Following Pierre Bourdieu into the field

Attending to Bourdieu’s early field studies conducted concurrently in colonial Algeria and in his childhood village of Béarn in southwestern France sets his scientific approach and output into a new light: it reveals the twinned ethnographic roots of his theoretical enterprise; it dissolves the caricatural figure of the ‘reproduction theorist’ oblivious to historical change; and it dispels the academic fiction of the ‘practice theorist’ by displaying how Bourdieu’s conceptual innovations (such as the reintroduction of habitus) were driven by questions of field research centered on social transformation, cultural disjuncture, and the fissuring of consciousness. Using each site as a living laboratory to cross-analyze the other enabled Bourdieu to discover the specificity of the ‘universally prelogical logic of practice’ and led him to break out of the structuralist paradigm. It also stimulated him to translate his existential disquiet with the scholastic posture into a methodical return onto the operations and tools of objectivation that evolved into his trademark stance of epistemic reflexivity. Recoupling his youthful inquiries in Kabylia and Béarn further reveals how, foreshadowing the ‘repatriation’ of anthropology after the close of the imperial age, Bourdieu revoked the dominant conception of ethnography as a heroic exploration of otherness and pioneered multi-sited ethnography as a means for controlling the construction of the object. Bourdieu’s paired field studies of social structure and sentiment in the far-away colony and the mother-country not only efface in practice the disciplinary division between sociology and anthropology. They demonstrate that one can conduct ‘insider ethnography’ and acknowledge the social embeddedness and split subjectivity of the inquirer without reducing ethnography to story-telling and forsaking social theory for poetry. Indeed, the ‘participant objectivation’ that Bourdieu sought to achieve and exemplify in his linked trans-Mediterranean investigations aimed to buttress the scientific underpinnings of fieldwork and points up his conception of social science as an instrument of self-appropriation.