The Case of Kabylia: Explaining Elective Affinities in Bourdieu’s Mediterranean

A recurrent paradox accompanies Pierre Bourdieu's description of his relation to his earliest field site: the people of Kabylia are frequently evoked as ‘at once exotic and familiar’. In the present article I ask what conditions must prevail for such a depiction to be possible. Taking up work conducted in recent years concerning the details of Bourdieu's fieldwork, its theoretical presuppositions, and its place within the declining French empire, I propose that Bourdieu's depiction is predicated on what Herzfeld calls ‘practical Mediterraneanism’: an ideology of the Mediterranean as a cultural region that permits Bourdieu to negotiate his colonial position, by transmuting a power relation into a relation of cultural similarity. Yet I aim to avoid imputing to Bourdieu a subjective failing in this regard, whether through cynical manipulation or simple error. Instead, pausing on the performative dimension of Bourdieu's texts, I examine what his representations of the Kabyle do throughout his oeuvre and how these are bound by particular intellectual, existential, and political problems that arise at different times