One of the founding theorists of the practice movement had his ideas formed in an anticolonial struggle. Pierre Bourdieu was the son of a rural French postmaster. Bourdieu’s academic ability allowed him to enter the elite Ecole Normal Superior in Paris in the 1950s, where he was a fellow student of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. He eventually became Chair of Sociology at the College de France, one of the most prestigious academic appointments in a country fascinated by intellectuals.
Bourdieu’s early discomfort with the ‘scholasticism’ of his intellectual equals in Paris led him to a form of personal rebellion. Bourdieu avoided doing his army service as part of the officer corps, as befit his education, and instead enlisted in the regular army. He was assigned to clerical work with the French Army in Algiers at a time when the independence movement in Algeria was a growing force. His experiences in Algeria led him toward ethnology. He was passionate about Algeria, a feeling mixed with guilt about the suffering of its people under French colonial rule. When he finished his military service he took up an academic post at the University of Algiers.
From that point forward he began ethnographic fieldwork with the Kabyle, Berber peoples of coastal Algeria. The initial years of his Kabyle fieldwork took place in the midst of the guerilla war between the French army and the independence forces of the ALN (National Liberation Army). Many Kabyle were in French relocation camps at the time that Bourdieu studied them. His contradictory writings on the Kabyle reflected their colonial displacement from their villages, which revealed to Bourdieu the fundamental structures of Kabyle society. His ethnography was, thus, a direct product of colonialism, and at times emphasized an idealized and traditional Kabyle culture, while at other times foregrounding the role of French colonial rule in their lives.
He returned to academic life in France, and settled on the role of ‘rural sociologist’ as giving him the greatest comfort. Intellectual life in postwar Paris was dominated by Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist philosophy. Prominent intellectuals like Sartre and Frantz Fanon were fascinated by The Algerian Question, and particularly by the role of rural peasants as a revolutionary vanguard in independence movements. Bourdieu, who had spent considerable time in Algeria, was hurt by this discussion. Far from seeing the Kabyle as a revolutionary vanguard, he emphasized the destruction of their way of life by the military situation. For Bourdieu human beings were indeed constrained by a social order, and could not simply choose the form of their own existence as the existentialists claimed.
In Paris in the early 1960s Claude Leivi-Strauss had brought anthropology great prestige in intellectual circles. Bourdieu took up structuralism, but his sociological training led him toward looking at the historical context of the ethnographic present, and at issues of inequality. He was a lifelong colleague, and admirer, of Leivi-Strauss, but Bourdieu felt that Leivi-Strauss had removed the ‘subject’, or the ‘agent’, from anthropological enquiry. For Bourdieu the structuralists overemphasized rules and social stasis, ignoring strategic practices by individuals and groups, which he saw as the key to understanding social life. As a result he rejected both structuralism’s emphasis on formal patterns, and existentialism’s emphasis on autonomous action. Instead he used his concept of habitus to describe both the old Kabyle system, based on honor, kinship, and community solidarity, and the new colonial system of individualism, markets, and profit. For Bourdieu, French colonialism had created a set of destabilizing, jumbled expectations for the Kabyle, which allowed colonial rule to flourish.
Bourdieu used the term doxa to refer to the unquestioned reality that is perceived by an individual. It is ‘‘the way things are’’. The social scientist understands that doxa is socially constituted, and not a representation of objective reality, but for social actors doxa remains as the unquestioned background to their actions. He coined the term habitus to refer to the ‘habitual dispositions’ of people. These give shape to social conventions. The habitus is built over a lifetime of experiences, learned unconsciously from the outcome of an individual’s previous actions in a particular field. It does not preclude, but in fact enables, improvization based on past experience. Peoples’ daily routines encourage complicity with current social norms, while at the same time new identities can be built through changes to daily practices. For the ethnographer, it is important to recognize that conscious answers to questions, and communication with informants, tends to emphasize explicit cognitive rules that informants can vocalize. The practical activities of informants are another field entirely, often outside the realm of explicit rules, but holding important information on the habitus of an individual, and on the implicit doxa of a society.
Bourdieu then turns toward daily practice, and sees it as strategic. People are able to improvise, and change their practices, and in doing so they reproduce society. Radical social and economic change tends to expose the arbitrariness of a society’s doxa, allowing active resistance to what had, previously, been unquestioned reality. Colonial situations, such as that of the Kabyle, produce particular challenges. In situations of colonization, it is very common that people become aware of challenges to their doxa, an awareness which destroys the idea of an unquestioned reality, and imposes new forms of reality. A lifetime of habitus is destroyed when people lose their way of life, and habitus is changed forever through colonial practices.
Archaeologists in the English-speaking world who have taken up Bourdieu’s ideas have generally done so through reading his Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977), which leans toward the more idealized, or essentialist, side of his ethnography. Many of the works in which Bourdieu more directly addressed the history of French colonial interaction with Kabyle society have not been translated into English, and have had little exposure in archaeological circles.
World History
