A recurrent paradox accompanies Pierre Bourdieu's description of his relation to his earliest field site: the people of Kabylia are frequently evoked as 'at once exotic and familiar'. In the present article I ask what conditions must prevail for such a depiction to be possible. Taking up work conducted in recent years concerning the details of Bourdieu's fieldwork, its theoretical presuppositions, and its place within the declining French empire, I propose that Bourdieu's depiction is

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... on what Herzfeld calls 'practical Mediterraneanism': an ideology of the Mediterranean as a cultural region that permits Bourdieu to negotiate his colonial position, by transmuting a power relation into a relation of cultural similarity. Yet I aim to avoid imputing to Bourdieu a subjective failing in this regard, whether through cynical manipulation or simple error. Instead, pausing on the performative dimension of Bourdieu's texts, I examine what his representations of the Kabyle do throughout his oeuvre and how these are bound by particular intellectual, existential, and political problems that arise at different times. A recurrent paradox accompanies Pierre Bourdieu's description of his relation to his earliest field site: the people of Kabylia are frequently evoked as 'at once exotic and familiar'. This peculiar coincidence of opposites is often explained by recourse to Bourdieu's own biography, with the explicit suggestion that it was his personal identification with the Kabyles, rooted in a rural temperament, that enabled this intellectual claim. This is best captured in a memory that Yacine relates: the culture of the colonised exercised on him the effect of a magnifying mirror, to the point that he came to define himself as Kabylo-Béarnais: "Like you, the culture of the other (Kabyle culture), transformed me and allowed me to see myself otherwise". 1 Albera appropriates Yacine's mirror metaphor and asserts that, in Bourdieu's work, the Mediterranean Sea 'above all remains the space for a mirror game between familiarity and alterity'. It follows from this that '[t]he other is no longer the bearer of this radical alterity, by which one distances oneself from him to better reify him'. As Bensa proposes, the Kabyle is Bourdieu's 'alter ego'. Thus, ethnographic work 'on the other becomes, inseparably, work on the self'. 2 To reify this specular metaphor, it amounts to recognising oneself in the reflection thrown back by another. In Bourdieu's terminology, we can register this as allodoxia: a 'false recognition founded on the misrecognised relation between two histories that brings one to recognise oneself in another history, that of another nation or another class'. 3 This definition, however, for now serves only to defer an answer by begging the question of what characterises an 'other' history. While questions pertaining to 'our' identity in relation to 'others' are so frequent as to be ritualistic incantations, the prospect of untangling their terms in Bourdieu's work offers specially important rewards, given several interlinked peculiarities that characterise it. The first peculiarity concerns Bourdieu's own biographical circumstances, in particular his peripheral, rural upbringing. Given that Bourdieu's second field site, in which he conducted research almost contemporaneous with his Algerian work, was his native town, his biography becomes immediately implicated. But does this mean that we can, as Bourdieu does as much as his commentators, explain his attitude to the other on the basis of a shared rural cultural background? A second peculiarity concerns Bourdieu's implication in studies of 'Mediterranean' cultures and his casting of the Kabyle culture-along with his own Béarnais culture-as one of several such groups belonging to this region. This is a region whose existence has been mired in scholarly controversy, given certain accusations made of it, namely, that it assumes and redoubles local stereotypes. Negating and inverting Bourdieu's