Pierre Bourdieu
- Life and work

In 1957, he abandoned his doctoral dissertation to devote himself to ethnological and sociological fieldwork in Algeria. He taught himself ethnographic methods and, driven by a desire to gain a deeper understanding of Algerian society, remained in the country’s capital even after his military service. He accepted a lectureship at the Faculté des Lettres in Algiers. Between 1958 and 1960, he conducted field research on Berber culture – work that, under the conditions of war, was often risky and dangerous. In Kabylia, Bourdieu collaborated with the local Pères Blancs, Catholic missionaries from the Society of Missionaries of Africa. With the support of a small team of collaborators, he carried out two large-scale social science surveys: one focused on the concept of labor in urban environments, and the other on “uprooted” peasants living in relocation camps established by the French.

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Bourdieu remained throughout his life an unconventional thinker who moved between disciplines and academic cultures. As a critical intellectual, he questioned the legitimacy of the colonial war and consistently took political positions on pressing issues. At a time when colonized populations were often denied not only economic rationality but also culture itself, he sought to rehabilitate the oppressed both materially and symbolically. He did this by identifying and documenting their forms of rationality, thereby offering the West (particularly the French) an opportunity to understand them.

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Between 1958 and 1961, Bourdieu took roughly 3,000 photographs capturing everyday life – and its specificities during colonization and war – in Algeria. Some of these images appeared as cover photographs for his books or as illustrations in his publications. His first book, Sociologie de l’Algérie, was published in 1958, followed by several initially unpublished manuscripts and academic articles. In his later, highly diverse body of work, he returned repeatedly to the North African context, most notably in his influential 1972 Outline of a Theory of Practice (Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique. Précédé de Trois études d’ethnologie kabyle).

 

Pierre Bourdieu on his project:

“I came to Algeria as a conscript. After two rather hard years, during which there was no question of doing any scholarly work, I was finally able to return to it. I began writing a book (Sociologie de l’Algérie) with the aim of making known and tangible the reality of this country and the tragic situation in which the Algerians found themselves – not only them, but also the Algerian-French, whose condition was no less dramatic, whatever one might say about their racism, and so on. I was struck by the gap between the French intellectuals’ ideas about this war and how it should be ended, and my own impressions, what I saw with my own eyes. I wanted to be of use, perhaps only to quiet my own guilty conscience. I did not want to content myself with reading books and going to libraries. In a historical moment when the entire reality was at stake in every instant, every political declaration, every conversation, every petition, it was absolutely necessary to go to the scene in person and form one’s own view – no matter how dangerous that might be, and it was dangerous.” [Bourdieu, 1986, p. 146, trans. by the authors of this website with AI support]. 

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After returning to France, Bourdieu served from 1960 to 1961 as an assistant to Raymond Aron, who supported his research projects at the Faculty of Philosophy at the Sorbonne. This was followed by visiting professorships and research stays at Princeton and at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.

In 1963, together with Alain Darbel, Jean-Paul Revet, and Claude Seibel, he published studies on the emergence of wage labor and an urban proletariat in Algiers (Travail et travailleurs en Algérie).

In 1964, he co-authored with Abdelmalek Sayad a work on the crisis of traditional agriculture, the destruction of society, and the resettlement operations carried out by the French army (Le Déracinement).

Many of Bourdieu’s later works draw on his ethnological and sociological research in Algeria, in particular his publications on the theory of practice – Esquisse d'une théorie de la pratique (1972), based on the ethnological study of Kabyle society, and Le Sens pratique (1980) – as well as his late work La domination masculine (engl.L Masculine Domination) from 1998.

 

Since 1975, he had been the editor of the research series Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. In 1964, Bourdieu moved to the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), where in 1968, with Raymond Aron’s support, he founded the Centre de sociologie européenne (CSE), becoming its director in 1985.

In 1981, Bourdieu entered the “Olympus of French science and intellectual life” when he was appointed to a chair in sociology at the Collège de France, one of the most prestigious positions in the French academic system. In 1993, he received the Médaille d’or of the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, the highest academic honor awarded in France. In 1997, he was awarded the Ernst Bloch Prize of the city of Ludwigshafen.

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Between 2000 and 2002, an exchange took place between Bourdieu, Camera Austria, and the Fondation Bourdieu. As a result, his photographic documents – long stored away in boxes – were reviewed, organized, and connected with his ethnographic and sociological studies. This initiative continues through this website and the book series Visual Forms of Sociological Knowledge – Pierre Bourdieu and Photography, published by transcript Verlag.