2025/01/30 by Muriam Haleh Davis · 1 voice · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice #Social and Cultural Dynamics
paper · doi:10.1093/sf/soaf005
openalex publication_date 2025/01/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
In Le déracinement, an account of the crisis of traditional agriculture in French Algeria, Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad wrote, “The colonial system survives as long as the contradictions it has left behind are effectively overcome” (p. 157). Amín Pérez’s book (an English translation of his 2022 Combattre en sociologies, Agone, 2022) sheds light on how their work in colonial Algeria contributed to the emergence of sociology as a discipline and analyzes the political commitments that underscored their research. Both scholars self-identified as liberals and distanced themselves from Algerian nationalists as well as French anti-colonial leftists. Rather than throw in their lot with the FLN (National Liberation Front), they committed themselves to the sociological knowledge that would make a true revolution possible. In other words, they were convinced that a study of symbolic violence would be a “starting point for any social emancipation” (p. 1). The first part of the book focuses on the biographical trajectories of both men, tracing their upbringings as well as their intellectual and social affiliations. Sayad and Bourdieu met at the University of Algiers in 1958, four years into the War of Independence. Bourdieu’s liberal stance was rooted in his discomfort with the Marxist theorizing fashionable in leftist French circles, where colleagues rushed to embrace the “spontaneous capacities of the resistance of the Algerian people” while neglecting “the structural effects of colonization on society itself” (p. 62). On the other hand, Sayad’s social position and personal experiences shed light on his reticence to fully embrace the FLN. His family had long played a role as intermediaries with the French, and he himself almost perished in the 1956 Soummam massacres, when up to a thousand Algerians were brutally killed by nationalist compatriots who suspected them of having collaborated with the French. Both men were therefore “déracinés” (uprooted) in some way. Perez’s research elucidates the conditions faced by social scientists working in Algeria, but it also seeks to explain the emergence of sociology as a new discipline in the 1950s. In the eyes of many scholars, sociology represented a break with the Eurocentric vision that took the capitalist system - as well as its cultural and social structures - as a universal lens.