Abdelmalek Sayad © DR
Inspiration
Edition 27
Abdelmalek Sayad
Abdelmalek Sayad (1933–1998) was an Algerian sociologist who devoted his work to thinking of immigration not as an administrative fact but as a total human condition, building out of his own trajectory a body of thought that profoundly renewed the social sciences.
Born in Aghbala, in Lesser Kabylia, a schoolteacher and then a philosophy student in Algiers, he was barred from teaching for his commitments during the war of independence. It was in Algiers, in 1958, that he met Pierre Bourdieu, with whom he would carry out the survey of the resettlement camps — that organised uprooting which, between 1954 and 1960, forcibly displaced more than two million Algerian peasants, a quarter of the population.
In 1963 he settled in France in his turn. He would spend the rest of his life listening to those who had come before him: the workers of the hostels, the building sites, the shantytowns of Nanterre. From this work came his central thesis: the emigrant and the immigrant are one and the same person, and you cannot understand the one who arrives without understanding what he has left. This is what he called the double absence — absent from home, absent from where one is.
Old map of the Mediterranean basin, 1935, W. & A.K. Johnston
Director of research at the CNRS and the EHESS, Sayad remained a discreet figure in his lifetime, publishing few books and many articles, an immigrant among the immigrants he studied. He devoted an essential part of his work to schooling, which he saw as the place where immigration ceases to be provisional: with the children, what was meant to be a temporary stay becomes a permanent presence.
Abdelmalek Sayad on immigration, INA archive
As early as 1977 he was denouncing “inadequate educational structures” that declare “unfit” the very pupils they fail to accommodate, and the relegation of those pupils to the lowest tracks of a school hierarchy which is also, he writes, a social hierarchy. According to Sayad, the French school system keeps them at the margins of what it claims to open up to them. His work was gathered and widely rediscovered after his death, with the 1999 publication of “La Double Absence”, prefaced by Bourdieu. The precision of his listening and the rigour of his thought have made Abdelmalek Sayad one of the principal inspirations behind our Edition 27.
Suggested reading: “Uprooting: The Crisis of Traditional Agriculture in Algeria” (with Pierre Bourdieu, Polity, 2020), “Un Nanterre algérien, terre de bidonvilles” (1995), “L’Immigration ou les paradoxes de l’altérité” (1997), “La Double Absence. Des illusions de l’émigré aux souffrances de l’immigré” (1999) and “L’École et les enfants de l’immigration” (2014).
Pierre Bourdieu in 1991, Pierre-Olivier Deschamps
“The only people left in the village are the old ones who have [come back] from France. They came back from France because they are tired of it, or perhaps because France is tired of them; if it were up to them… they have not taken it [France] out of their hearts.”
La Double Absence, Abdelmalek Sayad
