In Praise of Strategy

The founding act of Bourdieu’s program is a critique of ethnology, aimed primarily at its dominant form in the France of the 1960s and 1970s: the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss. For Bourdieu, however—himself an ethnographer of Kabylia—structuralism is only the most extreme form of the objectivist illusion inherent in the ethnologist’s position of exteriority relative to the society under study. This problem is, admittedly, common to all the social sciences: under the label of the “scholastic illusion,” Bourdieu was constantly highlighting the difficulties raised by the position of the researcher within the division of labor. As an agent “kept in reserve” away from production tasks, the intellectual tends spontaneously to project his or her disconnection from the world—the skholè, which suspends all sense of practical urgency—onto agents who seek not to interpret their environment but to act on it (Bourdieu 1972, 226; 1997). With ethnology, however, this exteriority is doubled, as the familiarity that sociologists always have with the members of their own society, to a greater or lesser degree depending on their class differential, is no longer present. The holism that comes so spontaneously to anthropologists, that of the model and the rule, owes much more to the nature of the ethnographic relationship than it does (as the evolutionists maintained) to the type of society studied. To believe that there are societies where the behaviors of agents really do obey rules—as opposed to modern societies where the rise of individualism means that we have to take account of interests—is to equate the ethnographer’s intellectual approach to activities whose practical grammar is unfamiliar with the determining principle of action (Bourdieu 1972, 227–239). That being the case, we cannot arrive at the “praxeological” knowledge that Bourdieu calls for unless we forever abandon the forms of explanation preferred by ethnologists.

Logically enough, it is in the field of kinship—the flagship of comparative anthropology ever since the Elementary Structures of Kinship (Lévi-Strauss 1949)—that Bourdieu sets up his stall. “La parenté comme représentation et comme volonté” (Kinship as representation and intention), outwardly an account of an exception that runs counter to the exchange theory of marriage—“Arab”-style marriage between parallel cousins—in fact uses this example to challenge the very foundations of the structuralist approach, which reasons in terms of kinship systems. The ethnologist, being “outside of practice,” and having no interest in the forms of marriage observed, takes a purely theoretical view of them (Bourdieu 1972, 108). This reduction of practice to theory, which Bourdieu calls “objectivism” because it ignores the viewpoint of the actors, is reflected in the primacy given to the legal language of the rule. Only someone who is not looking to get married can afford to overlook the obvious fact that the name of the game is not to marry by the rules but rather to marry well, and that, far from blindly following a rule that assigns them a preferential spouse, those involved adopt matrimonial strategies aimed at accumulating symbolic and economic capital. One must understand the violence of the struggles that lie behind the order of the rule: the supposed reciprocity of matrimonial exchanges masks a power play in which family trees are manipulated to present, in the most favorable light, alliances that could never be deduced from the logic of genealogy alone (122–125). Even names are usurped. Far from being a faithful reflection of genealogy, such marriages reflect a constant struggle for position: to name one’s son after a famous ancestor is to claim the prestige of the bloodline, to the detriment of other branches of the family (101).

This form of demystification is so well attuned to our critical common sense that it can be hard for us to perceive its paradoxical side. With a little effort of historicization, however, we can uncover a surprising turnaround in the economy of anthropological knowledge. The generations of anthropologists of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, such as Franz Boas, Marcel Mauss, and indeed Lévi-Strauss, fought to gain recognition for the idea that those who had hitherto been dismissed as savages in fact followed elaborate systems of norms. To pursue the theme of kinship, Lévi-Strauss’s theory of reciprocity showed that complex and seemingly irrational sets of rules could be reduced to a small number of perfectly coherent social integration mechanisms (Lévi-Strauss 1949). In other words, in the classical phase of anthropology, the collective norm is what elevates individual action. It is worth looking back at The Gift here. Mauss can hardly be accused of naïveté: the agonistic logic he sees at work in the potlatch proves that there is no such thing as a “free gift.” And yet, unlike Bourdieu’s, the thrust of his argument is not about unmasking the self-interested calculations that lie behind ostentatious shows of generosity. No, Mauss seeks to demonstrate that the economics of modern European societies cannot simply be reduced to utilitarian calculations, and that one cannot entirely ignore the archaic—in the sense of fundamental (Mauss would say “eternal”)—principle of the creation of reciprocity and obligation through exchange. The “archaic,” in other words, contains the truth about modernity, and it should lead us to identify and reactivate, in the modern world, forms of solidarity that cannot be reduced to purely mercantile logic, specifically in the form of social insurance mechanisms (Mauss [1923] 1950, 260). Bourdieu, on the other hand, uses modern economics as the yardstick of truth for a set of practices that the Kabyles (Algerian Berbers) themselves insist on presenting as disinterested: in his case, it is about demystifying the gift by comparing it to mercantile exchange, bringing to the surface forms of self-regarding calculation that such societies—in which the economy is not disembedded—refuse to acknowledge.

That this operation was presented as a way of enriching our conception of the agent in nonmodern societies says more about us, perhaps, than it does about the people under discussion. Its success shows that this type of demystification satisfied a key requirement in Western societies where, from the 1970s onward, strategic action became the only authentic form of action, while obedience to collective norms was relegated to the level of “mechanical” execution. In answer to Lévi-Strauss, who argued that the rules put in place by Australian societies to ensure harmonious social integration could only be understood by means of high-level formalization techniques, Bourdieu countered that structural anthropology reduced the individual to a puppet, governed by rigid rules, whereas individuals were in fact capable of cheating and of manipulating the norms to their own advantage (Bourdieu 1980, 167). This criticism is founded on the axiom that to respect social agents, one must accord them the status of homo economicus. Under the cover of a critique of narrow economism, the concept of symbolic capital allows individual optimizing rationality to be extended to behaviors that cannot be explained by the search for profit in an immediately material form. If we accept, with Durkheim, that the cult of the individual is the normative underpinning of modern societies (Durkheim 1893), then anthropology’s current crisis of explanation must be seen as a consequence of transformations in this curious religion: when the irreducibility of the individual to the group is held up as a core value in their own societies, anthropologists can no longer put forward holistic arguments without appearing to deny their informants the status of full-fledged subjects. Conversely, revealing individualistic strategies of material or symbolic capital accumulation among Kabyle peasants now passes as a kind of rehabilitation.

Rekindling Criticism

Denouncing the illusion inherent in the ethnologist’s position of exteriority is only the first step in Bourdieu’s critique. The real problem is that the ethnologist is the objective accomplice of the dominant class. By adopting the viewpoint of the rule, the ethnologist is a half-consenting victim of the official image that the group wants to present of itself. All too happy to find good informants who can supply systems of rules that correspond to the epistemological canons, the ethnologist generally holds back from pushing the questioning too far. In so doing he or she enshrines, as objective truth, the vision of the social order that the dominant succeed in imposing, to their advantage (Bourdieu 1972, 108, 148). As a result of this reversal of perspective, the so-called view from afar is requalified as an unquestioning adherence to the viewpoint of those in power: the ethnologist is the one who does not even have the bare minimum of critical distance shared by the dominating and the dominated, all of whom more or less know, often in rather obscure ways, just how much self-interested calculation goes into fabricating the social order. Although Bourdieu often couches it in epistemological terms, his critique of structural anthropology is above all a political one. The radicality of his stance goes well beyond the opposition between objectivism and subjectivism: Bourdieu’s sociology is not structuralism with a bit of phenomenology added on. It is the knowledge that there is no external viewpoint on society. From this perspective, ethnology, seen as a fundamentally conservative discourse, is reduced to an exaltation of the established order.

This devaluation of ethnology in favor of a sociology of domination is linked to the rekindling of a form of demystification that had been banned from anthropology decades earlier (Bourdieu 1980, 246). Anthropology had managed to obtain scientific legitimacy during the twentieth century only by suspending all criticism of the societies it studied. The critique of non-Western societies was, of course, central to the discourse of the colonial powers, a discourse embodied by the twin figures of the missionary and the administrator. Assertions that the Brahmans or the Marabouts were no more than crafty profiteers taking advantage of popular superstition to maintain their prestige, that local elites were corrupt and purely self-serving when they pretended to set out collective norms, or that the colonized societies forced women into abject submission were commonplace in the colonial literature of the nineteenth century.

The obligatory suspension of criticism by which ethnologists sought to free themselves from such value judgments does not of course imply that they adhered unreservedly to the norms and practices of the societies they described. Lévi-Strauss formulated a canonical version of this new professional ethic in a chapter of Tristes Tropiques in which he affirms that the degree of injustice is roughly the same in every society (1955, chap. 38). Every society is therefore a legitimate target of criticism. But the ethnologists’ position demands that they refrain from denouncing injustice in the societies they study. It is only in their own society that they have any right to push for political reform, as criticism can only come from within. In an asymmetrical power situation where the ethnologist belongs to a society that is richer and more powerful than the one studied, any criticism from the outside is automatically taken as a scientific justification for the domination exerted on these societies by states of European origin.

There is indisputably something transgressive about Bourdieu’s stance, but it can only be understood in the light of a broader history of criticism in the social sciences. We should therefore begin by taking a step back in time. With its suspension of criticism of the “Other,” while at the same time maintaining the possibility—even the requirement—of criticism “at home,” anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century triggered a general crisis in the type of criticism that had been introduced by classical sociology. The sociological critique, as defined by Durkheim and, with some variants, by the other founding fathers of the field, relied crucially on anthropology as it sought to find a balance between the modern and nonmodern elements within contemporary societies.

All true sociology is based on a duality of some sort. Unless they shut themselves away inside a static vision of the social order, sociologists and anthropologists cannot simply be content with describing its internal coherence. They must strive to reveal a tension between (at least) two heterogeneous principles of social organization. The most developed form of this model is found in Durkheim, in the form of the tension between mechanical solidarity, based on resemblance, and organic solidarity, based on the functional integration of difference (Durkheim 1893). But the opposition between status and contract in Henry Maine, between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in Ferdinand Tönnies, or between hierarchy and equality in Louis Dumont plays a similar role. Although these concepts do not map onto each other perfectly, it is obvious in each case that one of the principles is more modern, and is defined by reference to political economy and contract law, while the other is more nonmodern, and that it is through anthropology that we can grasp this other mode of social cohesion in its purest form. That being the case, the core problem of classical sociology is how to strike the right balance between these two elements. And as a general rule, the critical formula adopted by sociology is not to oppose the modernization of society but to show that this modernization needs to be held in check by ensuring that we never forget the nonmodern principle, which prevents modern society from dissolving into a disparate scattering of economic agents or legal subjects.³

This model, which underpinned the politics of the social sciences, was mortally wounded by the critique of evolutionism. Boas was probably one of the first to dispel the idea of a unitary scale of social evolution, arguing instead that societies are the fruit of histories that cannot be reduced to each other (Salmon 2013a). More widely, anthropology’s journey toward autonomy, as it gradually emancipated itself from its status as an auxiliary science to sociology, favored the conviction that “primitives” could not be plotted onto earlier stages of a historical timeline that the Europeans had covered more quickly than the rest, and that could somehow be identified from the progressive transition from one mode of solidarity to another. By the same token, the idea of using anthropology to avoid and rectify the excessive individualization of modern societies became inoperative: the rejection of evolutionism precluded the whole idea of slowing down modernization by reactivating nonmodern elements, since nonmodern was now defined as an imaginary retroprojection dreamed up by the moderns.

Incorporating Structuralism

What kind of explanation, what kind of critique, can anthropology bring to bear if its role is no longer to identify some sort of counterweight to modern individualism? This question, which loomed large over the last third of the twentieth century, continues to trouble us today, and the identification of optimizing strategies among the peasants of Kabylia offers a provocative answer: anthropology serves to demystify the belief in rules. Its task now is to give the social sciences a good lesson in individualism, and to cure them of their fictitious belief in a unified and harmonious social order. What makes this turnaround even more spectacular is that just a few years earlier, Bourdieu’s analysis of the same society in Le Déracinement remained within the orbit of the classical paradigm. In it, he described the trauma caused by the brutal entry into the market economy of peasants for whom utilitarian calculations remained an alien concept. The main thrust of his criticism is a denunciation of a forced march toward modernization: because it does not give Kabyle society the time it needs to adapt and reconfigure its traditional forms of solidarity, the regrouping of the population imposed by the French Army is presented as nothing less than a breakdown of society. Reading the description offered ten years later in Outline of a Theory of Practice, it is hard to believe that the Kabyle peasants, now portrayed as deft optimizers of symbolic and material capital—albeit while never openly admitting to it—could have been destabilized by the introduction into their working arrangements of a form of accounting.

Does this turnaround mean that the duality between mechanical integration, based on uniformity and rule, and organic integration, which leaves room for individual initiative and the interplay of interests, is now a thing of the past? And that anthropology, as penance for having long underestimated the individualization of nonmodern societies, must now reorganize itself around a strict methodological individualism? Bourdieu’s answer is actually more complex than that. It is not so much about eliminating the dualism inherited from the Durkheimian tradition as about rearticulating it in the form of a dialectic between the official and unofficial, of which his sociology represents, in some ways, a mirror image. The paradox, in other words, is that while anthropology is adopting individualistic instruments to reveal the mechanisms of domination in supposedly nonmodern societies, sociology is at the same time adopting—for domestic use—a set of holistic analytics with the aim of subverting the individualistic-meritocratic ideology that justifies the domination of one class over another.

To understand this curious dual-action mechanism, we need to consider the tense relationship that Bourdieu entertains with structural anthropology. His critique of the legalism of the Elementary Structures must not be allowed to mask the importance of the structuralist legacy for Bourdieu, in particular its “transformational” analysis, which he incorporates into his sociology while at the same time detaching it from the comparative ambitions it served in Lévi-Strauss.

The reproach often leveled at structural anthropology—that it immobilizes the social order in a rigid framework—is based on a profound misunderstanding. The concept of transformation, which Lévi-Strauss forged in the analysis of myths, in fact involves uncovering a dynamic that refers not to the evolutionary hierarchization of societies but to their horizontal articulation with each other. The basic principle of structural analysis is that every society is crisscrossed by lateral possibilities that are actuated by other societies. A myth, for example, can never be understood in isolation. It does not exist for its own sake; it is a transformation of stories told by neighboring societies. The only way to “explain” a myth is to retrace the process by which it is simultaneously translated and altered through a set of systematic operations (metaphorical transposition, inversion, etc.) when it crosses a cultural, linguistic, or ecological barrier. In this sense, a culture is not a self-enclosed totality but a point at which an unstable equilibrium is negotiated within a network of variants (Salmon 2013b). Structuralism is indisputably a form of holism inasmuch as its positioning theory of identity supposes the primacy of the system over the elements, but the system in question is located in the relations between societies, which define themselves and each other by the ways in which they differ. It thereby avoids the trap of defining its object of study privatively: whereas classical sociology defined the nonmoderns in opposition to Europe, at the risk of neglecting the differences between them, structural anthropology sets out from the networks of relations they maintain with each other in order to explain how differentiated identities are produced.

Bourdieu is not interested in the comparative problem. His critique of the Elementary Structures makes that perfectly clear. Whereas Lévi-Strauss set out primarily to account for the diversity of matrimonial systems, Bourdieu repatriates the whole question of kinship back within a single society. His aim is not to explain the diversity of social orders but to reveal the domination effects involved in keeping the Social Order as it is. As a result, the two approaches intersect more than they actually contradict each other. Lévi-Strauss himself, who never really saw Bourdieu’s work as a genuine objection, emphasized that people undeniably adopt strategies, but the rules they play by—whether they follow them or break them—are not the same everywhere (Lévi-Strauss [1988] 2001, 145).

This side-lining of the comparative problem obeys the principle that there is no outside—that is, no fence to sit on in the primordial division between the dominant and the dominated. Like it or not, ethnologists belong to the situation they describe, and from this viewpoint, by suspending their criticism of the forms of domination they observe—in the name of their respect for a society to which they do not belong—they can only be siding with the dominant.⁴ Though it explains why Bourdieu feels entitled to break free from cultural relativism, this principle seems destined to render obsolete the structural analysis techniques that Lévi-Strauss developed to describe the operations by which a myth passes from one society to another and is systematically inverted by those who borrow it. And yet … from the text on the Kabyle house in the early 1960s through to Distinction (Bourdieu 1979), transformational analysis lies at the heart of the Bourdieusian program. With this key difference: he gives it a twist that might be described as a “folding” operation. Instead of using structural analysis to grasp the mental operations involved in passing from one culture to another, he employs it as a technique for revealing how the public face of the social articulates with its hidden side.

This displacement is visible in “The Kabyle House or the World Reversed,” a text that can be read as the generative formula of his sociology. The principle behind the analysis is to show that the layout of the Kabyle house plays on a set of oppositions between light and dark, up and down, dry and wet, raw and cooked, masculine and feminine, which are disposed in such a way that the house appears as a microcosm, reflecting the outside world by means of a general inversion of its coordinates (Bourdieu 1972, 71). The house is the dark, feminine side of the public world, which is a masculine world:

If we now go back to the internal organization of the house, we can see that its orientation is exactly the reverse of that of the external space, as if it had been obtained by a half-rotation on the axis of the front wall or the threshold.… The importance and symbolic value of the threshold within the system cannot be fully understood unless it is seen that it owes its function as a magical boundary to the fact that it is the site of a meeting of contraries as well as of a logical inversion and that, as the necessary meeting-point and crossing-point between the two spaces, defined in terms of socially qualified body movements, it is the place where the world is reversed. (Bourdieu 1972; Nice [trans.] 1990, 281–282)

This demonstration allows us to measure Bourdieu’s debt to structuralism and to identify the principles by which he would divert transformational analysis from its initial purposes in order to set up a new regime of sociological criticism. In keeping with the model defined in Mythologiques, the crossing of a barrier—in this case the threshold of the house—produces a reversal of all coordinates. But beyond the apparent fidelity to Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu subjects this structural analysis to three correlative displacements. The first reflects the absence of exteriority: Bourdieu does not study the circulation of symbolic systems between villages; he is interested in the ability of a social order to self-replicate from the inside, to turn in on itself by developing a dark side that is nonetheless structurally linked to the official world. The second displacement is to do with the importance given to the body. In Lévi-Strauss, transformations are mental operations. In this text, by contrast, the transformation is made tangible by a bodily operation: the half rotation performed on the threshold of the house, a gesture that conditions the transition from the public world of men to the secret world of women. The third displacement lies in the hierarchical nature of the transformation described. Lévi-Strauss was analyzing transformations between the myths of neighboring societies, and thus between formally equivalent entities, even if the balance of power between neighboring groups can vary considerably. The same is not true of Bourdieu’s analysis of the Kabyle house. The transformation is intrinsically hierarchical; it does not take place between variants from different locations, but between a structurally unequal front side and reverse side (82).

The Twofold Truth of the Social

With these three displacements—the folding inward of the social order, the primacy of the body, and the hierarchical nature of the transformations between a dominant space and a dominated space—we have all the ingredients we need to understand the double-sided mechanism by which Bourdieu articulates holism and individualism, and the inverse positions that anthropology and sociology occupy within it.

The first point, the social order’s ability to engender a mirror-image duplicate of itself—we can call this the schismogenesis of the official and the unofficial—clearly evokes Marx and his characterization of ideology as the imaginary inversion of a reality constituted by the relations of production. However, this comparison runs the risk of overlooking a key element: even if the discovery of a hidden inverted variant of the official version has a demystifying effect, as with the revelation of the strategies that govern the choice of a spouse, Bourdieu insists on the fact that the official level nonetheless possesses a reality that has to be taken into account in the analysis: “The official definition of reality is part of a full definition of social reality and … this imaginary anthropology has very real effects” (Bourdieu 1980; Nice [trans.] 1990, 108).⁵ Unlike Marx, Bourdieu does not only confront the ideological illusion with the economic reality: he contrasts two different modes of social cohesion, which bear more than a passing resemblance to Durkheim’s two modes of solidarity. The level that Bourdieu describes as being that of rules corresponds to the mechanical solidarity that underpins the representations shared by the group, while the level of interests can be compared to organic solidarity, since a form of group integration is produced through these matrimonial strategies or gift exchanges, even if it does lead to domination effects. But where Durkheim saw an authentic form of solidarity, Bourdieu sees only the interplay of individual egoisms, thus rejecting the founding act by which Durkheim separated his sociology from political economy. This sought to maintain a holistic viewpoint at the very core of modern economics by asserting that the division of labor was itself a source of solidarity. With Bourdieu, however, we are back to a head-to-head confrontation between a type of mechanical social integration that is illusory (but nonetheless real inasmuch as agents have to pretend to conform) and a maximization of interests consistent with the most orthodox economic rationality.

The principle underlying this mechanism is that a society is incapable of unifying in conformity with the values it claims to hold, and that it therefore relies—unavowedly—on a mode of integration that it refuses to acknowledge. On this point Bourdieu is faithful to classical sociology, for which every society plays on two heterogeneous principles of solidarity. But where Durkheim saw these two principles as dovetailing together, with organic solidarity gradually taking precedence as societies evolve toward modernity, Bourdieu folds them together to show that one is hidden beneath the other. It is this figure of the fold that allows the sociological duality of the principles of integration to function as a demystification device. Whence the importance of the concept of “twofold truth” (Bourdieu 1972, 368), which sets the sociologist the task of seeing, in every situation, the two contradictory—but nonetheless both very real—forces of social unification. Here Bourdieu is rekindling the ambition, typical of the Durkheimian school, of diagnosing the maladjustments of a society by reference to itself (Boltanski 2009, 29–30), except that these maladjustments no longer take the form of discrepancies in the process of historical evolution (such as where the law lags behind public morality or the actual division of labor) but rather assume that of an insoluble contradiction between two principles that can interrelate only in denial mode. This makes it possible to criticize a society entirely from the inside, without reactivating the old evolutionist instincts that had been disbarred by anthropology.

The second displacement that Bourdieu makes relative to Lévi-Straussian structuralism lies, as we saw, in the role he assigns to the body. In his analysis of the Kabyle house, the inverted symmetry that unites macrocosm and microcosm is linked to the half turn performed on the threshold, and therefore to the body as potential for action, as capacity for movement. If we are to hold this text up as the general matrix of Bourdieusian sociology—as I am seeking to do—then we should qualify this point. In “The Kabyle House or the World Reversed,” the body acts as the operator of the transition between an outside world and an inside world, both of which correspond to distinct physical spaces. But if we ask what plays the role of the house in Bourdieu’s sociology—the role of the mirror image of the public world—the answer would have to be that it is generally the body itself, in the form of the habitus. The body as a set of rule-governed gestures is the operator of the fold that bends the social space in on itself.

The concept of habitus can be seen as a paradoxical inversion of Noam Chomsky’s concept of competence. The founding argument of generative grammar, and indeed of the dominant research program in the cognitive sciences, is the thesis of the underdetermination of the stimulus, which Chomsky used to refute behaviorism: the input (i.e., the phrases that the child hears during the language-learning phase) is infinitely poorer than the output (i.e., the ability of any speaker of a language to produce an infinity of well-formed utterances). Since the disproportion between the ultimately very limited number of phrases heard and the infinity of phrases that can be produced is so vast, Chomsky asserts that language learning is not a social process (Chomsky 1959, 1965). For him, linguistic (especially grammatical) competence is a biological given, and the learning process simply sets the parameters of certain secondary characteristics of this innate capacity. Bourdieu takes this model and inverts it: the habitus is indeed supposed to act as the generative formula for the diversity of an individual’s practices, but for Bourdieu, contrary to Chomsky, the stimulus is overdetermined. One of the axioms of his sociology resides in the disproportionate weight given to a small number of social experiences acquired in early education: these shape the child’s schemes of perception and action so deeply that they also determine all future situations in which the individual is involved.

What this means is that any ordinary sociological situation (any situation outside of the infant learning process) is overdetermined in the meaning of the word as used by Sigmund Freud, who uses it to refer to the way features of dreams can be involved simultaneously in several different associative series. The official reading of the situation is superimposed by the secret reading, to which habitus provides the key. The school examination, for example, which in its official definition neutralizes all social affiliations in order to judge candidates solely on the technical competencies they have acquired, is covertly overdetermined by the varying distance between the class habitus of the examiner and that of the student. This is the core of Bourdieu’s critique of education: unmasking the subtle interplay of affinities or divergences of habitus that lies beneath the surface of the supposedly meritocratic universality of the school system. Bourgeois students, whose habitus is spontaneously adjusted to that of their examiners, always enjoy an unjustified and unjustifiable advantage over students from the “lower” classes, whose habitus is maladjusted relative to the institution and its agents (Bourdieu and Passeron 1970). The world reversed, then, is the body itself, which, through its attitudes and gestures, undermines the official definition of every situation. Bourdieu’s sociology is very much a “sociology of tests” or “sociology of trials” (sociologie des épreuves)—to use an expression that later gained currency (Boltanski and Laurent 1991; Latour 1984)—but it quickly leads into a sociology of domination, because tests, and especially school exams, are structurally biased.

This takes us to the third displacement relative to structural anthropology: the hierarchical nature of the transformations. Where Lévi-Strauss studied the relationships between variants separated in space, Bourdieu uses structural inversion as an operator for the transition between two hierarchical levels, the official and the unofficial. And one of the more singular features of the Bourdieusian critique is the reversibility of this hierarchy. Of course, in every society, the official represents the dominant, public pole, while the unofficial embodies its secret, shameful flipside. When we look at the content of these two levels, however, we find a strict inversion between Kabyle society—which for Bourdieu fulfills the role of embodying traditional societies, alongside other examples closer to home such as the Béarn—and the France of the 1960s to 1980s, whose role is to embody modern societies.⁶ At the risk of laboring the point, in Kabyle society, it is mechanical solidarity—the rule—that occupies the official pole, while the language of self-interest is its unspoken underside. In France, on the other hand, where the economy is disembedded, the interplay of interests is much more readily acknowledged, and so the unmasking of individual strategies does not have the same demystifying impact. Indeed, the school example shows that in our modern societies, the official language is that of organic solidarity, while mechanical solidarity is cast in the role of the darker reality behind the shared ideals.

In his work on education, Bourdieu always takes as his standard the model of an education system tailored to the needs of the economy, devoted exclusively to producing specialists endowed with differentiated technical competencies that correspond to the current state of the division of labor (Bourdieu and Passeron 1970, 202–206). The reason why he refers to this yardstick is that it relates to one of the key justifications for education: as an agent of organic integration in modern societies. It would be more accurate to say that the education system in modern societies acts as an exchange mechanism between the mechanical and the organic. It functions as a mechanical integrator in that by dispensing the same education to all, it is the locus for the inculcation of shared values. But at the same time as schools dispense this common education, the examination system produces an organic distribution in that individuals are assigned, on the basis of their talents, to occupations that will enable each of them to play their own role in the division of labor. The education system is therefore a mechanical institution with an organic vocation. It is this that makes it the focal point for the integration of modern societies.

The critical gesture tirelessly repeated in The Inheritors, Reproduction, and State Nobility seeks to demonstrate that the allegedly organic logic of the education system is constantly being undermined by latent forms of mechanical solidarity that, of course, no longer correspond to forms of integration of the group as a whole, but to partial mechanical solidarities, restricted to a single class. The vector of explanation and criticism in ideologically individualistic societies is therefore not economic calculation, as it was in the Kabyle ethnographies, but the lurking presence of class solidarity behind what outwardly appears to be a strictly functional selection process. This means that the hierarchy between the official and the unofficial is not a universal constant; it is a characteristic specific to every society that values one form of social integration at the expense of the other. Though Bourdieu never says so in as many words, his theoretical model assumes that every society needs both mechanical and organic solidarity, but that they can be articulated only by refusing to openly acknowledge one of the two forms. We should enter a caveat, however, as regards the symmetry between the principles of intelligibility in modern and nonmodern societies: “mechanical” and “organic” do not have the same meaning in each case. In the case of Kabylia, the mechanical takes the Durkheimian form of the shared rule, while the organic is reduced to the interplay of economic interests. In 1960s and 1970s France, on the other hand, the organic is valued as a principle of functional solidarity. Here, we are talking about organic solidarity in its fullest sense, not merely the logic of economic maximization. But this official organic solidarity is undermined by a mechanical solidarity that, in this case, is nothing more than class solidarity. So while the mechanical may act as a catalyst for demystification in modern societies, it does not unite them; it divides them irreducibly in the form of class antagonisms.

This chiasmus that governs the economy of sociological knowledge when it moves from nonmodern to modern societies gives rise to a counterintuitive principle: namely that the body takes on greater significance in the framework of a critical sociology of modern societies. Of course, the body plays a cardinal role everywhere in the production of the social order: every society is constructed primarily through the education of the body (Bourdieu 1972, 296). The difference is that in nonmodern societies, differentiated and hierarchical habitus are explicitly encoded in the body. The prototype is found in the construction of masculine domination: while the whole education of Kabyle boys teaches them to strike a self-confident pose, staring frankly upward and outward, the women are expected to lower their gaze, walk with small steps, and make themselves as inconspicuous as possible (292). Because it is accepted for what it is, this differential qualification of the body cannot act as a demystifying principle. It is not the body that is denied, but self-interest. In modern societies, by contrast, the logic of self-interest is more widely accepted; what is unavowable is the way officially egalitarian situations, and in particular school or professional examination situations, are subverted by the subtle inculcation of hierarchical dispositions into the members of different classes. In organic-ideology societies, habitus is therefore the structural equivalent of self-interest in mechanical-ideology societies.

As we saw from the reading of the Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu employs the modern—in the shape of capital accumulation strategies—as the truth of the nonmodern. In a further twist, this formula is reversed, because it is equally true that the nonmodern—this time in the form of the shaping of differentiated habitus—is the truth of the modern. This reversibility of demystification ultimately imbues anthropology with a more complex role than is suggested in Bourdieu’s purely ethnographic works. If individualism is, after all, the primary tool for the study of traditional societies, such studies nonetheless serve to provide sociology with holistic instruments for unmasking the hidden face of officially individualistic societies.

Anthropology Left to Its Own Devices

The model employed by Bourdieu offers a uniquely illuminating illustration of the paradoxical position anthropology has been left in by the disintegration of the classical model. In antagonistic mode, its mission is to protest against an exaggerated holism that refuses to see the members of extra-European societies as autonomous individuals in their own right. But there has to be more to it than this salutary demystification, important though that is; otherwise anthropology would slide into a kind of pure individualism that, by losing sight of the issue of individuals’ social production, would take it outside the remit of the social sciences.

Individualism, in anthropology, is of protest value only. That is why it only very rarely leads to individualistic modes of explanation. Bourdieu is one of the few to venture down this path, when he introduces economic optimization into the social practices of Kabyle peasants. But he does so as part of a two-stage mechanism, by leveraging anthropology’s ascetic influence on sociology to dispel any romantic belief in obedience to rules and in the virtues of harmonious social integration, and then—beyond this initial demystifying phase—by revealing habitus-forming practices that are then redeployed to challenge the ideology of individualistic-meritocratic societies. In this sense, even if he gives a significant twist to the classical model, Bourdieu preserves some of its most fundamental characteristics, in particular the subordination of anthropology to sociology. Anthropology can afford to be individualistic if it is destined to serve as a critical tool for sociology, which is not. Distinction illustrates this paradox perfectly: in ideologically individualistic societies, Bourdieu’s aim is to show that the development of taste—and thus the accumulation of symbolic capital—does not obey an individualistic logic; instead, it conforms to collective mechanisms of distinction, for which he borrows the model from the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss (individual strategies exist—there is no reason to deny it—but they take place inside a space whose coordinates they do not define).

The question to be asked is this: Does antiholism offer anthropology a real purpose, or does it limit its horizon to an indefinite protest against a classical model from which we will never really break free? For those who, unlike Bourdieu, do not want to use anthropology inside what is basically a sociological program, but rather to produce anthropological knowledge, it just makes life more difficult. The success enjoyed in the discipline by postmodernism owes at least something to this discomfort: the joy of deconstruction is that it allows anthropologists to be antiholistic without having to embrace any kind of economism, which they might have to do if they adopted any serious methodological individualism. That being the case, the renunciation of any attempt at explanation—not only the causal determination of behaviors but also, far more importantly for the social sciences, the conceptual determination of what practices are—seems less like a price to be paid and more like an escape route to avoid the burden of having to construct new ways of making collective practices intelligible, ways that go beyond criticism.

Those who refuse to take the easy way out expose themselves to a potentially paralyzing tension. The case of Jeanne Favret-Saada is probably the clearest illustration. The huge popularity of Les Mots, la mort, les sorts (Deadly Words) (1977) stems from the way it suspends explanation in favor of a subjective synthesis of supposedly archaic practices: rather than explain belief in witchcraft, the purpose of the inquiry is to show how an anthropologist from the French National Center for Scientific Research—that bastion of modern rationalist individualism—could also become caught up in these practices (not actually witchcraft as such, but at least the removal of spells). However, despite the success encountered by this kind of rehabilitation via an ethnography of firsthand subjective experience, we should not forget that for the author, it was merely the first step toward revealing a “system of places (or positions)” that would make accusations of witchcraft—and the rituals employed to counter it—intelligible. The inability to fulfill this promise, for more than thirty years, is probably at least as telling as the ultimately very classical form taken by her return to the explanatory regime, in which she links the use of spell-breaking rituals to the fragilities inherent in the organization of family farms in Normandy in the 1960s (Favret-Saada 2009; Salmon 2014).

It would be instructive to retrace the way in which anthropologists have tried to escape the dead end of protest-driven individualism by constructing new forms of holism that are above all suspicion of asymmetry between moderns and nonmoderns (of which the concept of ontology can be seen, at least for the time being, as one of the culminating points: Salmon 2016). But that lies outside the scope of this chapter. It is certain, however, that if we embark down the path of individualistic symmetrization (more individualism for the Others, be they non-Westerners or, equally well, the dominated, to put them on an even keel with the individualism of the dominant) instead of holistic symmetrization (more holism at home, especially when analyzing the dominant, for better holism elsewhere), we run the risk of neglecting the crucial question of whether, and how, other collective forms of existence and practice might affect us collectively.

NOTES

1. 1. Contrary to popular belief, the question of formal causality is much more important for the epistemology of the social sciences than that of efficient causality.

2. 2. To illustrate this point, which has become obscured by an erroneous interpretation of the Weberian imperative of axiological neutrality (Kalinowski 2005), one could cite most of the classic works of sociology. Mannheim’s refocusing in Ideologie und Utopie (1929) has the advantage of clarity. For a reading of Durkheim along these lines, see Callegaro 2015.

3. 3. One of the most consequential formulations of this idea that the onward march of modernization needs to be slowed in order to make it bearable for society is found in Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944).

4. 4. The rejection of the position of exteriority that anthropologists generally used to claim is one of the major trends in the ethnography of the 1970s and 1980s: variants can be found, for example, in Jeanne Favret-Saada or in the postmodernism of James Clifford. What sets Bourdieu apart is that this rejection is directly bound up with the problem of domination: the fact that he did his fieldwork in Algeria during its independence struggle was doubtless a decisive factor in the primacy he gives to questions of power. Bourdieu does not insist on this point, but there is no doubt that the colonial authorities frequently enshrined the viewpoint of local elites whose cooperation they courted as the “official version.” In this respect, the principle of “no exteriority” is a valuable tool for the purposes of a sociology of colonialism.

5. 5. While acknowledging that the level of values is irreducible to that of interests, Bourdieu nonetheless tries to articulate the two by means of the concept of interest: “One is right to refuse to credit the rule with the efficacy that legalism ascribes to it, but it must not be forgotten that there is an interest in ‘toeing the line’ which can be the basis of strategies aimed at regularizing the agent’s situation, putting him in the right, in a sense beating the group at its own game by presenting his interests in the misrecognizable guise of the values recognized by the group” (Bourdieu 1980, Nice [trans.] 1990, 108–109). This attempt—which reflects the ascendancy accorded to explanations of an individualistic order—has something contradictory about it. If the strategy of passing one’s own interests off as values recognized by the group is to make any sense, the group must first recognize these values: the logical grammar of the simulacrum dictates that it can exist only by reference to a reality that it respects and at same time circumvents.

6. 6. Although Bourdieu rejects the evolutionism of classical sociology, he maintains the contrast between cases that embody “modernity” and those that embody “tradition”—cases that always need to be demystified.

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