Abdelmalek Sayad

Abdelmalek Sayad (November 24, 1933, in Beni Djellil, Algeria – March 13, 1998, in Paris, France) was a sociologist, first as an assistant to Pierre Bourdieu, then as a research director at the French CNRS and at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. He studied migration issues in French social sciences.

Life and career Abdelmalek Sayad was born in 1933 in Aghbala, in the Beni Djellil commune in Kabylie, a Berber region in Northern Algeria. The third child and only boy of a family of five children, he started attending his village's primary school at seven. He then went on to study in Béjaïa's highschool, before training to be a primary school teacher in Algiers. He was then appointed a teacher in a school in the Casbah of Algiers. He continued studying at Algiers university in parallel, where he met Pierre Bourdieu.

Sayad moved to France in 1963, after the Algerian independence in 1962. He started working on short-term contracts at the Centre de sociologie européenne at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. In 1977, he was hired at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), as research director in sociology.

Sayad died on March 13, 1998. He was married to Rebecca Sayad, who, after his death, donated his archive to the Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration (Paris) in 2006. The library of this museum is named after him. The Association of the friends of Abdelmalek Sayad has organised events surrounding his thought, and contributed to make his work known in France and in Algeria, via an exhibition, conferences and workshops.

Sociology Sayad studied immigration in French society. He argued that it was a "total social fact", using Marcel Mauss's expression, to "underline that the immigrant was also an emigrant", and argued against analyses which were limited to comparing the economic 'costs' and 'benefits' of immigration. He also examined the effect of colonisation in Algeria and of the war of independence in his work with Pierre Bourdieu, Le Déracinement. La crise de l'agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie (The Uprooting: The Crisis of Traditional Agriculture in Algeria).

Sayad examined the situation of migrants arriving in France. Many articles he wrote on the subject were published after his death in a book entitled La double absence (The double absence), with a foreword by Pierre Bourdieu. which was translated by David Macey as « The Suffering of the immigrant ».