The Silo Effect

by Gillian Tett

  Claude Lévi-Strauss, a French anthropologist, is a case in point. He started his career as a linguist and philosopher, in the classic French intellectual style. But Lévi-Strauss (like Bourdieu) eventually tired of abstract musing. “Since I was a child, I have been bothered by, let’s call it the irrational, and have been trying to find an order behind what is given to us as a disorder,” he later observed. “It so happened that I became an anthropologist . . . not because I was interested in anthropology, but because I was trying to get out of philosophy.”25 In the late 1940s he became fascinated with myth and legend. He believed that if you analyzed myths around the world, you could understand how human cognition worked. His theory, called “structuralism,” posited that the human brain has a tendency to organize information in patterns, marked by binary oppositions (not dissimilar to how computers code data), and these patterns are expressed and reinforced in cultural practices, such as myths or religious rituals. It was a theoretical construct that did not draw directly on much participant observation of the type that Malinowski had pioneered. However, Lévi-Strauss supported his argument with extensive data drawn from communities around the world, and when he published his ideas in the 1950s in books such as The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Tristes Tropiques, and The Savage Mind,26 the books earned widespread plaudits. They also provoked a new wave of interest in the then little-known discipline of anthropology among European intellectuals. Such as the ambitious would-be philosopher Pierre Bourdieu.

  BY 1957, A FULL-BLOWN war had erupted in Algeria and Bourdieu’s military service had come to an end. But he remained haunted by a desire to “explain” the world around him, and to understand the anthropos of Algeria. So after being discharged from the army, he applied for a teaching post at the University of Algiers, and set out on an intellectual crusade. “The simple desire to observe and witness led me to invest myself . . . in frenzied work,” he explained.27 His methods were the opposite of philosophy or any other armchair disciplines such as economics. He journeyed in buses to the most remote corners of Algeria, hitched rides on French military cavalcades, or traveled furtively with Algerian friends. He sat down among the local people, quietly sitting, observing, asking questions, and living among them.28 It was a crazily dangerous endeavor. The countryside was teaming with rebels and French soldiers. In remote villages, elderly Algerians sometimes pulled him aside and recounted “in places where no one would hear us, of the torture the French army had inflicted on them.”29 French officers would describe how extremist Algerians were cutting the throats of French children and women, or planting roadside bombs. In high mountains, Bourdieu would see guns hidden under the men’s flowing white robes, or djellaba, and “along the whole shoreline, the mountains were in flames,” and the “doors of all the cafés were protected with wire mesh to prevent grenade attacks.”30 But Bourdieu pressed on. “[My] disregard for danger owed nothing to any sort of heroism but, rather, was rooted in extreme sadness and anxiety.”31 Like Malinowksi, Bourdieu was determined to taste and see real life, at the grass roots. He wanted to understand the mental map that Algerians used to order their world.

  It was up in the high mountains of Algeria that Bourdieu first turned this fascination into a full-blown theory. During his research, he spent time with a group of Berber tribesmen, known as the Kabyle, and discovered that they had strong ideas about the best way to build a house. Their dwellings were always rectangular, the front door facing west, with a giant weaving loom placed opposite this door. Inside the house, the Kabyle always separated the space in two, divided by a low internal wall. Half of the house—which was typically raised a bit higher, and larger and lighter—housed a weaving loom, and was used to entertain guests and stage formal meals. Men slept there. However, the second half of the house was smaller, darker, and lower. That was where animals lived, children and women slept, and the Kabyle stored everyday goods, along with anything that was wet, green, or damp.

  When Bourdieu asked the Kabyle villagers why they arranged their houses in this pattern, they found his question bizarre. To them, it seemed normal to classify space, objects, and people in this way. They had grown up dividing their homes like this and to do anything else felt strange. If somebody had suggested that the Kabyle should store wet, green, or damp items in the place where men slept they would have laughed or winced, just as an American suburban family might recoil if you suggested storing shampoo in the car, or putting the fridge under the bed. To the Kabyle, this pattern was simply how the world worked.

  But Bourdieu, as an outsider, could see that the pattern was not inevitable. He could also see that the way the Kabyle arranged their house echoed how they organized other aspects of their life. In Kayble culture, men were considered separate (and superior) to women, and public space was distinct from the private sphere. Similarly, their religion distinguished between “damp” and “fertile” activities, and those that were “dry.” The spatial map of a Kabyle house thus reflected a social and mental map too, and this created a subtle, mutually reinforcing interplay of space, mind, and body. The Kabyle built their houses that way because of their cultural norms about how women, say, should interact with men, and these norms were reinforced whenever they stepped into their houses, to a point where the patterns seemed entirely natural.

  The Kabyle are not unique. This interplay is found in all human societies. Take New York’s City Hall. As Bloomberg discovered when he became mayor, the layout of the government offices reflected local ideas about how people should work. The fact that firefighters sat in dedicated departments reflected the idea that firefighters were a specialist team, separate from others. But precisely because firefighters sat apart from teachers, say, it seemed natural they should be separate. Architecture is driven by our mental vision of the world. But the way we design offices, say, ingrains our classification systems as well. We all tend to be creatures of our own environment, in a physical, social, and mental sense, although we usually do not notice this at all. Habits matter.

  IN 1961, PIERRE BOURDIEU left Algeria. By then, the French military had used such brutal tactics against the rebels this had sparked a widespread backlash. (Indeed, the aggressive policies were so counterproductive that when America went into Iraq fifty years later, the Pentagon staged screenings of the film The Battle of Algiers to its officers as a cautionary tale of what not to do in the Middle East.) Eventually, the backlash became so intense that the French government decided to withdraw. Angry local French settlers took revenge against some of the French intellectuals who had opposed the war, and Bourdieu fled for his life.

  He returned to Paris to a comfortable academic post, working with Raymond Aron, a prominent sociologist. The next natural career step for Bourdieu would have been to build on his reputation as an expert in Algeria, as an anthropologist. After all, anthropologists were expected to study exotic, non-Western cultures, like the Kabyle Berber. But once again, Bourdieu refused to conform. Back in 1959, while he was based in Algiers, he had visited his family in the French Pyrenees and become fascinated by what he could see unfolding there. When Bourdieu looked at his old hometown, he could see that the French villagers had just as many rules, patterns, and social maps as the Kabyle. To Frenchmen, their rules seemed natural, if not obvious. But to outsiders they did not. So Bourdieu concocted a bold plan. He asked a young Algerian sociology student, Abdelmalek Sayad, to travel with him out to the Pyrenees. Bourdieu had worked with Sayad to conduct his research in Algeria and they made a good team: Sayad, as a local insider, understood how Algerian culture worked; but Bourdieu, the French outsider, could spot patterns in Algerian culture that Sayad did not see. Bourdieu reckoned that this same principle could work in reverse: Abdelmalek would be an outsider in France, so he would spot oddities that French people ignored.

  This was not anthropology in the way that Victorians like James Frazer had first imagined the craft. For one thing, Bourdieu was turning the colonial power structures upside down, treating French villagers on the same leve
l as the Kabyle. But Bourdieu was convinced that the best way to understand any society was to take an inside-outsider view, and to flip perspective. So Sayad and Bourdieu repeated exactly what they had done in Algeria: they tramped around the hills of South West France, measuring things, watching everyday life, talking to people. Sometimes Bourdieu took his father with him, to help him become a real insider in local French culture. On other occasions, Bourdieu deliberately positioned himself as an outsider from his subjects. “The most visible sign of the conversion of the gaze [from insider to observer] was the intensive use I then made of photographs, maps, ground plans and statistics,” he later explained.32 But as he kept flipping his perspective he gained new insights into the anthropos of France. It was unexpectedly liberating in a personal sense too. Twenty years earlier, Bourdieu had been furious over the way he felt excluded from the snobbish culture of elite France. Now he realized that his childhood anger had produced an unexpected benefit, teaching him to notice cultural patterns. Instead of just wanting to destroy the hierarchy, he now wanted to understand it.

  IN SUBSEQUENT YEARS, BOURDIEU broadened his gaze into the Western world way beyond his hometown. He analyzed the French elite, studying how their seemingly mundane choices in relation to food, art, furnishings, and so on helped to define modern French society—and stratify it into different social groups. In one of his most famous books, Distinction, he analyzed how a mundane action, such as deciding to order bouillabaisse in a restaurant (or not) creates social labels and markers that sort people into different groups. The tiny decisions that people constantly make in their lives are never irrelevant or meaningless. Small signals constantly express and reinforce power relations. Our ideas about what is pretty, ugly, tacky, trendy, or cool classify people (and things) into particular mental and social buckets.

  Then Bourdieu turned his lens to the world of American arts funding, the nature of photography, the operations of the modern media, and behavior of political groups. He peered into the French education system and different academic tribes that dominated the universities in Paris. He also looked at the poorest parts of French society, seeking to make sense of how the “dispossessed” people lived in the infamous banlieue—suburbs—of Paris. Wherever he went, he obsessively watched, listened, and tried to flip his analytical lens back and forth from insider to outsider, seeking to uncover patterns that people inside a society could not always see, blending the participant observer principles of Malinowski with the vision of Lévi-Strauss. “I spent hours listening to conversations, in cafés, on pétanque, or football pitches, in post offices but also at society receptions or cocktail parties or concerts,” he recounted. “I have been able to participate in universes of thought, past or present, very distant from my own . . . the aristocracy or bankers, dancers at the Paris Opera or actors at the Théâtre-Française, auctioneers or notaries, and work myself into [their world].33

  This research eventually produced some fifty-seven books, and gave birth to numerous theories. It is worth spelling out five of his most important ideas (out of a long list of his concepts), since these five points provide an intellectual framework for this book.

  • First, Bourdieu believed that human society creates certain patterns of thought and classification systems, which people absorb and use to arrange space, people, and ideas. Bourdieu liked to call the physical and social environment that people live in the “habitus,” and he believed that the patterns in this habitus both reflect the mental maps or classification systems inside our heads and reinforce them.

  • Second, Bourdieu also believed that these patterns help to reproduce the status of the elite. Since this elite has an interest in preserving the status quo, it also has every incentive to reinforce cultural maps, rules, and taxonomies. Or to put it another way, an elite stays in power over time not just by controlling resources, or what Bourdieu described as “economic capital” (money), but also by amassing “cultural capital” (symbols associated with power). When they amass this cultural capital, this helps to make the status of the elite seem natural and inevitable. The wealthy French pupils at Bourdieu’s boarding school, for example, exuded a “natural” sense of authority and power by wrapping themselves in dozens of tiny, subtle cultural signals, which nonelite people such as Bourdieu lacked.

  • Third, Bourdieu did not believe that the elite—or anyone else—created these cultural and mental maps deliberately. Instead, they arose as much from semiconscious instinct as conscious design, operating at the “borders of conscious and unconscious thought.” The habitus does not just reflect our social patterns, but it ingrains them too, making these seem natural and inevitable. The elite and nonelite are both creatures of their cultural environment.

  • Fourth, Bourdieu believed that what really matters in a society’s mental map is not simply what is publicly and overtly stated, but what is not discussed. Social silences matter. The system ends up being propped up because it seems natural to leave certain topics ignored, since these issues have become labeled as dull, taboo, obvious, or impolite. In any society, Bourdieu argued, there are ideas that are freely debated, and there can be differences of views about this (or a clash between the orthodoxy and heterodoxy). But outside that space of acceptable debate (or the “doxa”) there are many issues that are never discussed at all, not because of any clearly articulated plot, but because ignoring those issues seems normal. Or as Bourdieu said: “The most powerful forms of ideological effect are those which need no words, but merely a complicitous silence.”34 The non-dancers in a village hall matter.

  • But a fifth key point that is implicit in Bourdieu’s work is that people do not always have to be trapped in the mental maps that they inherit. We are not robots, blindly programmed to behave in certain ways. We can also have some choice about the patterns we use. How much choice humans have to reshape their cultural norms was—and is—an issue of hot dispute. When Bourdieu was first embarking on his academic career, Sartre, the French philosopher, declared that humans did have free will, and could develop their thoughts as they chose. Lévi-Strauss took another view: he thought that humans were doomed to be creatures of their environment, since they could not think out of their inherited cultural patterns.

  Bourdieu, however, rejected both of these ideas; or, more accurately, he steered a middle ground between these two extremes. He did not think that people are robots, programmed to obey cultural rules automatically. Indeed, he did not like the word “rules” at all, preferring to talk about cultural “habits.” But he also believed these habits and the habitus shaped how people behave and think. Social maps are powerful. But they are not all-powerful. We are creatures of our physical and social environment. However, we need not be blind creatures. Occasionally, individuals can imagine a different way of organizing our world, particularly if they—like Bourdieu—have become an insider-outsider by jumping across boundaries.

  BY THE TIME BOURDIEU died in 2002, his work had made him famous in France. So much so that his death was marked by the main French paper, Le Monde, with a huge headline on its front page declaring “Pierre Bourdieu est mort!” Outside France, he was not as well known by the public. But his life had become a very powerful symbol of how the study of anthropos had developed across the West. Anthropology was no longer just a study of the “other,” or exotic, alien, non-Western cultures. It had also become a study of the “self,” or the place where the Western anthropologists who (still dominated) academic debate lived. The ideas advanced by Bourdieu had blended with the work done by numerous other anthropologists to create a new approach.

  Kate Fox, a British anthropologist, is one such descendant. Her father, Robin Fox, was an anthropologist at London University, then Rutgers in America, and he pursued a career that seemed typical of anthropology at the time. He studied the Cochiti Indians of New Mexico, taking his family with him to live there as he strode around dusty villages. “Unlike most infants, who spend their early days lying in a pram or cot . . . I was strapped to a Cochiti Indi
an cradle-board,” Kate Fox recalls.35 This boundary-hopping created such an impression on her that she eventually chose to become an anthropologist herself. (A notable trait of the discipline is that many of the people who choose to study anthropology have been exposed to cultural dislocations at some point in their childhood or young adult lives; myself included.) But when Kate did her own research she decided that she did not want to study “exotic” peoples, but her own English society instead. “The human species is addicted to rule making. Every society has food taboos, rules about gift-giving, rules about hairstyles, rules about dancing, greetings, hospitality, joking, weaning, etc.,” she wrote in Watching the English, which analyzes English rituals, ranging from horse racing rituals to conversations about the weather. “I don’t see why anthropologists feel they have to travel to remote corners of the world and get dysentery in order to study strange tribal cultures with bizarre beliefs and mysterious customs. The weirdest, most puzzling tribe of all is right here on our own doorstep.”36