A deliberate oversight? Bourdieu at the Kabyle assembly

Pierre Bourdieu’s fieldwork in Algeria was foundational for the development of his theoretical apparatus. Recent research has noted the many oddities and idiosyncrasies of Bourdieu’s ethnographic descriptions; yet little has been said about the ways in which the circumstances of his fieldwork and his later positioning within the French intellectual field changed the substantial content of his descriptions and thereby influenced his theoretical tools. Here I would like to take a first step in this direction, by taking a closer look at the notion of politics as he developed it during his Algerian research, a conceptualization that led him to privilege accounts of domination over descriptions of forms of horizontal political action, which in Kabylia was most clearly represented by village assemblies.