Question: When did you start to familiarise yourself with the work of Max Weber? If I understand you correctly, this happened during your time in Algeria. What sort of texts were you reading at that time?

Pierre Bourdieu: I began with Die protestantische Ethik. During that time, I was working on a book which was intended to summarise my research on Algeria. In Die protestantische Ethik there was an abundance of things on the traditional, pre-capitalist ‘spirit’, and on economic behaviour – wonderful descriptions which were very useful and indeed quite impressive. I drew on Weber's work in order to understand the M'zab, a stretch of land in the Arabic desert, inhabited mainly by Kharijites, who are Muslims with a very ascetic – and almost ‘Puritan’ – lifestyle and whom we might want to call ‘the Protestants of Islam’, a religious current. This was really mind-boggling; this austerity with regard to sexual morals and self-discipline. At the same time, these are really prosperous and forward-looking traders; in fact, a lot of the small businesses in North Africa belong to them. I was astounded by the typically Weberian connection between religious asceticism and this very smooth adjustment to new conditions. By the way, similar to the Calvinist Puritans, these people are highly educated: they read a lot, they read the Qur'an, almost all of the children go to school, and most of them are bilingual in Arabic and French.