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Abstract
While new scholarship on Pierre Bourdieu has recovered his early work on Algeria, this essay excavates his early thoughts on colonialism. Contrary to received wisdom, Bourdieu did in fact offer a theory of colonialism and a systematic understanding of its effects and logics. Bourdieu portrayed colonialism as a racialized system of domination, backed by force, which restructures social relations and creates hybrid cultures. His theory entailed insights on the limits and promises of colonial reform, anticolonial revolution, and postcolonial liberation. Bourdieu's early thinking on colonialism drew upon but extended French colonial studies of the time. It also contains the seeds of later concepts like habitus, field, and reflexive sociology while prefiguring more recent disciplinary postcolonial studies. Bourdieusian sociology in this sense originates not just as a study of Algeria but more specifically a critique of colonialism. It can be seen as contributing to the larger project of postcolonial sociology.
Keywords
Bourdieu, colonialism, postcolonialism, habitus, field
The Arabs of La Peste and L'Etranger [by Albert Camus] are nameless beings used as back- ground for the portentous European metaphysics explored by Camus. ... Is it farfetched to draw an analogy between Camus and Bourdieu in Outline of a Theory' of Practice, perhaps the most influential theoretical text in anthropology today, which makes no mention of colonialism?
-Edward Said (1989:223)
[T]here never existed in Algeria a truly isolated community, completely untouched by the colonial situation.
-Pierre Bourdieu (1959:63).
Pierre Bourdieu's vast intellectual influence is expressed in the diverse topics to which his ideas have been applied. His concepts have been deployed to study nearly everything- education, kinship, unemployment, religion, globalization, art, literature, the state, gender, the body, immigration, the media, and so on. Yet, Bourdieu's work is not renowned for studies of colonialism and associated matters of social transformation, racial difference, or intercultural domination in non-Western contexts. This article argues that it should be.
On the one hand, we know that Bourdieu's early work from 1957 to the early 1960s was on Algerian society. This was when he served in the French military in Algeria, taught at the University of Algiers, and did his first fieldwork on the Kabyle that would eventually lead to his famous theory of practice (Bourdieu 1977, 1990a). We also know that...