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Pierre Bourdieu on capitals, the state and forced resettlement: A review essay
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Alan Smart
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Pierre Bourdieu on capitals, the state and forced resettlement: A review essay
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                                                                                  Note critiche

Pierre Bourdieu on capitals, the state
and forced resettlement. A review essay
Alan Smart
University of Calgary




Abstract: Pierre Bourdieu distinguished two main ways to teach sociology, by either
teaching the principles and formal procedures, or by revealing examples of these formal
procedures at work, and preferred to harness both together. This essay attempts to adopt
this approach to consider three of his books recently translated to English, using my own
research on forms of capital, the state and resettlement to engage with his arguments. I
suggest that the utilization of Bourdieu’s powerful ideas are limited in areas like social
capital and resettlement research by some inconsistencies and lack of definitional clarity.


Keywords: Pierre Bourdieu; Forms of capital; The State, Resettlement.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Alan Smart
Pierre Bourdieu on capitals, the state and forced resettlement. A review essay.
2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 229-250.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5399
230	Alan Smart

Introduction
   Polity Press has done a great service to scholarship in publishing a series
of translations to English of some important works by Pierre Bourdieu, three
of which I discuss in this essay (Bourdieu 2014, 2021; Bourdieu, Sayad 2020).
   Pierre Bourdieu began his lectures to the prestigious Collège de France on
the Forms of Capital (Bourdieu 2021) by reflecting on the teaching of sociolo-
gy. He distinguished two main ways to do it, by either teaching the principles
and formal procedures, or by revealing examples of these formal procedures
at work. He structured these lectures by dividing them into two parts, the first
hour devoted to wide-ranging theoretical issues , the second “showing how
we can construct an object of study and elaborate a problematic, and above
all bring these theoretical formulae and formal structures to bear on actual
operations” (Bourdieu 2021: 2). In this essay, I follow this model using my own
research interests for the latter objective. I consider first the two volumes of
his Collège de France lectures, the earliest on the forms of capital, the later
one on the state, and then turning to his very early (1964) research mono-
graph on rural resettlement in colonial Algeria.
   Having been generously offered my choice of four of his recently translated
volumes to review by Anuac , I selected these three in part because they echo my
own research career. I hoped that I might have something useful to say about
them separately and in combination. My doctoral research was an ethnographic
study of resettlement in Hong Kong, a topic I returned to through archival re-
search in the last fifteen years. My first major postdoctoral project was focused
on understanding the operation of diverse forms of capital in early reform Chi-
na, while my more recent and ongoing archival work focuses particularly on
making sense of governmental decision-making in colonial Hong Kong. While I
attempt to avoid fixating too excessively on what the volumes say about issues
of concern to myself, some of that seems inevitable if my review essay is to
usefully go beyond summaries. Adequate summaries of the sprawling Collège
de France volumes, with their multitudes of insights and provocations, would
be a challenging proposition. My preference is rather to engage with some of
the ideas and concepts in ways that offer some thoughts about how they can be
put to work on “actual operations” of research. However, some summarization
of key arguments will be necessary, occasionally at some length, and these fo-
cus particularly on his ideas about major species of capital, the role of symbolic
capital in the consolidation of the dynastic state, and situating the study of re-
settlement in Algeria in the broader resettlement literature.


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Pierre Bourdieu on capitals, the state and forced resettlement                  231

Collège de France, 1983-84
   Forms of Capital followed on from two earlier Collège lecture series, the first
on the constitution of groups and social classes, the second on his key con-
cepts of habitus and field. Bourdieu’s ideas on the diverse kinds of capital are
closely linked to these issues, and Forms of Capital builds on the prior lecture
series to take his conceptualization of capitals in some new directions. In a
following essay in the volume, Julien Duval very usefully situates the capital
lectures in relation to the prior (and subsequent) Collège lectures and more
generally in the context of Bourdieu’s career and critical reception. This ex-
cellent essay can serve to fill in some of the biographical and bibliographic
details that I gratefully avoid doing here, concentrating instead on the key
ideas themselves and their applicability.
   Bourdieu stresses the co-constitution of field and capital so that “we can-
not define a field without at the same time defining the capital that is at work
in it. Consequently, all capital is specific” (Bourdieu 2021:16). Fields are de-
fined by a structure of social relations that allow or afford distinctive “games”
that operate within them. Among other features, a field sets terms for entry:
the properties that a “new entrant must possess to produce effects in the field”
(Bourdieu 2021:15). The concept of field implies specific capitals and interests
(Bourdieu 2021: 109). However, the claim that all forms of capital are specific
is problematic: is cultural capital specific in the same way that literary capital
is bounded and defined by the characteristics of the French-language liter-
ary field? Bourdieu deals with this problem by introducing another category:
major species of capital, “of which the others are particular forms” (Bourdieu
2021: 132). In contrast to his earlier work, he reduces these more general cat-
egories from four to two: economic capital and cultural capital, the latter of
which is the main focus of the volume. He does say in passing that there might
be “two and a half” if he includes social capital, but he argues that the prin-
ciple of parsimony and Occam’s razor “would dispense with it and it could be
subsumed under cultural capital” (Bourdieu 2021: 160). To accommodate the
expansion and generalization, he adopts the modified term of “informational
capital” (but not consistently, since the thorough index includes only six en-
tries for the new term, compared to dozens for the old label). Because of this,
I will continue to refer to cultural capital, except in order to discuss what the
new term means for Bourdieu.
   My first engagement with Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas was in an essay published
in 1993, in which I tried to operationalize the proliferating varieties of capital


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232	Alan Smart

in his work. I suggested that we could limit these to four basic types of capital,
with a variety of other more specific kinds defined by the kind of social field
in which they operated, such as the literary field (which receives the most
attention in Bourdieu 2021). In this attempt at operationalization, I saw eco-
nomic capital as based on ownership which is enforceable by law or equivalent
state action. Cultural capital is embodied knowledge that supports the claim
to the ability to engage in certain types of practices. Symbolic capital involves
claims by the possessor that he or she be treated in particular ways by classes
of others. Social capital consists of claims to reciprocation and solidarity from
particular others. Forms of capital specific to a field are generally combina-
tions of all four, but with limitations depending on the rules of the game, such
as limiting the amount of money that can be used in pursuing political capital
in elections. Each capital is vested in a distinct kind of phenomenon: state
supported ownership (economic capital), embodied knowledge and skills (cul-
tural capital), general social reputation (symbolic capital), and interpersonal
relations (social capital). While ontologically distinct, there are field-specific
ways of converting one into another (Smart 1993).
   While not challenging the productivity and excitement of this work by
Bourdieu on the forms of capital, I am not convinced that collapsing these
four types into only two major species (or 2.5) is useful. Too much is being
packed into cultural capital, conflating quite different kinds of phenomenon,
from reputation to personal obligation. Is it useful to collapse both personal
discipline and social networks into the same concept, or to reduce prestige to
knowledge about how to behave in ways to obtain greater prestige?
   Bourdieu’s distinction between major species of capital and specific capital
would suggest a taxonomy that the lower classificatory level is included only
in its higher hierarchical level and in no others, such as all rodents being mam-
mals. However, academic capital is not composed only of cultural capital, but
also relies on economic capital (to pay for training, books, etc.), social capital
(colleagues and supporters who provide opportunities, advice and construc-
tive criticism) and symbolic capital (the prestige of the institutions in which
you were trained and are employed). The relation between the major species
and specific capitals is not Linnean. Instead, each specific capital is constitut-
ed by localized and specialized versions of the two, three or four major species.
   Bourdieu stresses the existence of three distinct forms of cultural capital:
incorporated, objectified, and institutionalized. The first concerns embodied
“dispositions” or the cultivated habitus, and is described as “what we call ‘cul-



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Pierre Bourdieu on capitals, the state and forced resettlement                  233

ture’ in the ordinary, somewhat vague sense” (Bourdieu 2021: 161). Since a
considerable portion of embodied cultural capital is tacit, rather than discur-
sive or explicit, such as knowing how to dribble a basketball, it is not clear if
describing all of this as “information” is fully accurate. Cultural capital also
refers to objectified cultural goods such as paintings, books, computers and
software. Since at least in Western countries, the law enforces ownership of
such goods, it is unclear to me why these cultural goods should not instead
be considered to be economic capital. Institutionalized cultural capital is
“both objectified and legally guaranteed” such as in the form of titles which
“is to cultural capital what the title-deed is to economic capital” (Bourdieu
2021: 162). Bourdieu also devotes several pages to distinguishing his approach
from that of the neoclassical idea of human capital.
   My discussion so far may seem unduly critical, or even nitpicking. This cri-
tique was not undertaken because of dislike of Bourdieu’s forms of capital,
but rather because I feel that the approach is remarkably useful and generates
fascinating accounts of the practical operation of social fields, particularly in
the form of the conversions of one kind of capital to another as part of what
he calls the economy of practices. Rather, I fear that, like myself, many who are
attracted to the concepts and theories are reluctant to seriously apply them
to their concrete analyses, because of the uncertainties of the precise nature
and boundaries of the concepts. My efforts have been directed at forging more
precise tools with which we can work with the inspiring visions opened by
Bourdieu’s theoretical efforts. Unlike the dominant versions of social capital
analysis, one of the most influential approaches in social policy, Bourdieu’s
approach does not focus on social capital as an all-inclusive category of as-
sets beyond strictly economic capital. Instead, he sees it as only one among
a variety of different forms of capital that have the potential to be convert-
ed from one to another This perspective has the advantage of distinguishing
between obligations between individuals (social capital), broader civic obliga-
tions or one’s reputation for trustworthiness or honor (symbolic capital), and
knowledge, including knowing how networks can be utilized (cultural capital).
Ben Fine has suggested that “Social capital can only reign supreme by ex-
cising the cultural, the symbolic—and Bourdieu” (cited in Harriss 2006: 193).
Bourdieu asserts that it is impossible to explain the social world “unless one
reintroduces capital in all its forms and not solely in the one form recognized
by economic theory” (Bourdieu 1986: 242). If policy researchers neglect the
“economy of practices” within which members of the elite convert social, cul-



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234	Alan Smart

tural, and symbolic capital into political influence and economic capital, their
ability to act effectively on the real political economy will be limited, although
the destruction wrought by policies they promote might not be. As anthropol-
ogists, we can appreciate the greater nuance of Bourdieu’s approach, even if
it is less easily operationalized into an index that can be acted upon by social
policy (Li 2007). A more differentiated approach to noneconomic capital is
less prone to confusions and problematic causal inferences. Lumping all of
the non-economic forms into the single one of informational capital, though,
seems to me to undermine the strengths of Bourdieu’s general approach.
    A clear definition of informational capital is not provided in the book. Munk
(2009: 5) has defined the term as “academic capital that includes dimensions
of skills and recognized symbolic capital”. In Forms of capital, though, I be-
lieve that he saw the idea as much broader in scope, including, for example,
juridical rule-making. He hoped that it would help communicate the ways in
which the “incorporated, objectified information that defines cultural cap-
ital is information that is both structured and structuring”. It’s use is seen
as particularly crucial for “designating dispositions that compose a habitus”
(Bourdieu 2021: 243). While this might be seen as true for all the diverse forms
of capital, his meaning appears to be a bit more specific here. Informational
capital is stored in the brain but also as wordly things or institutions. Such
“stored and structured information will have the property of structuring any
new information as it is received” (Bourdieu 2021: 244) and thereby operates
as a code in both legal and linguistic senses which can in turn be embodied
and objectified. To illustrate his idea, he gives an extended example of “codi-
fication or formalization”.
    Bourdieu rejects the legalistic tendency to explain behaviour by reference
to rules, relying instead on the habitus, but acknowledges that codification
has social effects that must be considered. Specifically, there is what he calls
the “officialization effect of formalization” (Bourdieu 2021: 247). To officialize
is at its most basic putting something into the public domain, such as notifica-
tion of marriages or recognizing a child. Officializing turns patterns of thought
into formal rules, which may strengthen their imposition but may not, since
“explicit rules can be attacked, whereas implicit rules have a kind of clandes-
tine force of persuasion” (Bourdieu 2021: 248). He addresses the force of form,
and suggests that when formalization is generalized to all citizens and com-
bined with the “symbolic magic effect of officialization” (Bourdieu 2021: 249)
the result is symbolic violence. Formalization facilitates bureaucratic accom-



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Pierre Bourdieu on capitals, the state and forced resettlement                  235

plishment of actions with greater certainty and ease, such as communicating
over a long distance. Moving from “regularity grounded in confidence in eth-
ical dispositions to a rule-bound society” enables a great saving in time and
energy” (Bourdieu 2021: 82). One of the differences between fields involves
the extent to which its forces are “codified and sanctioned by explicit rules of
a legal nature” (Bourdieu 2021:17). The banking field is extremely formalized,
while the literary field is among the least officialized.
   I have some reservations about Bourdieu’s treatment of formalization, a
topic that I have devoted attention to in a forthcoming book about colonial
Hong Kong (Smart, Fung in press). He claims that when we say that a din-
ner or a relationship is informal, “we are saying that there is no etiquette, no
deontological code, no objectives rules”. There is a formality effect of mak-
ing something “objective, written, published and public” (Bourdieu 2021: 31).
This dualism is hard to sustain, except by using a narrow definition of formal-
ity. Consider etiquette, for example. Harold Garfinkel, one of the pioneers of
ethnomethodology, revealed how seriously apparently informal rules of po-
liteness can be taken. As one of his infamous “breaching experiments” that he
assigned his classes in order to demonstrate the unacknowledged rules and
procedures of everyday life, he asked students who lived at home to interact
with their family as if they were lodgers in a boarding house (Garfinkel 1967).
Their exaggerated politeness was in a number of cases treated as mockery,
and resulted in serious fights within the family. Bourdieu does recognize that
there are patterns within informality. For example, he notes that the differ-
ence between “politeness of the heart and formal politeness or good manners,
is the opposition between form and formlessness” and that this opposition
is between “what is objective and what is regular but lacking form” and is
found in every social space (Bourdieu 2021: 77). This might be simply a se-
mantic matter of what is meant by formlessness, but studies of informality
and illegality show that interactional formality may actually be greater when
legal formalities and recourses are not available (Heyman 1999; Koster, Smart
2019). Of even greater importance is the neglected informalities within gov-
ernment (Smart 2018; Smart, Zerilli 2014). I return to these questions in the
next section, where I address Bourdieu’s book on the State.

Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989-1992
   There is a striking contrast between the 1983-84 lectures and those trans-
lated in On the State (Bourdieu 2014). The commitment to a parsimony of



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236	Alan Smart

major species of capital has disappeared, and the two (or 2.5) major species
has been eclipsed by the prior four forms, restoring social capital, and placing
symbolic capital at the heart of his pursuit of understanding the state through
its historical genesis. This reversal isn’t explained. Though I was tempted to
pursue this change of course through his other publications of the period, this
essay isn’t the place for that inquiry. I decided to stay with the project of en-
gaging with the three books, rather than Bourdieu’s work in general.
   Bourdieu’s arguments on the state would have been difficult to sustain
without a resurrection of symbolic capital, as he modifies Max Weber’s defi-
nition of the state as an entity with the monopoly of legitimate violence by
expanding it to “the monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence”.
Symbolic violence is elevated above its twin, since it is “the condition for pos-
session of the exercise of the monopoly of physical violence itself” (Bourdieu
2014: 4). Of course, with the modifier of “legitimate” Weber had already in-
cluded symbolic claims and struggles. Bourdieu perhaps takes the analysis of
the symbolic dimension of the state farther and deeper. He presents the state,
“either in a nascent state or in an institutionalized one, as a kind of reserve of
symbolic resources, or symbolic capital, which is both an instrument for agents
of a certain type, and the stake in struggles between these agents” (Bourdieu
2014: 65). Much of his book concentrates on describing the concentration of
symbolic capital from the twelth century onwards, primarily in France and En-
gland, and on demonstrating this concentration as being “just as important if
not more so” (Bourdieu 2014: 70) than material resource concentration, since
it makes accumulation of the latter possible. To understand the genesis of
the state, “priority has to be given to symbolic capital” (Bourdieu 2014: 193).
The state is produced by first “concentrating around the king” (or presumably
other kinds of rulers) the various forms of capital (Bourdieu 2014: 192). This
multiple capital concentration generates a “meta-capital” with the ability to
exercise power over other forms of capital, for example by determining the
rules within which economic transactions are legal.
   Another continuity with Bourdieu’s work on forms of capital is that for him
the state is not a bloc of powerholders, but a field of power. The administrative
field is a “space structured according to oppositions linked to specific forms
of capital with differing interests” (Bourdieu 2014: 20). The modern state
(considered as initiated by the French Revolution) is presented as pioneering
movement towards increased “universalization (de-localization, de-particu-
larization, etc.)” simultaneous with “a progress towards monopolization, the



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Pierre Bourdieu on capitals, the state and forced resettlement                  237

concentration of power, thus towards the establishment of the condition of
a central domination” (Bourdieu 2014: 222). A substantial part of the book
focuses on the dynamics that lead from the feudal order to the dynastic state
and subsequently to the modern nation-state. Interested agents, particular-
ly jurists and other individuals with skills but without inherited positions,
gradually created the state as an entity that “authorizes its possessors […] to
proclaim the official […] backed by the force of the official” (Bourdieu 2014: 33).
This concentration of authority led to the construction of the territorial state,
with a population contained within frontiers, which gradually produced a
nation as a unified population speaking the same language. Rather than se-
quential, however, the authority of the state is itself made by unifying the
nation (Bourdieu 2020: 123). Making the state and making the nation involves
“managing two sets of relatively independent phenomena” (Bourdieu 2014:
359), but doing so in a way that makes concentration and unification seem an
inevitable result of the history of a people, with that history and culture in-
culcated through socialization and eventually mandatory education. Without
such integration and assimilation of regional difference, the nation-state is
said to be permanently beset by the risk of secession. Bourdieu himself seems
too inculcated in the French history of cultural unification and administra-
tive centralization here, neglecting countries like Canada and Belgium, and
federal states more generally, that can be quite effective administratively and
stable for long periods of time without a shared national culture. John Ralston
Saul (1988) described Canada as a “failed nation” that was not only an effec-
tive state, but one that he thought was a good model for a globalized world of
increasing diversity within countries.
   The key to the modern state is the transition from feudalism to the dy-
nastic state. This transition struggled with inherent contradictions between
the king’s house and the emerging publicness of the state. At first, the king
is simply one among a field of nobles or warlords, but one who is more suc-
cessful at expropriating powers. The task of jurists, clerics and intellectuals
is to universalize this concentration of powers and resources, to say that the
king’s domain is not a private interest like the others. Instead, “this private is
public” (Bourdieu 2014: 259). This ideology exposes another contradiction:
the royal family “perpetuate a mode of reproduction of the domestic type [...]
in a world in which a different mode of reproduction is in the process of being
established”. This new mode is based on officials, competence and education
(Bourdieu 2014: 259). To compete with other emerging monarchs, the con-



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238	Alan Smart

centrating power of the state could not be diffused among family members.
Rather, to defend the dynastic principle, the king had to rely on the services of
those with competences that relied on a non-dynastic principle of education
and training. This fostered conflicts between blood and merit. The battlelines
of the administrative field were set and fostered a new ideology of public in-
terest opposed to private interests (other than those of the king and his heir).
   Economic capital is turned into symbolic capital in this process. Kings
and other notables gain prestige by receiving gifts as well as by giving them
(Yan 1993). The transition from feudalism to monarchy was endangered by
the centrifugal trends of local powerholders (both inherited noble positions
and appointed positions) seeking to divert resources to their own benefit and
prestige. These form leaks in the centralization of capitals, and may threat-
en the throne when they are redistributed by local powers misappropriating
resources from the king (Bourdieu 2014: 275, 281). Such leaks in redistribu-
tive flows can be seen as corruption, but may also be routinized bureaucratic
obstacles to direct central authority. Success in concentrating resources and
minimizing their diversion to alternative fields of power resulted in the “gen-
esis of public power” where reproduction of power holders is achieved through
bureaucratic mediation rather than blood. Regarding this process, Bourdieu
asks “how was a de-privatized, de-feudalized, de-personalized power estab-
lished?” (Bourdieu 2014: 292). Part of this is a consequence of the extension
of the reach of power, reliant on the appointment of non-inheriting func-
tionaries. But this extension generates a “withering away” of absolute power,
limited by new demands evoked by treating the king’s resources as public
(Bourdieu 2014: 303). Delegation is necessary to rule broadly, but limits the
center’s ability to control the chains of action. However, this delegation to
the emerging “state nobility” (in Bourdieu’s terms) contains its own contra-
diction, since office-holders often wanted to make their offices transmissable
to their progeny, and frequently succeeded. Later, the further advance of bu-
reaucratization made it necessary for officials to transfer their status to their
children and proteges indirectly through the education systems, if possible.
Legacy admissions to Ivy League universities are a contemporary example of
such elite transmissions of cultural capital.
   Jurists found themselves in an ambiguous situation, a “double bind”. As
jurists, they were on the “side of law against nature by definition”. The ju-
rist should be on the side of “duplication of what is”, expressing “what must
be”. He cannot “simply adhere to the dynastic formula of natural transmis-



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Pierre Bourdieu on capitals, the state and forced resettlement                  239

sion from father to son”. As possessors of privileges and cultural capital “that
opposed them to the nobles, jurists were on the side of merit, the side of the
acquired as against the innate”. Bourdieu claims that they “could not justify
the royal power without de facto limiting it”. When they gave “reasons for
obeying the king, they tied the king by the reasons that they gave for obeying
the king”. I suspect these last two claims underestimate abilities to live with
self-contradictions and to obfuscate. Another feature of the emerging admin-
istrative state was that jurists as holders of technical competence operated in
a particular territory, “implying limits and a conflict over limits” (Bourdieu
2014: 320). Specialization and its attendant bureaucratic turf politics emerged
and expanded.
   Bourdieu’s treatment of these processes offers a wide range of fascinating
insights, too many to consider here. One area that requires some attention
is his careful examination of the emergence of disinterestedness within the
administration. Bureaucratic institutions, for Bourdieu, are designed to op-
erate with automatism, existing independently of the people who occupy
these institutions (Bourdieu 2014: 37). While in England until the 19th centu-
ry “functionaries performed a function with the (accepted) idea of enriching
himself on the back of the function”, Napoleon’s projects “tried to reduce the
role of personality so that it was abolished in the [...] autonomous logic of the
bureaucratic function” (ivi). The public became opposed to the “particular, to
the singular” (Bourdieu 2014: 49). While bureaucrats regularly promote public
policies and practices from which they may personally benefit, the logic of the
system requires that they do so by arguing for the public benefit and keeping
silent on the advantage it offers, for example, to their children through sys-
tems of educational preference in administrative recruitment.
   This abstract logic conflicts in some ways with his discussion of corruption
and political scandal. The extension of the sovereign’s power required the king
to devolve part of his power to others, which created “chains of dependence
and at each link in the chain there is a new possibility of misappropriation”
(Bourdieu 2014: 274). The potential for corruption is inherent in this process.
   A related, but more precisely argued, approach to the state can be seen in
Margaret Levi’s (1988) work. Similarly recognizing that the agents of rulers
have diverging interests, she hypothesizes that rulers “maximize the revenue
accruing to the state subject to the constraints of their relative bargaining
power, transaction costs, and discount rates” (ibidem: 2). Revenue-maximizing
rulers can accept situations where subordinates siphon off resources for their



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240	Alan Smart

personal purposes, since suppressing it might undermine their coalition of
support, while uncertain futures increase the discount rate, encouraging the
sacrifice of future for present gains. Most crucially, she demonstrates how ex-
cessive control of revenues by rulers can inhibit the expansion of the pie to be
divided, whereas the economic consequences of centralization and corruption
are largely neglected by Bourdieu. While corruption is usually predatory, such
local leakage of resources can in certain circumstances promote development
(Smart 1999).
   One of the most common and important resources to combat the risk of
resource leakage and corruption is an intensification of the use of law and
formal rules. Acts of delegation are accompanied or followed by “more ex-
plicit rules governing how those commissioned are commissioned” (Bourdieu
2014: 296). While those who are noble by birth prefer vagueness and avoid bu-
reaucratic strictness, the rise of jurists and experts leads to a growing coverage
of law which gradually envelopes the sovereign himself, leading eventually
to constitutional monarchies. However, greater elaboration of rules can often
create an accompanying proliferation of ways to manipulate the system to the
advantage of those at the pinnacle of the administrative field (Smart 2018).
   The greatest contribution of Bourdieu’s book on the state is to encourage
us to reconsider the fundamental features of the administrative state, things
that he stresses that we do not see or think about because the state is already
in our heads. Bourdieu suggests that tracing the history of the state is the best
way to avoid these fundamental taken for granted conceptualizations, since
“the state poses a particular problem for us because we have state ideas that
we apply to the state” (Bourdieu 2014: 56). Going back to the early history
of an institution makes the “arbitrariness of beginnings resurface” (Bourdieu
2014: 115). This arbitrariness or contingency is precisely what I found in my
historical research on the origins of Hong Kong’s public housing system and,
currently, on the bureaucratic innovations that made it possible to end new
squatting in Hong Kong in 1984 (Smart, Fung in press). These innovations
result from “policy mangles” where disparate and heterogeneous issues get
mangled together in the deliberations of constituted commissions or work-
ing parties. For Bourdieu (Bourdieu 2014: 27), a commission brings together
people to “elaborate a new legitimate definition of a public problem”. The es-
tablishment and operation of a commission involves complex calculations of
who needs to be included, and those choices are intended to generate deci-
sions that strengthen or undermine a “certain state of the balance of forces”



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Pierre Bourdieu on capitals, the state and forced resettlement                  241

(Bourdieu 2014: 111). For most policy mangles, though, the inputs are not
simply those that concern the apparent policy issues, but also other kinds of
issues that are tangled up with the problem contexts of the decision makers at
that point in time.
   Hong Kong was a very different kind of colony than Algeria, much more
divergent than the respective colonizers, Britain and France. For Bourdieu,
though, French nationalism is distinctly committed to belief in the universal-
ity of the demands of the French Revolution, and as a result “the particularly
vicious character of French imperialism lay in its imperialism of the univeral”,
a kind of imperialism that he says “has been transferred today from France
to the United States” (Bourdieu 2014: 159). I turn to colonization in Alge-
ria in the next section on Bourdieu’s third book, published in French in 1964
(following two prior books on Algeria), but restricting the analysis to resettle-
ment (regroupement).

Uprooting: The crisis of traditional agriculture in Algeria
   Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad (2020) make the brutality of coloni-
zation in Algeria very clear, although they do not provide any comparisons with
other instances elsewhere. Between 1847 and 1863, the peasants and farmers
were uprooted from their ancestral settlements and relocated in much less,
and poorer quality, land. Prior to French appropriation in 1830, there was no
individual private agricultural land, so when collective ownership was banned
in 1873, the indigenous population were allocated tiny, mostly unproductive,
plots. By 1950, 2,700,000 hectares, equivalent to eighty per cent of agricultur-
al land, was controlled by French settlers (Rapini 2016). Bourdieu and Sayad
focus on the program of forced resettlement (regroupement) from 1954 to the
end of French control in 1962. This resettlement affected about a quarter of
the total population, 2,157,000. They describe this displacement as “one of the
most brutal in history” (Bourdieu, Sayad 2020: 2).
   The Algerian displacement is indeed on an appalling scale, but does not
exceed the devastation imposed on indigenous populations in the Americas or
West Africa. During the same period, 1830 to 1850, the United States forcibly
removed the entire population of five tribes from their southeastern home-
lands to west of the Mississippi River. Perhaps 80 to 95 per cent of the North
American indigenous population died in the 150 years after colonization
began in 1492. Disease was the main cause, but other brutalities such as en-
slavement and loss of land heightened their vulnerability (Nunn, Qian 2010).



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242	Alan Smart

At a similar time as the regroupements the Malayan “Emergency” from 1948 to
1960 resulted in about one million rural dwellers, mostly squatters and 86%
of them Chinese, being forcibly moved into 600 New Villages to combat the
threat of Communist anti-colonial action (Sandhu 1964; Scott 1998).
   Bourdieu’s early Algerian works “are among the least known, cited, and
translated in the world” (Rapini 2016, 391), so it is very fortunate to have Up-
rooting translated to English. Sophie Bélot (2016: 52) suggests that “all of his
writing has been influenced by his early relationship” with Algeria. Goodman
and Silverstein (2009) note that Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts, particularly
habitus, misrecognition, and symbolic domination, have entered mainstream
social thought independently of the North African and French contexts in
which they were initially developed. These issues are outside my expertise, but
I can recommend these studies for those interested in the early seeds of Bour-
dieu’s later theoretical innovations, such as the first two books addressed in
this essay. Uprooting has the merit of avoiding being tangled in theoretical con-
siderations and being remarkable clearly presented compared to the later work.
   Again, I focus my consideration of this book by engaging with my own work
on resettlement in a colonial context. Forced movements were a major feature
of imperialism (Wolf 1982). Vast populations were involved in the provision of
labor through the Atlantic slave trade and the transfer of Chinese and South
Asian indentured workers from one colony to another, helping to produce per-
sisting inter-ethnic conflicts from Fiji to Guyana. People were also transferred
within individual colonies to provide labor for mines and plantations. As in
Algeria, people were also moved to make better land available for settlers.
Such practices were found in all settler colonies, from Australia to the United
States. In addition to making desirable land available for colonial develop-
ment, though, the 1954 program of regroupement was also implemented as
part of efforts at “pacification” since anti-colonial resistance had increased
substantially in that period. Such pacification through displacement was com-
mon in colonialism, especially where nomadic populations were difficult to
control, as well as in the new village program attempted by the Americans
during the Vietnam War.
   There are some important variations in resettlement programs. Firstly, not
all forced movements are linked to any kind of resettlement. Forced evictions,
such as squatter clearance, can simply expel residents, without any provision
for where they relocate. Given that there are costs for government in even very
basic rehousing, there have to be reasons to resettle evictees, beyond simply



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Pierre Bourdieu on capitals, the state and forced resettlement                  243

making desired land available for new uses seen as more desirable by the gov-
ernmen, to resettle those who are expelled (Smart 2006). Bourdieu and Sayad
resort to Robert Merton’s distinction between manifest and latent function to
explain Algerian resettlement. The property laws that led to displacement had
the “patent function of establishing conditions favorable to the development
of a modern economy founded on private enterprise and individual property”.
However, they identify the latent function of the policy as “fostering the dis-
possession of Algerians by supplying the colonists with the apparently legal
means of appropriation” (Bourdieu, Sayad 2020: 5). I would consider that this
functionalist language could be avoided by replacing the latent function with
an hypothesis that dispossession appeared to be the primary intent of gov-
ernment, even if it is not explicitly stated in public documents. A policy like
this one, which persisted in various forms for a century, clearly had more than
one intent. The question I am raising is which one(s) of these accounts for re-
settlement and not just displacement. Often it is not the actual objective that
makes the difference, but the constraints on achieving that objective.
   In my first book on Hong Kong squatter history, I explained the constraints
on bare clearance, on evicting people without offering any resettlement. What
turned displacement into resettlement in Algeria? Here I can only consider the
late colonial period. Algerian colonial policy swung between two poles: simply
to “destroy the structures of Algerian society” in accord with the interests of
the colonizers, or to assimilate the population (Bourdieu, Sayad 2020: 10). At
a minimum, the aim was to remove the possibility for effective resistance, but
the more ambitious goal was to integrate Algerians into a colonist-dominat-
ed system by transforming individuals and the social structures within which
they were socialized. In even more brutal colonial contexts, the comparable
alternative was between assimilation and genocide. Assimilation accepted the
destruction of traditional social formations, particularly collective property
and the tribal system that enabled violent resistance, but also envisioned “im-
provement” (Li 2007) and civilizing. From 1957, Algerian forced resettlement
became more ambitious than to simply pacify the population and open more
land for colonists. Some “humanitarian” officials saw the new settlements as
an opportunity to educate and spur “accelerated evolution” (Bourdieu, Sayad
2020: 11). Officers in charge of implementation for particular resettlement
villages had considerable room for maneuver. Yet “all the forced resettlement
villages essentially came to resemble each other because they resulted less
from an explicit or implicit doctrine than from the application of unconscious



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244	Alan Smart

models, those that a century earlier had underwritten the establishment of
colonial villages” (Bourdieu, Sayad 2020: 12). Military officers decided all the
details of layout, ignoring traditional models without consultation, disciplin-
ing space in hopes of disciplining people. In 1845, a French Captain wrote
that with resettlement “we will then be able to do many things that seem im-
possible today, and that will permit us to win their minds after we have won
their bodies” (Charles Robert, in Bourdieu, Sayad 2020: 13). There were minor
variations in the manner of implementation. What they called “paternalist”
officers tried to take some account of the wishes of the people, but conces-
sions were very minor. “Authoritarian” officers adopted a fully alien military
order. But the effects differed little (Bourdieu, Sayad 2020: 21).
   More important than nuances of difference between the local officers’ ap-
proaches were the history of colonialism in the specific region. One of the most
impressive contributions of this study of resettlement was the use of eleven
different case studies in different regions, and a careful internal comparison
of the outcomes on agriculture and local culture. Perhaps the most striking
conclusion was that resettlement had resulted in short-term practices, such as
the abandonment of fallowing, that undermined future production, and creat-
ed a “traditionalism of despair” that expressed a “total distrust of the future,
which condemns him to fatalist abandon”. Whereas the former rural society
“used traditional means to ensure maximum predictability” and displayed con-
siderable foresightness, the traditionalism of despair resorted to bare survival
and a disintegration of society comparable to the lumpenproletariat “who are
chained to a past that they know is dead and buried” (Bourdieu, Sayad 2020: 7).
The result was simply a choice between attempting to survive or forced de-
parture to the town, city or France. The result was either acculturation to the
French culture (but with little prospect of anything other than being on the
bottom rungs) or a disintegrating deculturation. I am again not qualified to
judge whether this assessment is accurate. One possibility is that it reflects
Jacques Rancière’s (2004) critique. He argues that Bourdieu’s portrayal of the
domination of the poor reproduces such domination by denying their ability to
understand their own domination without the efforts of the sociologist.
   Although there are similarities, there are important differences between ru-
ral and urban resettlement. While in some situations, urban settlements are
demolished and the population resettled in the countryside, such as in the
Philippines and Indonesia, more commonly urban resettlement is a movement
to a different part of the urban space, usually on more peripheral and less de-



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Pierre Bourdieu on capitals, the state and forced resettlement                  245

sirable land. Those who are resettled are usually able to resume something like
their prior urban employment, although movement to the periphery is par-
ticularly difficult for casual day workers and shopkeepers. The loss of viable
agricultural land for peasant subsistence, however, can be even more disrup-
tive. In both cases, though, questionable assumptions about how design can
deliver improvements for the poor can be extremely destructive (Turner 1976).
   There is now a very large literature on forced resettlement. However, a quick
scan of the English literature suggests that any of the influence by Bourdieu
on it is through the use of his theoretical concepts, without any clear impact of
Uprooting. Hopefully this English translation will change the situation, mak-
ing specialists aware of an impressive early study that went beyond narrow
policy analysis to encompass a major multi-site project grounded in a thor-
ough understanding of the colonial history and current situation, and helped
spark some of the most important general theoretical concepts in the social
sciences.

Final words
   This review essay offers only selective views onto a rich tapestry of con-
cepts, examples and expositions of Bourdieu’s approach to developing and
expressing ideas. One of the books allowed me to return to my earlier work
on the forms of capital, and engage significant departures in Bourdieu’s con-
ceptualizations. The other two books impelled me to grapple with his ideas
in relation to topics where I had not adopted Bourdieu’s approach. Each book
was a challenge to review, but attempting to integrate them was even more
daunting.
   This essay attempted to follow Bourdieu’s pedagogical division of his Forms
of Capital lectures into teaching the principles and formal procedures, and re-
vealing examples of these formal procedures at work. I have mostly alluded
to the latter, and pointed to publications that develop such issues. Instead,
my work has focused on clarifying concepts, especially “species of capital”,
symbolic violence and resettlement. Bourdieu’s concepts continue to be im-
mensely productive to think with, offering pathways into opening up insights
into fields that he never touched upon. But the obscurity of their definition
and exposition make the use of them daunting, particularly to young academ-
ics. As a result, Bourdieu has largely been sidelined in the now-vast field of
social capital research and policy prescription (Smart 2008). The greater avail-
ability of some of Bourdieu’s key works in translation now, thanks to Polity



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246	Alan Smart

Press, may help, but the dizzying array of apparent definitions without clear
boundaries between related concepts will still present obstacles to empirical
deployment of the ideas. Still, it is better to have ideas that cut to the core
questions and issues than it is to have precise and operationalizable theoret-
ical terms that encompass inappropriate simplifications and chaotic concepts
that merge ontologically incompatible phenomena. For these reasons, en-
gagement with Pierre Bourdieu is indispensable for critically minded social
scientists, and my own experience with these three books has reinforced my
firm belief that Bourdieu is good to think with.
   The translations were excellent, with helpful notes and conventions to
point to where words were indecipherable from the tapes and how such prob-
lems were managed. The added essays do very good jobs in helping to situate
the works in their time and fields. The complete volumes provide great assis-
tance in making it easier to use these classic works.




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Pierre Bourdieu on capitals, the state and forced resettlement                     247

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Pierre Bourdieu on capitals, the state and forced resettlement                    249

  Alan Smart is a Professor Emeritus in the Dept. of Anthropology and Archaeolo-
  gy at University of Calgary, Canada. PhD in Social Anthropology from University
  of Toronto (1986). Research interests include political economy, housing, urban
  anthropology, anthropology of law, borders, zoonotic diseases, smart cities and
  posthumanism. Field research conducted in Hong Kong, China and Canada. Author
  of Making Room: Squatter Clearance in Hong Kong, The Shek Kip Mei Myth: Squatters,
  Fires, and Colonial Rule, and Posthumanism: Anthropological Perspectives (co-author
  Josephine Smart) and numerous book chapter and articles.
  asmart@ucalgary.ca




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Alan Smart
Pierre Bourdieu on capitals, the state and forced resettlement. A review essay.
2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 229-250.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4932
