Goldsmiths - University of London

Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria: Testimonies of Uprooting

Photographic Exhibition

Kingsway Corridor, Richard Hoggart (Main) Building

Goldsmiths, University of London

October 2006 - May 2007

Upcoming seminar - Friday 4 May 2007

The exhibition is part of an ESRC Seminar Series on 'Thinking With Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria: Testimonies of Uprooting', initiated by Nirmal Puwar and Les Back of the Methods Lab, in collaboration with Azzedine Haddour (UCL), Derek Robbins (UEL), as well the curators of the exhibition - Franz Schultheis (President of the Pierre Bourdieu Foundation, Geneva) and Christine Frisinghelli (Camera Austria, Graz) - both of whom have generously supported the project.

The series utilizes the exhibition as an opportunity to open up a dialogue on the place of intellectuals in war, the consequences of colonialism and post-colonialism on questions of land, work and homelessness. Above all, the presence of the photographs presents the need to re-visit the influence of Algeria, as a colony and a post-colony, on the formation of French social theory. The neglect of colonial contexts upon theoretical perspectives that continue to impress huge influence upon our contemporary tools of analysis is indicative of the ways in which histories of social and political thought have eclipsed particular landscapes and formations in the writing process.

For Bourdieu, the years he spent doing research in Algeria (1958 -1961), during the period of the war of Liberation, continued to have an enduring impact upon both his theoretical formulations as well as how he intervened and conducted himself as an intellectual. His research resulted in the books: Sociologie de l'Algérie (1958), Travail et travailleurs en Algérie (1963), Le Déracinement: La crise de L'agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie (with Abdelmalek Sayad, 1964) and Algérie 60, structures economiques et structures temporelles (1997). However, the majority of the vast number of photographs he took during this period remained private. Towards the latter part of his life Bourdieu began to develop a plan for exhibiting the photographs, in conversation with Franz Schultheis and Christine Frisinghelli. He himself though passed away in early 2002, before the completion of the exhibition.