Behind, on the margins of the dance floor, gathers a somber mass, a group of men who are older, who look on, without speaking: all at least 30 years old, they wear a beret and a dark suit, of outdated style. Almost as if tempted to dance, they come forward, taking some of the space of the dancers. They are there, all the bachelors. The men of their age who are already married no longer attend the dances.

Pierre Bourdieu, Le Bal des Célibataires: Crise de la Société Paysanee en Béarn, (Paris: Editions du Seuil). Translated by Deborah Reed-Danahay in “Tristes Paysans: Bourdieu’s Early Ethnography in Béarn and Kabylia,” Anthropological Quarterly 77:1 (Winter 2004), 93.