Of rooting and uprooting: Kabyle habitus, domesticity, and structural nostalgia

Exploring the ethnographic context of the early development of his concepts of habitus and practice, this article critically examines Bourdieu’s representation of the Kabyle house (akham) as a synecdoche for a larger ‘rooted’ socio-cultural totality set against the backdrop of the generalized ‘uprooting’ caused by colonialism and the war of national liberation. The akham is shown to be an object of ‘structural nostalgia’, shared by Bourdieu and his informants alike, for a cultural form understood as explicitly threatened. The article traces how these categories of rooting and uprooting, as appropriated by Bourdieu from French nationalist discourse, have continued to inflect contemporary forms of historical consciousness among the Kabyle diaspora, including contemporary Kabyle cultural politics in France and the transnational Berber Cultural Movement.