AfterwordTheory of fields in the postcolonial ageMathieu Hilgers and Eric Mangez

I have attempted to show foreign publics the universal validity of modelsconstructed in relation to the speciflc case of France.

(Pierie Bourdieu, opening lines of Practical Reason:On the Theory of Action)

A universal concept carries within it traces of what Gadamer would call 'pre-judice'

- not a conscious bias but a sign that we think out of a particular

accretion of histories that are not alwavs transDarent to us.(Dipesh Chakrabarty, new Preface to Provincializing Europe.

Postcolonial Thought and Historical Dffirence)These two juxtaposed quotations provide a perfect starting point for a con-sideration of some questions relating to the future life of Bourdieu's theory.Maintaining a universalist ambition presupposes working through an objec-tivation which, despite all his efforts to promote a reflexive sociology and acritique of the illusions of a certain kind of universalism, Bourdieu seems notto have completed fully. The conquest of the scientific object is achieved, aswe know, against prejudice, but Gadamer's argument, which Chakrabartyalludes to above, aims not to tend towards the impossible suspension of allour prejudices to put forward a science or a hermeneutics devoid of any pre-figuration, but rather to open up a dialogue with those who are capable ofspotting our prejudices and identifying their consequences. In this regard,postcolonial approaches play a decisive role today. They invite us to rethinkhegemonic Western knowledges in global terms and the hermeneutic uncon-scious of their tradition from a subaltern standpoint. Thinking postcoloniallymeans, in particular, determining 'how universalistic thought was always andalready modified by particular histories' (Chakrabarty 2008: xiv), controllingthe epistemic violence inherent within it, and seeking to move beyond it byquestioning the prejudgment 'rendered before all the elements that determine asituation have been finally examined' (Gadamer 2013:283).

Every concept and every judgement by concept is necessarily precededby a non-explicit pre-comprehension, a taken-for-granted prejudgement that

-258 Mathieu Hilgers and Eric Mangezdetermines the judgement. At the heart of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of fields isan element that is never questioned, either by Bourdieu or by most of theauthors who are concerned to take nothing for granted and who have devel-oped a fruitful critical dialogue with his work: the distinction between differ-entiated and non-differentiated societies. This distinction, which is central insociological thinking, appears to be taken for granted, and whose con-sequences need to be examined. This unquestioned certainty, a category ofperception, hierarchization and discrimination that is constantly mobilized, iseven sometimes used by the most stimulating heretical inheritors as a tool todistance themselves from the master.l

Every represeptation of the real, every ordering with a view to constructingintelligibility and, more generally, all knowledge, bears within it the seeds ofan epistemic violence (Mudimbe and Hilgers 2013). The invention of theprimitive, and with it of relatively or entirely undifferentiated societies, waspart of the ambition, in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, to interpret andclassify cultures along a scale according to their degrees of development(Kuper 1988). It served as the matrix for the history of the social sciences,which was partly constructed around couples of oppositions

- Western and

non-Western, close and remote, dynamic and static, heterogeneous andhomogeneous, complex and simple, modern and archaic which often tookthe form of a denial of otherness or a use of otherness as a leverage point forunderstanding our societies (Mudimbe 1988; Mbembe 2001,2013). The vio-lence of the categories of scientific understanding is all the greater when it isnot made explicit. Works in postcolonial studies abound in attempts todeconstruct the hegemonic aspirations of this particular universalism.

Theory of fields and social differentiationThe distinction between weakly and strongly differentiated societies as con-ceived by Bourdieu is relatively simple. He draws, inter alia, on his experienceof the precapitalist, agrarian society of Kabylia, in the colonial situation,where social practices unfold in a unified mythico-ritual universe, in order todefine what constitutes the specificity of relatively undifferentiated societies.At the other extreme, he takes modern French society as the archetype ofstrongly differentiated societies, in particular because it contains fields, i.e.autonomized domains of activity.

How does he integrate this distinction into his theory? In his PascalianMeditations, Bourdieu writes that 'precapitalist societies depend mainly onhabitus for their reproduction whereas capitalist societies depend principallyon objective mechanisms, such as those which tend to guarantee the repro-duction of economic capital and cultural capital, to which should be addedall the forms of organizational constraints ... and codifications of practices'(Bourdieu 1997: 256; Bourdieu 2000b: 215-16). Bourdieu thus pursuesreflection on a phenomenon which, as Lahire (2012) notes, enjoys a unani-mity rarely found in sociology. The social differentiation of activities is found

Afterword 259in Spencer, Marx, Durkheim, Simmel, Weber, Elias, Polanyi, Parsons andLuhmann to mention some but a few. For all their diversity, the sociologies ofmodernity are based on a minimum line of common interpretation whichindicates 'how society progresses, evolving from the simple to the complex'(Martuccelli 1999). This shift from homogeneity to heterogeneity has con-sequences for social structures, psychic structures, behaviours, personalitiesand modes of domination.

A more detailed vision of his argument is developed in the first lines of hisarticle on 'The Modes of Domination'. There, Bourdieu states that:

in societies which have no 'self-regulating market' (in Karl Polanyi'ssense), no educational system, no iuiidicatpparatus and no State, rela-tions of domination can be set up and maintained only at the cost ofstrategies which must be endlessly renewed, because the conditionsrequired for a mediated, lasting appropriation of other agents' labour,services or homage have not been brought together. By contrast, dom-ination no longer needs to be exerted in a direct, personal way when it isimplied in the possession of the means (economic and cultural capital) ofappropriating the mechanisms of the field of economic production andthe field of cultural production, which tend to assure their ownreproduction by their very functioning, independently of any deliberateintervention by the agents.

(Bourdieu 1976: I22; Bourdieu 1977:183-84)The term'field'should be taken here in the generic sense. It can be concludedfrom this statement that the sedimentation of the mechanisms of legitimacyand domination in relatively autonomous universes and institutions facilitatesthe reproduction and exercise of a domination that is more generally managedby institutions.

The distinction between differentiated and non-differentiated societies,however descriptive it may be, refers, as we have said, to a problematic lexicalfield which finds its most synthetic expression in the idea of the 'great divide',a formula that distinguishes modern societies from non-modern societies, i.e.archaic, exotic, non-differentiated societies whose mechanisms of reproduc-tion are based not on institutions but on a kind of cartesian continuouscreation, a creation in every instant, of societies in which, as Mbembe puts it,'the formulation of norms ... has nothing to do with reasoned public delib-eration, since the setting of norms by a process of argument is a specificinvention of modern Europe' (Mbembe 2001: ll), societies in which theindividual must endlessly reaffirm all his characteristics because no socialsedimentation, no institution takes charge of them, societies that areundifferentiated because they are precapitalist.

The lexicological discomfort revealed by the subaltern point of view stemsfrom the hierarchical forms and the immanent teleology of the distinctionmade according to degree of differentiation. It is not a matter of denying a

260 Mathieu Hilgers and Eric Mangezdifference or the existence of variation in social differentiation. still less ofcalling its effects into question, but of examining the way they are perceived,ordered and analysed.

Provincializing Western differentiation'Fields', Lahire tells us, 'only have a history and a meaning in the frameworkof differentiated societies' (Lahire 2012: 145 and see Chapter 2 of thisvolume). This is clearly what Bourdieu also seems to indicate, since hedeclares that 'to understand human practices in differentiated societies, onehas to know about fields and, on the other hand, one has to take accountof ... habitus'.'At the same time, the concepts of habitus and field seem sointerlinked that one may wonder if there can be societies without fields.Moreover, he considers that 'Habitus is valid only in relation with field,capital is valid only in relation with field' (both quotations, Bourdieu 1989,quoted by Lahire in Chapter 2, this volume) or even that'a capital does notexist and function except in relation to a field' (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992.101). Would 'traditional' and 'precapitalist'societies function without capitalor without fields? In the case of Kabylia, is the relationship between habitusand field exclusively negative? In reality, the confusions stem rather from thesemantic instability we referred to in the Introduction to this work. The term'field' sometimes designates the social space, conceived as a structure of posi-tions that must be understood relationally, and sometimes it refers to a rela-tively autonomized domain of activity. It is in the latter sense that 'traditional'and 'precapitalist'societies more or less lack f,elds. From the subaltern view-point, this assertion calls for an immediate reservation: do non-differentiatedsocieties exist? What would such societies look like? If one follows Lahire.they are:

traditional societies, with an oral tradition, ... also ... termed 'acepha-lous' societies, 'stateless' societies, 'lineage-based' or 'segmentary' socie-ties ... [To] account for the mythico-ritual phenomena of these socialformations ... one cannot speak of 'politics' in the sense of an autono-mized practice of power separate from other social practices ... Thesituation has nothing in common with that of societies in which separateinstitutions of power have emerged.

(Lahire 2012: 145)

The remark is significant but too general, and does not take into accountthe advances of anthropology over at least the last 30 years, no doubt forLahire because it is essentially read through Bourdieu and for Bourdieu,and

- as the references he mobilizes suggest

- because he has not followed the

developments of the discipline. What does this anthropology say? First, at areflexive level, it has underlined that despite the paradigmatic succession thatstructures its history (evolutionism, diffusionism, functionalism, structural

Afterword 261functionalism, structuralism, etc.), the idea of 'primitive society' has remainedabnormally stable within the discipline (Kuper 1988: 1). It has shown thatclassic anthropology constructed its object through constant recourse to allo-chrony, postulating that undifferentiated societies belonged to an earlier tem-porality, although they were generally contemporary with the analyst (Fabian1983), or by emphasizing that societies which underwent Western annexationcould be understood, even in their symbolic structures, independently of thecolonial 'situation' (Balandier 1951, and in another way the Manchesterschool). This'denial of coevalness'(Fabian 1983)

- i.e. the assignment to our

contemporaries of another position in the temporal structure of humanity byconverting a cultural distance, presumed to separate the West from the non-Western world, into linear historical time, on the basis of which hierarchiesand distinct places are assigned (Friedman 1994; Chakrabarty 2008; Boa-ventura de Sousa 2014)

- has analytic consequences that are hard to accept

today -

complex societies have actors with complex psychology, plural actorsand plural worlds, undifferentiated societies have actors with undifferentiatedpsychology, singular worlds and singular people acting, paradoxically, almostwithout singularity.

In parallel with its self-critique, anthropology has shown, without necessarilyfalling into orientalism, that where primitive societies are described, therehave also been societies with an elaborate oral tradition (Vansina 1985), witha State (Terray 1995), profoundly varied societies (Vidal 1995), some of whichhave had a complex administrative apparatus, a bureaucracy and domainswith a specific language (Izard 2003; Hilgers 2012). Even in acephaloussocieties one finds autonomized practices of power and even fields, if this termis taken to mean domains of autonomized activities, i.e. activities requiringthe learning of a specific language known to certain initiates, the transmissionof a knowledge and a history specific to an activity, associated rituals, condi-tions of entry, the development of beliefs, a specific illusio, a specific capital, astructure of relational positions within which differences and forms of dom-ination come into play. One only has to think of secret societies or the hier-archies linked to earth altars in precolonial African societies to measure theircomplexity.

If precolonial African societies are not 'undifferentiated societies', what humangroups would count as such? No doubt some 'primitive hordes', 'bands' ofhunters, gatherers or fishers that existed beyond the imagination of anthro-pologists but the heuristic necessity of which for constructing the model ofdifferentiation is not clear, not only because they no longer exist, not onlybecause they belong to too remote a past, but also because behind these labelslies an immense variation and heterogeneity and it seems problematic on theone hand to valorize a sociology of complexity and on the other to totalizeand classify extremely different societies on the basis of such a rudimentarycategory.

To calm the debate we could more simply say that there are no non-differentiatedsocieties, first, because sexual difference in itself constitutes a biological

262 Mathieu Hilgers and Eric Mangezdistinction that leads to a minimum social differentiation, but above allbecause many of these so-called primitive societies are much more complexthan they seem. Suffice it to say that we can read the classic authorsgenerously, skipping over the occasional careless use of language, and agreethat they are dealing with weakly or strongly differentiated rather thandifferentiated and undifferentiated societies.

However, this remains insufficient to avoid the risk of perceiving the processof social differentiation solely through the prism of the West, of the expansionof capitalism, with, in addition, the return of the Great Divide and the nat-uralized ontological distinctions that accompany it.2 The ethnocentricdeployment of.this difference, albeit tempered by levels and forms, brings therisk of not perceiving the richness that results from the variation of the degreeand type of differentiation. The critical intervention of postcolonial epistemol-ogy makes it possible to avoid the teleological pitfall and the danger of pre-senting the West and capitalism as the paradigmatic framework for therealizalion of social differentiation. Clearly, the obligation of vigilance does notimply the denial of difference and differentiation. Rather, it is a tactic to avoidthe prejudices latent in the distinction.

If it appears necessary to reconsider the opposition between differentiatedand non-differentiated societies and replace it, as we have suggested, with acontinuum of more or less differentiated societies, it can also be useful tointroduce some complementary distinctions depending on the types of differ-entiation with which one is dealing. The differentiation with which fieldtheory is concerned is in fact a particular form of functional differentiation.However, as has been said, it does not imply that societies that are presumedto be little or non-differentiated in this respect are not differentiated in otherrespects

- religion, language, ethnicity, local particularity and territory. In

these other respects, moreove! France would have to be regarded as a relativelyundifferentiated society compared to many others. There is much to be gainedfrom considering alternative differentiations instead ofconsidering all societiesdeviating from the Western model as necessarily poorly differentiated.

Extending field theoryReconsidering differentiation in a less exclusive way makes it possible toenrich the contextualist and dispositionalist perspectives in empirical andtheoretical terms. What happens when one tries to implement this theory inspaces that are less differentiated or imagined to be so (i.e. the countries ofthe South)? What questions arise from this transposition? What do theyilluminate? It is a complex issue, and to introduce it we shall limit our-selves to three preliminary considerations that lead to a decentring of theconventional use of field theory. The first concerns the unification of the cul-tural market; the second, the unification of the economic market; and thethird, globalization.

Afterword 263The unification of the caltural murketOne characteristic of many societies of the South is that there is no unifica-tion of the market in cultural capital. In contrast to French republicansociety, where the educational hierarchy is always a decisive element in theevaluation and profitability of this capital, where the educational systemestablishes what Bourdieu calls 'a unified market for all cultural capacities'and guarantees 'the convertibility into money of cultural capital acquired at adeterminate cost in time and labour' (Bourdieu 1976: 125), in most Africancountries it seems difficult to identify absolute cultural reference points withinthe local horizon. The overlapping of different sets of norms means that sev-eral hierarchies coexist and appear as more or less legitimate depending onthe context. Aside from extreme cases, where individuals accumulate

- or are

totally deprived of -

all the legitimate facets of cultural capital, it is difficult,but not impossible, to identify precisely the value of the specific componentsof an individual's overall cultural capital (including its incorporated andtherefore dispositional form). It is even more complex to determine a uniformhierarchy based on this capital. That would presuppose establishing whatconstitutes the legitimate culture, which in some social universes is highlyproblematic, as shown by the work of the Euro-African Association for theAnthropology of Social Change and Development (APAD) school analysingthe 'superimposition', 'overlapping' and 'intertwining' of a 'plurality ofnorms' in a sub-Saharan Africa marked by the multiple belonging of socialagents to several hierarchies (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 1998; Chau-veau et al. 2001; Hilgers 2009; Blundo 2012; Lund 2013). The great variety ofthe legitimacies that shape the hierarchies makes it difficult to establish anoverall hierarchy spanning the whole of the social space.

In contrast to economic capital, which draws very clear dividing lines andis almost always determinant in the structuring of social positions, culturalcapital here relates to different forms of legitimacies, often competing andgenerally hybrid.3 The legitimacy of the facets of cultural capital varies pro-foundly according to the context. It is less subordinate to a hegemonic, uni-form, totalizing hierarchy than in Jacobin French society. The hierarchies arenot fixed but situational. This does not mean that they are constantly rein-vented or that there are no institutions stabilizing them in an idiosyncratic, oreven idiosyncretic way, but simply that they are not unified. Is this the sign ofweak differentiation? If so, it has to be acknowledged that weakly differentiatedsocieties can produce individuals who have an extremely plural register of dis-positions.a Is it the sign of strong differentiation? It is then clear that it is notidentical to the type of differentiation considered by Bourdieu. The multiplicityof these legitimacies seems, indeed, to be the product of a social differentiation,while at the same time resulting from the difficulty of establishing a State insti-tution which could, as in the French case, constitute a 'meta-field', a 'meta-power', a 'meta-capital'that irradiates the other fields (Bourdielu20l2:488-89).If one considers a good number of southern countries, it seems difficult to agree

264 Mathieu Hilgers and Eric Mangezthat'in the modern world state actors alone have the formal authority to inter-vene in, set rules for and generally pronounce on the legitimacy and viability ofmost nonstate fields' (Fligstein and McAdam 2012: l9). The theory of fields hasto take into consideration the configurations in which it is deployed, the impactof the variation of the state configurations (i.e. authoritarian, semi-authoritarian,weak or failed) and the historical trajectory of societies.

How is the hierarchy of these multiple legitimacies organized? How dofields relate to one another when the State does not constitute a meta-field?How does the variety of orders of legitimacies affect dispositions? More gen-erally, 'Does the concept of the field still function in the same way (and aseffectively) when translated into a context other than that of French society?'Mangez and Linard ask in this volume (Chapter 7). These authors examinethe question, taking the example of a country neighbouring France

- Belgium

and show the importance of understanding the differentiation into fields bycross-comparing it with other types of differentiations based on religious,philosophical, ethnoJinguistic and territorial affiliations. These overlappingsgenerate specific mechanisms, neutralize certain intra-field struggles and sti-mulate inter-field solidarities. The State in Belgium is not as centralized as inFrance, the cultural hierarchy is less unified, the linguistic hierarchies remainsubject to controversy, the federal, community and regional institutions com-pete in many areas. If such differences are already observable between neigh-bouring countries, it is clear how important it is to undertake a serioushistorical and geographical comparison between the countries of the Northand ofthe South(s).

The colonial situation, for example, established a form of differentiationprobably much more violent and radical than the differentiation generallyassociated with the dynamics of capitalism in Western societies. Nonetheless,and without minimizing its violence or the fact that this debate is neverentirely closed, mrmerous works by historians, political scientists and anthro-pologists have shown that in many regions colonization did not take the formof a break but rather constituted a radical moment of composition orrecomposition of hegemonic alliances (Bayart 1994). Colonization should notnecessarily be conceived as the collision and coexistence of two societies(undifferentiated and differentiated). It can also be seen as the recompositionof a social assemblage, or of a society marked by radical levels of autonomyand internal differentiation, extreme forms of exclusion and strong logics ofambivalence, heteronomy and encounter.

With the works on the colonial experience, we now have a vast andparticularly fertile corpus for understanding intra- and inter-individual dis-positional differences. At the empirical and theoretical levels, many studiesprovide excellent resources for advances in relational and dispositionalistsociology, for example, the works of Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff onthe body, the historical transformation of culture, the colonization of con-sciousness and the consciousness of colonization (1985, 1991, 1992, 1997), orSerge Gruzinski (1988) on the 'colonization of the imagination', or life

Afterword 265trajectories that directly question dispositional plurality, such as that ValentinMudimbe (1988), the equivalent of Edward Said in African Studies. Mudimbegrew up in a village in Zaire and received a Jesuit schooling in that countrybefore studying in Europe, living in the Latin Quarter in Paris, and writing athesis in classical philology at the Catholic University of Louvain, becoming aMarxist, and spending another ten years in his country of origin before finallybeing expelled from it and being appointed to a chair of literature at DukeUniversity in the United States. A whole aspect of his work can be reread asone of the highest forms of reflexivity on the dispositional plurality inducedby this individual and collective trajectory which can be condensed in the term'postcolonial' in the historical, theoretical and epistemological sense (see forexample his novel L'cart,translated as The Rf). Who am I, what am I, whenmy identity and my relation to myself are constituted through contexts andlearning experiences inducing such radically opposed readings and rereadingsof myself?

Practices that the academic observer considers dissonant or out of phaseare not always perceived or conceived as illegitimate from an emic point ofview. The existence of great variations within societies probably allows othermodes of conversion of capital. It may be supposed that there are some formsof cultural capital that transcend local spaces and others that play a sometimesauxiliary sometimes dominant role but have only a regional efficacy. Theseobservations invite us to nuance a point of view in which practices that anthro-pologists designate as those of fusion, bricolage, hybridity

- or, in some cases,

breaks that constitute not a total rupture but an outlet facilitating the manage-ment of existential tensions

- through the prism of dissonance relative to a cul-

tural space presented as a homogeneous reference. Many variations do notappear to the agents as discordant, not only because they result from a 'prac-tical sense' but also because they are not understood in terms of a totalizationof a lifetime's experience of the world that might seek to define an aesthetic ofhomogeneous existence.

Some societies are marked by tendencies valorizing ambivalence, playingon multiple registers, living with ruse or conscious but non-problematic con-tradictory associations. Practices are not necessarily evaluated in terms of alifestyle that ostentatiously manifests its coherence. The conscious hetero-geneity of practices generates less guilt than that produced by dissonance inpostmodern Western societies, tolerant of contradiction though they are. Theexplanation probably lies not in a weak differentiation that would produce a lesscomplex psychological structure, but perhaps, over the long term, in a differentrelation to the moral ideal of coherence in societies long untouched byChristianity and, above all, structured with a less unified market in culturalcapital. These considerations are important for refining our understanding ofcultural capital outside and perhaps for seeing how particular the Frenchcontext ls.

266 Mathieu Hilgers and Eric MangezThe anification of the economic markelTherefore, there are highly differentiated societies in which, in contrast to theFrench case, there is no unifred market in cultural capital. Given that Bour-dieu's analysis of cultural capital is in many respects a transposition of theanalysis of economic capital as worked out by Marx, it might be wonderedwhether the critique should not be extended to the sources of inspirationthemselves, i.e. to the process of unification of the economic market.

In sociological thought, as is shown by the recurrent use of the term 'pre-capitalist' to designate relatively non-differentiated societies, functional spe-ciation is generally posited in relation with capitalism. The main societies inwhich Bourdieu grounds the empirical underpinning of his reflection are,moreover, 'traditional', 'precapitalist' Algeria where he analyses in part theforms of social violence linked to economic transformations, and especiallytheir impact on the temporal and affective structures of perception (Bourdieu1979

- and a broadly 'capitalist' French society. Bourdieu does not present

these configurations as specific but seems to regard them as the expression ofa universal. While one can legitimately examine Algeria and France as formsof practical embodiments of a universal, it is essential to question the uni-versal character of the association between 'precapitalism' and 'weakly dif-ferentiated' on the one hand, and 'capitalist' and 'strongly differentiated' onthe other.

These associations seem to be so assimilated by Bourdieu that they effacethemselves, disappear, become quasi-invisible in his work. Apart from some ofhis early texts on Algeria or the polemical texts of Bourdieu the 'publicintellectual' against neoliberalism, in his major texts

- Outline of a Theory of

Practice, The Logic of Practice, Distinction, Pascalian Meditations -

capitalismis a background, incorporated into the logic of differentiation without beingmade fully explicit, so that it ends up constituting a presupposition and evenan implicit motor of the process of differentiation. However, it may be ques-tioned if the dynamics of demographic growth, which mechanically engendersa competition leading to differentiation, is exclusively articulated with thelogic of capitalism. Historically, given the variety of forms of social organi-zation, the answer can only be negative. It is not a question of claiming thatcapitalist societies are not differentiated but rather of pointing out that not alldifferentiated societies have necessarily been capitalist. In other words, aquestioning of the forms and degrees of differentiation invites one to considerthe potentially idiosyncratic character of the differentiations that develop incapitalist spaces. This requires one to shed the retrospective illusion wherebyany non-capitalist space is necessarily seen as 'precapitalist'.

Making this assumption explicit raises several questions: what happens inautonomized domains of activities in non-unified economic spaces, in frame-works where the capitalist and non-capitalist economy are hybrid? How dofields function there? How do conversions take place between the forms of capi-tal possessed by the agents (cultural, economic, symbolic, specific) when there is

Afterword 267no homogeneous hierarchy and unifred market in cultural and/or economicterms? Are the modes of conversion of capital as Bourdieu theorizes them reallypertinent in non-capitalist but differentiated societies? Are these not questionsthat arise and are necessary both for grasping the social dynamics of relativelyautonomous activities aT a general and comparative level and identifying thehistorical particularity on the basis of which Bourdieu built up his model?

Notwithstanding the arguments put forward in the Introduction to thiswork, which indicate how to use the theory of fields to understand socialchange, it seems that Bourdieu neglected the extent of historical variations.His strange relationship to Kabyle society is the most perfect expression ofthis. On the one hand, the texts from his youth are political and analyse theimpact of coloniation on the transformation of economic and social dis-positions. On the other hand, his best-known and most decisive texts basedon Algeria are theoretical works which present and analyse a Kabyle societythat exists outside time and the colonial experience. Beyond the fieldwork, thework of theoretical investigation and powerful interdisciplinary discussions,one cannot fail to be surprised by this situation. One of the most stimulatingand innovative analytical models of the twentieth century is based on thedifficult transposition to 'highly differentiated' societies of a 'anthropologicalmythology',5 established in relation to 'weakly differentiated societies'.6

It is all the more disconcerting since it was by means of this detour thatBourdieu was able to shed a revealing, pertinent and innovative light on manyaspects of the organization and functioning of the social world. At the level ofconceptual productivity, Bourdieu's binary comparisons have proven extre-mely fertile. At the level of their descriptive value, some of them nonethelessremain profoundly problematic all the more so since Bourdieu presents themnot as tactics devised to construct an analytical apparatus but as analyses intheir own right.

Without falling into naie realism, it seems, however, that a rigorous studyof the social world based on his concepts can be conducted by movingbeyond some analytical fictions that were necessary for their construction.This presupposes that one take account of the historical particularities in alltheir complexity. Analysing the logic of fields in their historical movementrequires taking seriously the profound variations that distinguish the trajec-tories of societies. However, Bourdieu's ambition of developing a generaltheory led him sometimes to neglect the specificity of epochs, societies andcultures, sometimes to reify and naturalize differences. The structural opposi-tion between weakly and strongly differentiated societies was a resource forinitiating the modelling; nothing now prevents us from nuancing and enlar-ging the field of investigation. In questioning the distinction between weaklyand strongly differentiated societies, in seeking to implement the theory offields in the countries of the South, not in order to destroy it or highlight itslimits but to refine it and extend its efficacy, the postcolonial approach expandsthe analysis of social differentiation. It explores alternative differentiations andintroduces nuances.

268 Mathieu Hilgers and Eric MangezGlobalizutionExpanding the field of investigation also means considering one final point which,contrary to what many people think, appears marginal in Bourdieub work and yetdecisive for pursuing decentring without limiting it to the study of the past. Hispolemical essays against neoliberalism and several late articles discuss globaliza-tion, and even associate it with the theory of fields (Bourdieu 1998a; Bourdieu andWacquant 1999; Bourdieu 2000a, 2001). Bourdieu shows, for example, how thefield of the neoliberal economy progressively establishes itself on a world scale andreduces the autonomy of the other fields. Howeve4 and even if he sometimesappears as a standard bearer of the anti-globalization movementq beyond hispolemical interventions, Bourdieu died too soon really to become a theorist ofglobalization. The theme is not the preoccupation of any of his major works andthe main lines of force of his theoretical approach were worked out without takingthis dynamic into consideration. On the contrary in many ways he gives theimpression of having studied relatively isolated societies, circumscribed on one ter-ritory. This observation is not insignificant. It suggests that rather than limitingoneselfto the relatively contextual sketches that Bourdieu devoted to globalization,it seems more fruitful to confront his model seriously with the questions thatemerge when it is deployed in the global framework.

The growing interconnectedness of societies, the emergence of a globalconsciousness, and technological transformations should be handled withcare, especially when one is studying isolated regions, but they are having adecisive impact on social structuring and historical, institutional and bodilydynamics (Hilgers 2009). As Duval's Chapter 6 in this volume shows, inter-nationalization is having a profound effect on relatively autonomized domainsof activity. A number of these domains have experienced an intensification oftheir global dimensions in recent decades: sport, religion, powe! science,politics, the economy, art, fashion, journalism, literature, the media, law,education, to limit ourselves to those that Bourdieu studied. The deploymentof relatively autonomized domains of activity must henceforward be con-sidered in local, national, regional and international contexts defined by leg-alities, institutional frameworks, reforms, modes of regulation, struggles andhistoricities that engender strong variations in their structuring. How arethese variations organized? Consideration of the systemic logics in specificdomains, the efficacy of the modes of refraction, the modification of rules andstrategies according to the scale, the impact of the trajectories of connectionsand disconnections with global flows, and the transformation of the forms ofautonomy are some of the many questions that arise.

Our own research on the Programme for International Student Assessment(PISA) has documented the transformation of the field of education, describ-ing its evolution towards heteronomy following the introduction of new actorsand the growing submission of those richest in cultural capital to economicand political interests. The diffusion of standardized modes of evaluation and aculture of accountabilitv has reduced the autonomy of national fields of

Afterword 269education (Mangez and Hilgers 2012). Researchers are increasingly drawingon Bourdieu to analyse the most varied domains in relation to the dynamicslinked to globalization. These major advances cannot be detailed here, but itshould be noted, given the small place of this theme in the Bourdieusiancorpus

- a place which, in the 47 books published to date, becomes even

smaller when one omits the occasional essays and polemical texts -

that thesedevelopments always constitute original extensions of his work rather thanthe academic, standardized duplication of his theoretical model.

This fertility derives, inter alia, from the fact that the implementation ofthis theory in the context of globalization raises many questions

- that of

whether the growth of connections and the strengthening of external forcesleads to a shortening of the cycle of transformation of fields; or the questionof establishing the impact of the contraction of space and time on theirfunctioning; or that of clarifying the relationship between deterritorialization,the structuring of a domain of activity, and individual dispositions.

International institutions are playing an historically unprecedented role.Often, they construct and disseminate international evaluations or standardswhich, in many fields, increasingly function as principles of ranking, imposinga specific form ofcapital and so unifying cultural hierarchies beyond regionalor national frontiers.T As a corollary the role and function of the State arebeing transformed. The objective structures that constitute relatively autono-mized domains of activity are no longer limited to the local level. The principlesof classification and judgement mobilized within them are becoming globalized(Fenwick et qL.2014, Andre and Hilgers 2015). How are the effects and therelations between fields, the intersections, the interrelations and the inter-fieldsarticulated? Are there trans-field effects? If so, on what scale do they occur?How do we articulate the variations of scale between the local, regional,national and global with the theory of fields? What can this teach us? Does thetheory of fields constitute an adequate structural framework to deal with themultiple variations, experiments and contingencies included in the historicaldynamics specific to each level of articulation? There are countless questions andthey seem to be extremely fertile.

ConclusionDespite its aspirations, in many of its aspects Bourdieu's theory of fields is aregional theory. It is built up from a local history in order to grasp a specificpart of the social space. If we understand it restrictively, this theory thereforeseems useful, first and foremost, in societies where a relatively strong Stateguarantees the existence of a unified market in cultural and economic capitaland has the power to preserve certain domains of activity from subordinationto external hierarchies such as that of the economic market. However, if onethinks that Bourdieu was right to claim that his theory goes far beyond loc-alism, there is no reason to limit oneself to this standard interpretation. There

270 Mathieu Hilgers and Eric Mangezis a choice to be made in methodological, theoretical and interpretative terms.If the theory is regarded as a general theory capable of being developed toshed light on the emergence and organization of any relatively autonomizeddomain of activity, then its implementation in alternative spaces anddiscussion with the most recent advances of the social sciences open a horizonof empirical and theoretical inquiries that has a promising future before it.

NotesI In his argument with Bourdieu, Lahire takes up the distinction between non-

differentiated and differentiated societies and makes it so much his own that heconsiders that Bourdieu's main effor was to have imported a model dispositionalistconceived in the observation of traditional societies (whether Kabylia or Barn)into modern societies, where, as Martuccelli notes, economic capital is of muchgreater importance, where symbolic domination is codified by the mediation of theState, and where mismatches between subjective representations and objective rea-lity increase (Martuccelli 1999).'The paradox', Lahire declares,'lies in having...retained the model of the habitus, appropriate for the study of weakly differentiatedsocieties (preindustrial, precapitalist) in order to study strongly differentiatedsocieties, which, by definition, necessarily produce actors who are moredifferentiated from one another, but also internally' (Lahire 2012:31).

2 In addition to a postcolonial perspective, for a stimulating way of moving beyondthis dichotomy, see the now classic works of Descola (2013) and Latour (1993).

3 Beyond economic capital and cultural capital, autochtony seems to play the role ofcapital that can be invested, valued and profrted from in many societies in Africa;see Hilgers 201l.

4 For one of the most stimulating developments of Bourdieu's dispositionalist theorywhich precisely considers dispositional plurality in highly differentiated societies, seeBernard Lahire's The Plural Actor (2010).

5 We borrow the term from Burawoy and van Holdt 2012.6 This is even more surprising given that in these early works Bourdieu analyses the

relations of cultural domination imposed by colonization (Bourdieu 1958, 1962). Heshows, for example, that modern activities presuppose the dissociation of the sym-bolic and the economic, and consequently 'the knowledge and recognition of impor-ted models'(Bourdieu 1963:302). Some agents, incapable of adapting to this system,abandon the effort and cling by default to a 'traditionalism of despair' (Bourdieu1964:201), generating obsolete attitudes, while others oscillate between the modernand the traditional modes offunctioning and develop a structure ofhybrid conducts.Hence young people brought up within the administrative and educational systemimposed by colonization find it easier to internalize the rules of colonial society andto produce appropriate practices. The peasants' hybrid systems of representations,classifications and actions lead to a disjunction between their subjective intentionsand their objective chances because they are less able to grasp the functioning of achanging world. At the same time, the massive and rapid changes in the conditions ofexistence and the transformations of norms and behaviours facilitate consciousawareness of models that were previously taken for granted. Bourdieu stresses thecomplexity of this social structure. According to him, all behaviour can be read in twoways, since it bears within it reference to the two logics. 'It follows that each of theone-sided descriptions of the reality suffices to account for the whole of the reality,except for what constitutes its essence, namely contradiction' (Bourdieu 1964: 164).Indeed, these logics very often interpenetrate each other and give rise to complex

Afterword 271behaviours. Bourdieu even refers to 'a double inner life' (Bourdieu 1958: 123; Bour-diet 7962: 144), oscillating between uncertain identication with the dominant modeland the urge to revolt that arises from the dominated model. He shows to what extent'the abandonment of the traditionalist attitude does not coincide with adoption of theethos historically associated with the capitalist attitude' (Bourdieu 1963: 374). How-ever, although these empirical works describe this complex interpenetration, a dualtheoretical representation of the world is progressively set up, and the traditionalmode of thought and the modern mode of thought come to constitute quasi-antinomic forms of theoretical objectivation.

7 For a reflection on these questions see for example a recent study on the process ofdissemination of a standardized conception of childhood, the simultaneous emer-gence of the field of worldwide child protection and its impact in Africa (Andreand Hilgers 2015).

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