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The Proverbial Bourdieu: Habitus and the Politics of Representation in the Ethnography of Kabylia
Author(s) -
Goodman Jane E.
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1525/aa.2003.105.4.782
Subject(s) - habitus , sociology , ethnography , contextualization , politics , context (archaeology) , representation (politics) , privilege (computing) , epistemology , gender studies , anthropology , linguistics , history , law , interpretation (philosophy) , philosophy , archaeology , political science
Since the 1970s, anthropologists have been centrally concerned with the relationship of ethnographic representation to political and historical context. Interestingly, the work of Pierre Bourdieu has largely escaped such contextualization, despite the significance of Bourdieu's ideas to anthropological theorizing. Today, many of Bourdieu's central concepts float free from the context out of which they arose—the Kabyle region of Algeria. This article addresses this omission by reading Bourdieu's early works against each other to reconstitute aspects of his methodology and fieldwork. Focusing on his choice to represent the Kabyles of his early work in prose, and those in his later work via proverbs, I suggest that key premises of Bourdieu's theory may not be supported by historical and ethnographic evidence. I consider how Bourdieu's position as a young social scientist grappling with ethnographic responsibilities in colonial wartime led him to privilege his interlocutors' accounts in some studies while expunging them from others. [Keywords: Bourdieu, represented speech, literacy, Algeria, Berbers]