ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is on the photographic archive which Bourdieu compiled during his fieldwork in Algeria during its War of Independence against the French during the fifties and early sixties (1954–1962). It considers his ethnographic research on the impact of the forced displacement of the peasantry through the lens of intersemiotic translation. In these early ethnographic studies, Bourdieu aimed to combine scientific study with an ethical-political commitment while further elaborating what would become two key concepts in his reflexive sociology: habitus and field. The photographs, which number in the hundreds, featured heavily in the fieldwork phase of this research, yet they scarcely appear in the research output from this period, except as illustrations on book covers or magazines in connection with his articles. They appear to have had an almost exclusively ‘private’ function serving mostly as memory supports for his written output. Viewing the photographs as intersemiotic translations affords us an opportunity to examine them and Bourdieu’s complex relationship to them critically within his conceptual approach where they acted as overlapping entities in a nexus of methodological reflexivity, elucidating the relationship Bourdieu wished to emphasize between the human, the non-human and the environment, constituted and reconstituted under colonialism.
