Between 1954 and 1960, in the midst of the Algerian War, more than two million Algerian peasants – a quarter of the population – were forcibly resettled. They were removed from their homes and villages and relocated in camps controlled by the French military in what was one of the largest and most brutal displacements of a rural population in history.
It was in this context of colonial violence that Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad set out to examine transformations in the fundamental structures of peasant economy and thought. By destroying the spatial and temporal frameworks of ordinary existence and reorganizing the life of peasants, the process of uprooting completed what the imperial policy of land confiscation and the spread of monetary exchange had started: the ‘depeasantization’ of agrarian communities stripped of the social and cultural means to make sense of the present and orient themselves to the future. This destruction of the traditional way of life was exacerbated by the quasi-urban conditions of the resettlement shantytowns, which brought about irreversible transformations in economic attitudes at the same time as they accelerated the contagion of needs, plunging the uprooted individuals into a ‘traditionalism of despair’ suited to daily survival in conditions of extreme uncertainty. Through their detailed analysis of these processes Bourdieu and Sayad provide a powerful account both of the destruction of a traditional way of life and of the brutal effects of colonial power.
This classic text, now published in English for the first time, will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, politics, migration studies, postcolonial studies and the social sciences and humanities generally, and to anyone concerned with the impact of colonization and its aftermath.
By:
Pierre Bourdieu (Collège de France),
Abdelmayek Sayad
Imprint: Polity Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 20mm
Weight: 363g
ISBN: 9780745623542
ISBN 10: 0745623549
Pages: 250
Publication Date: 19 June 2020
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
,
A / AS level
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
"List of Maps, Diagrams and Tables vii Note on Transcription and Transliteration ix Acknowledgments xi Foreword Loïc Wacquant xii Introduction 1 1 Forced Resettlement and the Logic of Colonialism 4 Forced resettlement and property laws 4 Landless peasants 5 Traditionalism of despair 7 Disdain and confusion 10 2 Two Histories, Two Societies 15 Acculturation and deculturation 15 Two exemplary societies: the Collo Massif and the Chélif Valley 16 Cultural transactions and colonial interventionism 18 Types of authority and types of intervention 19 The contradictions of colonial ideology and the contradiction of colonialism 21 Specifics of the study 23 3 Forced Resettlement and the Crisis of Traditional Agriculture 28 Dangers, control, and harassment 28 Kerkera: objective obstacles 30 Aïn-Aghbel: effect exceeds cause 32 Djebabra: partial and elective abandonment 35 4 The Discovery of Work 38 Employment and the awareness of unemployment 38 Experience of wages and attitudes to work 43 The prestige of a ""trade"" (metier) 46 A widespread attitude 48 Economic attitudes and family traditions 49 Time convertible into money 52 Discovering the scarcity of work 55 5 Tafallahu or the Consummate Peasant 58 Portrait of the ""naif' 58 From naivety to folly 61 ""Peasants of the end of time"" 66 6 Farming Without Farmers 70 Refusal to admit 70 Unavowed disavowal 73 The alibi and the admission 75 The separation 78 7 Town-Dwellers Without a Town 82 From clan to household 83 Confronting differences 85 The broken group 89 From familiarity to anonymity 92 The urban situation and peasant values 101 Space, time, and values 108 8 The Cultural Sabir 116 Coexistence of contraries 117 Djeha's nail 121 Two contradictory abstractions 123 The educator and the bureaucrat 126 Appendices Appendix I Glossary and Place Names 129 Appendix II The Forced Resettlement Centers of the Collo Massif 141 Appendix III The Forced Resettlement Centers of the Chélif Valley 155 Appendix IV One Aspect of Depeasantization: The Discovery of Illness 170 Notes 176 Index 209"
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) was one of the most influential sociologists and anthropologists of the twentieth century. He was Professor of Sociology at the Collège de France and Director of Studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Abdelmalek Sayad (1933-1998) was an Algerian Sociologist and Director of Research at the CNRS and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales.
Reviews for Uprooting: The Crisis of Traditional Algriculture in Algeria
Uprooting is at once a stunning document on colonial conflagration and a pioneering analysis of its distinctive rationale that will enrich the rapidly growing scholarship on empires, colonies and postcolonies. Loic Wacquant, University of California, Berkeley A classic text that is as relevant today as it was almost 60 years ago. As such, it provides a critical contribution to scholarship on post-conflict recovery and/or postcolonial studies and should constitute foundational reading for scholars working in these areas. Rural Sociology Uprooting [is] ... an impressive early study that went beyond narrow policy analysis to encompass a major multi-site project grounded in a thorough understanding of the colonial history and current situation, and helped spark some of the most important general theoretical concepts in the social sciences. Anuac
