Page 158 - Cultural Theory

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••• Framing Bourdieu •••

continued: ‘This use of real history thus characterizes studies of acculturation, rather
than assumptions of historical contact based on reconstructions made by working
out distributional analyses’ (ibid.: 15).
Herskovits spends a great deal of time differentiating between assimilation, diffu-
sion, and acculturation. His assumption is that acculturation is a reciprocal contact
whereas assimilation involves enforcement. He approvingly quotes the comment
that ‘The problem of acculturation, when we are considering the American Indians
in relation to their adjustment to European culture, is a problem of assimilation’
(ibid.: 7).
He also clarifies a distinction between diffusion and tradition. He writes:

Diffusion, this process by means of which culture spreads in space, is contrasted …
with tradition, which represents the means by which a given culture persists in
time; that is, the means by which the content of a culture is handed down from
one generation to another within the same society. (ibid.: 13)
Herskovits emphasized the need to exploit known history in describing acculturation
processes. He argued that the study of acculturation mainly involved normal anthro-
pological research procedures but he thought that there was one special point to be
considered. He expressed it in the following way:

For where European and native cultures under contact are being studied, the
elements from the student’s own culture tend to be taken more or less for
granted by him. Hence this must be carefully guarded against lest the resulting
ethnographic description be thrown badly out of focus.
(ibid.: 18)

Finally, Herskovits gave detailed attention to the methodology of adopting an histor-
ical approach to the analysis of cultural change. He insisted that it was possible to
‘reconstruct the life of the people as it was lived before the acculturative process set
in’ (ibid.: 23) and that this reconstruction constituted a kind of ‘base-line’ for mea-
suring the acculturation process.
The book by Herskovits clearly informed Bourdieu’s practice. It constituted a kind
of handbook or textbook for his work. First of all, Bourdieu accepted the heavy ori-
entation towards supposing that there is no biological, racial factor in acculturation.
Bourdieu paid no attention to ethnic differences in his account of Algerian cultural
change. Second, Bourdieu adopted Herskovits’s historical approach. The essence of
the Sociologie de l’Algérie is that it offers a reconstruction of the Algerian status quo
ante, precisely the sort of base-line account which Herskovits recommended.
Importantly, Bourdieu shared Herskovits’s view that the definition of the ‘culture’ of
a geographical region was problematic. The opening paragraph of Sociologie de
l’Algérie is significant here:

It is obvious that Algeria, when considered in isolation from the rest of the
Maghreb, does not constitute a true cultural unit. However, I have limited my
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