Based on the ethno-sociological studies conducted by Pierre Bourdieu between the late 1950s and the early sixties on war-driven Algeria, this article analyses critically the notion, widely held by both the media and academia, that Pierre Bourdieu's public interventions on the Algerian war date back to the early sixties and /or that Bourdieu's early writings on Algeria were as politically engaged as those of La misère du monde published in 1993. Some even considered P. Bourdieu as the intellectual father of Berber cultural militancy. The purpose of this article is to show that the power, the elegance and the scientific and political insightfulness of Pierre Bourdieu's ethnological and sociological work on Algeria, and more specifically on Kabylia, lies, in fact, in the “polished” and “depolitisized” nature of his style, his approach and his relation to his scientific objects and to politics itself.