Dr Judith Scheele (EHESS)
A deliberate oversight? Bourdieu at the Kabyle assembly
Pierre Bourdieu’s fieldwork in Algeria was foundational for the development of his main theoretical concepts. These, in turn, continue to loom large in the social scientific common sense. Recent research has conclusively analysed the many oddities, shortcomings and idiosyncrasy of Bourdieu’s ethnographic descriptions; few, however, have pointed to his glaring omission of the role of local assemblies, which, by all accounts, were, then as now, at the heart of local conflicts and disputes.
My paper attempts to elucidate this omission, understanding it as symptomatic of a larger shift in socio-anthropological approaches to politics, from a focus on particular political institutions to more general accounts of domination; from politics as a local practice and category to politics as an analytical framework. This has, in many cases, left anthropologists (and others) at a loss for words when attempting to describe phenomena that are not bound up with modern-state formations or governance.
I will then suggest that a renewed attention to non-sovereign institutions, treating them not so much as Durkheimian ‘social facts’ than as ongoing processes and spaces of political debate and conflict, might point a way out of the resulting impasse. Northwest African assemblies might in fact provide a starting point for the development of a truly comparative political theory.
Lecture theatre A, Arts School is located here: https://map.cam.ac.uk/Lecture+Theatre+A#52.203448,0.119533,17