus son, Emmanuel Bourdieu, has made a featurelength movie, Le Vert Paradis, based loosely upon the story of an ethnographer who returns to his natal village to study bachelorhood. It is in post-production at the time of this writing and is to be released in early 2004. REFERENCES Albera, Dionigi, Anton Blok and Christian Bromberger, eds. 2001. LAnthropologie de la Mditerrane/Anthropology of the Mediterranean. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1962a [1958]. The Algerians. A.C.M. Ross, trans. Boston: Beacon Press. [orig. 1958. Sociologie de lAlgrie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.] ________. 1962b. Clibat et Condition Paysanne, Etudes Rurales. 5-6: 32-135. ________. 1963. The Attitude of the Algerian Peasant Toward Time. Gerald E. Williams, trans. In Julian Pitt-Rivers, ed. Mediterranean Countrymen, pp. 55-72. Paris and La Haye: Mouton and Co. ________. 1966. The Sentiment of Honour in Kabyle Society. Philip Sharrard, trans. In J.G. Peristiany, ed. Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, pp.192-211. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ________. 1972b. Les Stratgies Matrimoniales dans le Systme de Reproduction. Annales 4-5: 1105-1127. ________. 1977a. Une Classe Objet. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 17/18:2-5. ________. 1977b [1972]. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Richard Nice, trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [orig. 1972. Esquisse dune Thorie de la Pratique. Paris: Librairie Droz.] ________. 1980a. LIdentit et La Reprsentation: Elments Pour Une Rflexion Critique Sur LIde de Rgion. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 35:63-72. ________. 1989. Reproduction Interdite. La Dimension Symbolique de la Domination Economique. Etudes Rurales 113-114:15-36. ________. 1990 [1980]. The Logic of Practice. Richard Nice, trans. Stanford: Stanford University Press. [orig. 1980. Le Sens Pratique. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.] ________. 1996 [1989] The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Lauretta C. Clough, trans. Stanford: Stanford University Press. [orig. 1989. La Noblesse dEtat. Grandes coles et Esprit de Corps. Paris: Les ditions de Minuit.] ________. 2000 [1997]. Pascalian Meditations. Richard Nice, trans. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ________. 2001a [1998]. Masculine Domination. Richard Nice, trans. Stanford: Stanford University Press. [orig. 1998 La Domination Masculine. Paris: ditions du Seuil.] ________. 2001b Science de la Science et Rflexivit: Cours du Collge de France, 2000-2001. Paris: Raisons dAgir. ________. 2002. Le Bal des Clibataires: Crise de la Socit Paysanne en Barn. Paris: Editions du Seuil. ________. 2003a. Participant Objectivation. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9:281-294. ________. 2003b. Images dAlgrie: Une Affinit lective. Texts and Photographs by Pierre Bourdieu. Edited by Franz Schultheis. Arles: Actes Sud.
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