Making the Economic Habitus

During the war of national liberation Algeria offered a quasi-laboratory situation for analysing the mismatch between the economic dispositions fashioned in a precapitalist economy, embedded in relations of group honour, and the rationalized economic cosmos imposed by colonization. Ethnographic observation of this mismatch revealed that, far from being axiomatic, the most elementary economic behaviours (working for a wage, saving, credit, birth control, etc.) have definite economic and social conditions of possibility which both economic theory and the `new economic sociology' ignore. Acquiring the spirit of calculation required by the modern economy entails a veritable conversion via the apostasy of the embodied beliefs that underpin exchange in traditional Kabyle society. The `folk economics' of a cook from Algiers allows us to grasp the practical economic sense guiding the emerging Algerian working class at the dawn of the country's independence.