This article reproduces a conference that Pierre Bourdieu gave on the work of the Algerian writer and anthropologist Mouloud Mammeri. The text was read in the author's absence, in a colloquium that was held in Algeria on "The Magrebian Dimension in Mouloud Mammeri's work". Bourdieu compares Mammeri's relationship to Magreb, a region of North Africa, to an odyssey, a pilgrimage that is made up of two distinct moments. The first consists of a movement away from his native culture and toward a universal university culture. The second is marked by his return to or re-appropriation of his native culture through ethnological study and research on ancient Kabyle poets. Through the discovery of Homer as well as devotion to ethnological work on his own country, Mammeri is able to link the two points of this pilgrimage, in a return to the denied culture via the culture that led to its denial. The end-point of this journey represents a confrontation of one of the major forms of symbolic domination, shame of one's self.
Mouloud Mammeri; Magreb; poetry; ethnology; Homer; symbolic domination