ARTICLE graphy Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com Vol 5(4): 617–621[DOI: 10.1177/1466138104048830] The odyssey of reappropriation ■ Pierre Bourdieu Collège de France Translated by Loïc Wacquant T R A N S L A T O R ’ S N O T E ■ A prolific writer, playwright, poet, linguist, and anthropologist of his native Kabylia and of the range of Berber-speaking populations, Mouloud Mammeri was born in 1917, the son of the mayor of his mountain village and a traditional poetic bard (anusnaw) He was schooled in Algiers, Rabat, and Paris, where he graduated in literature from the Sorbonne in 1938 After fighting in World War II, he taught French in the interior of Algeria, published his first essays on Kabyle culture and the colonial question, and earned a growing reputation as a novelist, especially due to his trilogy of ‘ethnographic novels’, La Colline oubliée (1952), Le Sommeil du juste (1955), and L’Opium et le bâton (1965) He spent the war of national liberation in forced exile in Morocco before coming back to Algiers in 1962, where he became president of the Union of Algerian Writers and a professor of Berber language and North-African ethnology at the University of Algiers He directed its Center for Anthropological, Prehistorical, and Ethnographic Research from 1969 until 1982, fostering the ‘Algerianization’ of social research and the development of field studies covering the gamut of regions and ethnicities of Algeria, with a strong focus on Berber oral cultures and interdisciplinary cooperation, despite the growing hostility of the authorities towards anthropological research In 1985 he founded the Center for the Study of Amazigh Culture (CERAM) and its journal Awal (‘the word’) in Paris, which Pierre Bourdieu helped baptize with a joint article entitled ‘On the Proper Uses of Ethnology’ (Bourdieu and Mammeri, 1985) Mammeri is the author of numerous books on Berber language and grammar, poetry, ethnography, and literature, and he was a leading exponent of Kabyle resistance to the forced ‘arabization’ of his people by 618 E t h n o g r a p h y 5(4) the Algerian state that entailed popular uprisings and ferocious repression over the past two decades When Mammeri died from a car accident on 25 February 1989, Pierre Bourdieu wrote his eulogy in Le Monde (Bourdieu, 1989) This article is the text of a presentation read in absentia at a conference held in Algiers on ‘The Maghrebine Dimension of Mouloud Mammeri’ (for more on Mammeri’s work, its intellectual impact and social import, see Awal, 1990, Chaker, 2001, and Yacine, 2001) I would have wanted to be amongst you, today, to take part in the homage given to Mouloud Mammeri and his work, and say what in my eyes constitutes his major contribution to the culture of this country I would like to show, briefly, that the history of the relation of Mouloud Mammeri to his originary society and culture can be described as an odyssey, with a first movement of distancing towards shores unknown and full of seductions, followed by a lengthy and slow return dotted with traps, toward his native land This odyssey is, in my view, the path that all those who are issued out of a dominated society or a dominated class or region inside dominant societies, must tread in order to find or recover themselves It is in this sense that the itinerary of Mouloud Mammeri is for me exemplary The first stage, then, is the movement that one must make to appropriate culture, culture tout court, that which needs no qualifier and which experiences itself as universal, that which is officially taught in universities and that one can acquire only by leaving at the door a whole world of things – often one’s native tongue and everything that goes with it This movement of repudiation, of disavowal, more often than not ignores itself as such: it is always effected, at any rate, with the consent of those who effect it, and it is accompanied by a certain form of happiness The process could stop here and many are those who, being integrated within the dominant universe, being known and recognized by the society and culture they recognize, ask for no more Mouloud Mammeri begins where so many others would have ended: the French-language writer goes back to listen in on the poets-blacksmiths, the poets-demiurges (Homer repeatedly uses the word demiourgos to designate the poet), and he records the poems they craft, often as sophisticated as those of the symbolist poets of the late 19th century He who had to pay his access to legitimate culture with a sort of symbolic murder of the father joins again with the paternal culture But with respect to this long-repressed culture, it is still a dominated intention of rehabilitation that propels him to get interested in it And he remains attached to models that lead him to seek ennobling references in the most high-ranking figures of Western poetry, such as Victor Hugo It is Bourdieu ■ The odyssey of reappropriation only when, on the occasion of our dialogues,1 he discovers a figure of Homer that his academic masters were not able to reveal to him, that his inquiries on the ancient Kabyle poets and his ethnological research cease to develop onto two separate planes A Homer constituted in his anthropological truth, and thus snatched from the unrealness of academic fiction, is thus joined in the Berber amusnaw, upon whom he confers an incontestable form of consecration Thus, as we see, the journey is long which leads to find again the hill, for a moment forgotten.2 The work that leads to a reappropriation of one’s culture of origin, through a victory over cultural shame, is a veritable socioanalysis that one is never sure to have accomplished to the full Especially because the overcoming of the initial disavowal cannot take the form of a disavowal of that which determined it, that is, of all the resources offered by the dominant culture What no doubt makes for the difficulty of the advance toward self-reconciliation is that the instruments that enable one to reappropriate one’s renounced culture are supplied by the very culture that imposed renunciation The final cunning of dominant culture resides perhaps in the fact that the revolt it elicits risks to forbid one from appropriating the instruments, such as ethnology, whose mastery is the condition for the recovery of the culture of which it fostered the disavowal Mouloud Mammeri succeeded in spoiling this ultimate cunning He was one of the first to impose ethnology in Kabylia and to accompany his personal work of reappropriation of self with an effort to develop a collective work of reappropriation of a culture forgotten or repressed I would not want to reduce to only one of its aspects an oeuvre that is fundamentally plural, multifaceted, and no one is more concerned than I to protect it from all the attempts at appropriation of which it will be the object Nonetheless, I believe that the personal conversion that Mouloud Mammeri had to effect in order to find again the ‘forgotten hill’, to return to the native world, is no doubt what he wanted, more than anything else, to share with all, not only with his fellow-citizens, his brothers and sisters in repression, in cultural alienation, but also with those who, subjected to whatever form of symbolic domination, are doomed to this supreme form of dispossession that is the shame of self Acknowledgements This article is the translation of Pierre Bourdieu, ‘L’odyssée de la réappropriation’, Awal Revue d’études berbères, 18, November 1998, pp 5–6 (which first appeared in Algiers in the weekly Le Pays, 27 June–3 July 1992) It is published here by kind permission of Jérôme Bourdieu and the journal The notes and references are by the translator 619 620 E t h n o g r a p h y 5(4) Notes This exchange took place in Paris in 1977 and was published as ‘A dialogue on oral poetry in Kabylia’, in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (Mammeri and Bourdieu, 1978) It is translated into English in this issue This is a reference to Mouloud Mammeri’s best known novel, La Colline oubliée (1952), a meditation on the overturning of the traditional cultural order of the Kabyle highlands by war and colonial intrusion that was made into a movie of the same title by noted Kabyle director Abderrahmane Bouguermouh in 1997 This novel made Mammeri the co-founder of (French-language) ‘Algerian literature’, along with Mouloud Feraoun’s Le Fils du pauvre (1951) and Mohammed Dib’s La Grande maison (1952) References Awal Cahiers d’études berbères (1990) Special issue in homage to Mouloud Mammeri Bourdieu, Pierre (1989) ‘Mouloud Mammeri ou la colline retrouvée’, Le Monde, March (also in Awal Cahiers d’études berbères [1989] (November): 1–3) Bourdieu, Pierre and Mouloud Mammeri (1985) ‘Du bon usage de l’ethnologie’, Awal Cahiers d’études berbères 1: 7–29 Chaker, Salem (2001) ‘Mouloud Mammeri’, in Dictionnaire Biographique de la Kabylie Vol Hommes et Femmes de Kabylie Aix-en-Provence: Edisud Mammeri, Mouloud (1958) La Colline oubliée Paris: Plon (Pocketbook ed Gallimard/Folio, 1992.) Mammeri, Mouloud and Pierre Bourdieu (1978) ‘Dialogue sur la poésie orale en Kabylie’ (Translated in this issue) Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 23 (September): 51–66 Yacine, Tassadit (2001) ‘Écrivain et chercheur: le cas de Mouloud Mammeri’, in Chacal ou la ruse des dominés Aux origines du malaise des intellectuels algériens, pp 229–50 Paris: La Découverte PIERRE BOURDIEU held the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France, where he directed the Center for European Sociology and the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales until his passing in 2002 He is the author of numerous classics of sociology and anthropology, including Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (1970, tr 1977), Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972, tr 1977), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979, tr 1984), Homo Academicus (1984, tr 1988), and The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Artistic Field (1992, tr 1996) ■ Bourdieu ■ The odyssey of reappropriation Among his ethnographic works are Le Déracinement La crise de l’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie (with Adbelmalek Sayad, 1964), Algeria 1960 (1977, tr 1979), The Weight of the World (1993, tr 1998), and Le Bal des célibataires (2002) ■ The picture in this article © Pierre Bourdieu/Fondation Pierre Bourdieu, Geneva Courtesy: Camera Austria, Graz 621 ... Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979, tr 1984), Homo Academicus (1984, tr 1988), and The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Artistic Field (1992, tr 1996) ■ Bourdieu ■ The odyssey of reappropriation. .. in on the poets-blacksmiths, the poets-demiurges (Homer repeatedly uses the word demiourgos to designate the poet), and he records the poems they craft, often as sophisticated as those of the symbolist... overcoming of the initial disavowal cannot take the form of a disavowal of that which determined it, that is, of all the resources offered by the dominant culture What no doubt makes for the difficulty