Tristes Paysans: Bourdieu's Early Ethnography in Béarn and Kabylia

Pierre Bourdieu conducted ethnographic research in his native region of Béarn and in Algeria during the late 1950s and early 1960s. He rarely drew explicit comparisons between the two sites, despite striking parallels in themes such as notions of honor in Mediterranean peasant ethos, the habitus as internalized dispositions, and peasant malaise in the face of socioeconomic change. Bourdieu called his Béarn ethnography an inversion of Lévi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques, as a way to "objectify" the familiar. I suggest that constructions of traditional and modern that informed Bourdieu's early research in both sites led to a nostalgic view of "tristes paysans".