By AFRANIO CATANI*
Comment about the book by Pierre Bourdieu
The American version of Pierre Bourdieu's book is an expanded edition of the original, Images of Algeria (2003), containing a preface by Craig Calhoun, an introduction by Franz Schultheis (also including an interview with the sociologist in June 2001), a commentary on the photos by Christine Frisinghelli and a list of 35 texts (books, academic articles, prefaces and journalistic interventions) that he wrote about Algeria.
Pierre Bourdieu arrived in Algeria in October 1955, aged 25, to complete his military service. The sending to the African country was, in reality, a punishment for his opposition to the repression that France unleashed against its then colony, which was fighting for independence, in a bloody revolutionary war (1954-1962).
Until months before being mobilized, he was stationed in Versailles. In 1956 and 1957 he read everything he could find about Algeria, finished his military obligations, returned to France, published Sociologie de l'Algérie (1958) and voluntarily returned as a university professor in Algiers.
The work presents more than 160 photos taken by Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of 1960, in the midst of war at a particular moment in his intellectual career: without fully realizing it, he was becoming a social scientist, distancing himself by leaps and bounds from his refined philosophical training.
In the excellent introduction, Christine Schultheis says that the photographs – almost two thousand, many lost, others without negatives – were stored in dusty boxes for 40 years. Only a few were used by Pierre Bourdieu in his books – cases of Work and labor in Algérie (with Alain Darbel, Jean-Paul Rivet and Claude Seibel, 1963); Le déracinement: the crisis of traditional agriculture in Algérie (with Abdelmalek Sayad, 1964); Algérie 60: economic structures and temporary structures, 1977 – and in articles.
The rest were unpublished until the publication of Images of Algeria and the exhibitions that took place in Institut du Monde Arabe, in Paris (January and November 2003).
Pierre Bourdieu's photographs were often taken in various dramatic situations, such as in the Collo region. Photographing people was, for the researcher, a way of telling them “I'm interested in you, I'm on your side. I will listen to you and witness what you are experiencing” (p. 13). Such photos help us to better understand, in the Algerian case, the dimensions and consequences of the economic situation and social unrest that increasingly affect entire sectors of the country's population, which was faced with a new logic, with totally flexible demands, which broke with history and with the traditional ties they have experienced until then (p. 4-5).
Pierre Bourdieu explores and documents the interdependence between economic structures and temporal structures, taking an interest in the phenomenology of emotional structures, manifested in the analysis of forms of suffering that result from the conflict between mental and emotional dispositions (the habitus of social actors) and the economic and social structures of colonial society (p. 3).
Looking at the photos that document the abject conditions and suffering of the Algerian people, as well as their dignity, grace and determination, and reading the fundamental excerpts from Pierre Bourdieu's work that accompany these images, it is possible to establish a parallel between the “uprooted” farmer of the Kabyle and the unregulated and destroyed employee of today in capitalist societies.
Just compare the testimonies presented in the collective work he organized, the misery of the world, with those transcribed in books about Algeria, forty years earlier. It is for this reason that Pierre Bourdieu said, about his Algerian research, the following: “this is my oldest work and at the same time the most current”.
*Afranio Catani He is a retired professor at the Faculty of Education at USP and is currently a senior professor at the same institution. Visiting professor at the Faculty of Education at UERJ (Duque de Caxias campus).
Reference
Pierre Bourdieu. Picturing Algeria. Edited by Franz Schultheis and Christine Frisinghelli. New York, Columbia University Press, 2012, 248 pages. [https://amzn.to/3Y4eSlx]
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