This volume makes available to English-language scholars a collection of Pierre Bourdieu's early writings on Algeria. Bourdieu wrote or conceptualized many of the pieces while working in Algeria during the revolution (1954–1962), initially on assignment with the French military and subsequently as a professor at the University of Algiers (1958–1961). The book encompasses six sections plus an introduction by the anthropologist Tassadit Yacine that usefully situates Bourdieu's writings within the political context of the times.

This book's major contribution is to enable scholars to trace the development of Bourdieu's social theory in relation to the specific historical and ethnographic conditions that he encountered in Algeria. Its first three sections sketch the foundations of Bourdieu's significant work on symbolic capital and economic exchange, and of the social formation that he would later term “habitus.”

The essays in Part 1, “Colonization, Culture and Society,” lay out a problem that would preoccupy Bourdieu from his earliest encounters with Algeria: how to conceptualize and assess the impact of one “civilisation” on another. The framework of rupture and disenchantment that would characterize all of Bourdieu's corpus on Algeria is apparent from the title of one of his earliest essays, “The Clash of Civilisations” (1959), where he posited that French colonial occupation had resulted in the “catastrophic disintegration of the cultural ensemble” (p. 40). Other essays in this section elaborate on the “logics” of time and economic behavior and offer an early sketch of his well-known work on economic exchange, and seek to establish the “internal logic” (72) or “spirit” (75) of traditional Algerian society, foregrounding his later work on habitus. Essays in Part 2, “War and Social Mutations,” consider the nature and impacts of the revolution on the peasantry and urban sub-proletariat. Countering the French Marxist Left, Bourdieu contended that anticolonial revolution could not be equated with class struggle; rather, the war simultaneously marked the indigenous refusal of the colonial system and a radical upheaval in the Algerian social order, thus constituting a “revolution in the revolution” (the title of one essay).

The theme of upheaval continues in Part 3, “Workers and Peasants in Disarray,” where essays draw on Bourdieu's ethnographic and sociological fieldwork in wartime resettlement camps and among urban laborers. These are richly documented with extensive interview and survey data and represent material previously unavailable in English. In the wartime context, Bourdieu's analysis of the destruction wrought by French colonialism on Algerian society constituted a courageous political stance. He put ethnography to the service of critique long before it became fashionable to do so. As a theoretical project, however, the stark conditions of wartime ethnography may have led him to overplay the contrast between rooted or traditional peasants and uprooted, disenfranchised ones, to neglect the ways Algerians may have successfully navigated between colonial and indigenous systems, and to invent an imagined precolonial social order that probably never existed.

Parts 4 through 6 offer a more personalized and self-reflexive portrayal of Bourdieu as a scholar and testify to his engagement with Algerian intellectuals. Part 4, “The Ethnology of Kabylia,” features two extended interviews with prominent Kabyle scholar and novelist Mouloud Mammeri, one on oral poetry and the other on the possibilities and problematics of colonial ethnology. The pieces in Parts 5 and 6, “A Reflexive Definition of Anthropology and “Return to the Algerian Experience,” offer critical self-reflection, something Bourdieu did little of in his ethnographic work. Here, Bourdieu considers the nature of participant observation fieldwork, reflects on his early research in Algeria, discusses his use of wartime photography (in an interview with the sociologist Franz Schultheis), and shares a testimonial he wrote for his friend and longtime collaborator Abdelmalek Sayad. An appendix reproduces Bourdieu's letters to the Algerian historian André Nouschi.

Euro-American readers may be unaware of the degree to which Bourdieu's theoretical problematics and proclivities emerged from the specificities of the French-Algerian relationship. This book has the great merit of making available a relatively neglected body of Bourdieu's work that will enable scholars to situate the development of Bourdieusian theory in relation to the ethnographic and political contexts out of which it emerged. Tassadit Yacine has done a tremendous service to scholars of sociology, anthropology, and history in bringing these scattered and little-known writings together in one volume.