ABSTRACT
Bourdieu arrived in Algeria in 1956 as a soldier and a philosopher; he left in 1960 as a self-taught ethnographer and social anthropologist. He had published his first book and undertaken, in person and using research assistants, field research among the Kabyle peasantry of the Mahgreb and among the urban poor in Algiers and elsewhere. The body of data and ethnography thus accumulated was to provide him with enough material for a substantial body of published work over the subsequent decades. It is something to which, even yet, he still returns on occasions.
