Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu (August 1, 1930 – January 23, 2002) was an acclaimed French sociologist whose work ranged widely from philosophy to sociology and anthropology. Best known in America for his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, in which he connected aesthetic judgements to positions in social space, the most notable aspects of Bourdieu's theory concerned the development of methodologies, combining both theory and empirical data, that function to dissolve some of the most troublesome antagonisms in theory and research, reconciling such difficulties as how to understand the subject within objective structures (in the process, reconciling structuralism with agency). Bourdieu also pioneered important methodological frameworks and terminologies, such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field, and symbolic violence. Bourdieu's work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment in social dynamics. Bourdieu's work builds upon theories of phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger, as well as philosophers of science like Georges Canguilhem and Gaston Bachelard.

Bourdieu was an avid political activist, and a staunch opposer of modern forms of globalization. He saw sociology as a weapon against social oppression and injustice. He commented that "sociology is a combat sport insofar as it is used to defend against the domination of symbolic systems and the imposition of distorting categories of thought."

Biography

He was born in Denguin (Pyrénées-Atlantiques) in 1930, where his father was a sharecropper and later a postman. He married Marie-Claire Brizard in 1962 and has three sons.

Bourdieu studied philosophy in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure. After getting his agrégation, he worked as a teacher for a year. During the Algerian War of Independence in 1958-1962, and while serving in the French army, he undertook ethnographic research, laying the groundwork for his sociological reputation. From 1964 on, Bourdieu held the position of Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and from 1981, the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France (held before him by Raymond Aron, Maurice Halbwachs, and Marcel Mauss). In 1968, he founded the Centre de Sociologie Européenne, the research center that he directed until his death. In 1975, he launched the interdisciplinary journal "Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales," with which he sought to transform the accepted canons of sociological production while buttressing the scientific rigor of sociology. In 1993 he was honored with the "Médaille d'or du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique" (CNRS). In 1996, he received the Goffman Prize from the University of California at Berkeley and in 2002 the Huxley Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

He routinely sought to connect his theoretical ideas with empirical research, grounded in everyday life, and his work can be seen as cultural sociology or as a theory of practice.

Bourdieu was both completely empirical and a master theorist, a rare if not unique combination in sociology. His key terms were habitus, field, and symbolic violence. He extended the idea of capital to categories such as social capital, cultural capital, and symbolic capital. For Bourdieu an individual occupies a position in their social space and is defined not by social class, but by the amount of all kinds of capital they possess, and by the relative amounts symbolic, social, economic and cultural capital account for.

He was also known as a politically engaged and active leftist intellectual, supporting workers against the influences of political elites and neoliberal capitalism. He was even considered the left's enemy of itself: the French Socialist party used to talk of "la gauche bourdieusienne", their enemies on the left.

Some examples of his empirical results include:

showing that despite the apparent freedom of choice in the arts, people's artistic preferences (e.g. classical music, rock, traditional music) strongly correlate with their social position
showing that subtleties of language such as accent, grammar, spelling and style — all part of cultural capital — are a major factor in social mobility (e.g. getting a higher paid, higher status job).

Pierre Bourdieu's work emphasized how social classes, especially the ruling and intellectual classes, reproduce themselves even under the pretence that society fosters social mobility - particularly through education.

Bourdieu was an extraordinarily prolific author of hundreds of articles and three dozen books, nearly all of which are now available in English. His style is dense in English translation, but he was considered an elegant and incisive writer both in France and in neighbouring European countries other than England.

Bourdieu's theory of power and practice

Bourdieu shared Weber's view that society, contrary to traditional Marxism, cannot be analyzed simply in terms of economic classes and ideologies. Much of his work concerns the independent role of educational and cultural factors. Instead of analyzing societies in terms of classes, Bourdieu uses the concept of field: a social arena in which people manoeuvre and struggle in pursuit of desirable resources. A field is a system of social positions (e.g. a profession such as the law) structured internally in terms of power relationships (e.g. consider the power differential between judges and lawyers). Different fields can be either autonomous or interrelated (e.g. consider the separation of power between judiciary and legislature)and more complex societies have more fields.

Bourdieu's influential concept of habitus was developed to resolve the paradox of the human sciences: objectifying the subjective. It can be defined as a system of dispositions: lasting, acquired schemes of perception, thought and action. The individual agent develops these dispositions in response to the objective conditions they encounter, but they remain subjective things. In this way Bourdieu theorises the incorporation of objective social structures into the subjective, mental experience of agents. Having thereby absorbed objective social structure into a personal set of dispositions, agents then go on to promote these dispositions as a model for others to emulate, thus reproducing that structure. Thus Bourdieu sees habitus as the key to social reproduction because it is central to generating and regulating the practices that make up social life.

Bourdieu sees symbolic capital (e.g. prestige, honour, the right to be listened to) as a crucial source of power. When a holder of symbolic capital uses the power this confers against an agent who holds less, and seeks thereby to alter their actions, they exercise symbolic violence. We might see this when a daughter brings home a boyfriend considered 'unsuitable' by her parents. She is met with disapproving looks and gestures, symbols which serve to convey the message that she will not be permitted this relationship, but which never make this coercive fact explicit. People come to experience symbolic power and systems of meaning (culture) as legitimate. Hence the daughter will often feel a duty to obey her parents' unspoken demand, whether or not her boyfriend is truly objectionable. If he is indeed unobjectionable, she has been made to misunderstand or misrecognise his nature. Moreover, by perceiving her parents' symbolic violence as legitimate, she is complicit in her own subordination.

In his theoretical writings, Bourdieu employs some terminology of economics to analyze the process of social reproduction (sometimes known as cultural reproduction), of how the various forms of capital tend to transfer from one generation to the next. For Bourdieu, education represents the key example of this process. Educational success, according to Bourdieu, entails a whole range of cultural behaviors, extending to ostensibly non-academic features like gait or accent. Privileged children have learned this behaviour, as have their teachers. Children of unprivileged backgrounds have not. The children of privilege fit into the world of educational expectations with apparent 'ease'. The unprivileged are found to be 'difficult', to present 'challenges'. Yet both behave as their upbringing dictates. Bourdieu regards this 'ease', or 'natural' ability as in fact the product of a great social labour, largely on the part of the parents. It equips their children with the dispositions of manner as well as thought which ensure they are able to succeed within the educational system and can then reproduce their parents' class position in the wider social system.

Cultural capital (e.g. competencies, skills, qualifications) can also be a source of misrecognition and symbolic violence. Therefore working class children can come to see the educational success of their middle-class peers as always legitimate, seeing what is often class-based inequality as instead the result of hard work or even 'natural' ability. A key part of this process is the transformation of people's symbolic or economic inheritance (e.g. accent or property) into cultural capital (e.g. university qualifications)- a process which the logic of the cultural fields impedes but cannot prevent.

Bourdieu insists on the importance of a reflexive sociology in which sociologists must at all times conduct their research with conscious attention to the effects of their own position, their own set of internalized structures, and how these are likely to distort or prejudice their objectivity.

Bourdieu's sociology in general can be characterized as an investigation of the pre-reflexive conditions that generate certain beliefs and practices that are generated in capitalist systems.

Legacy

In its obituary, The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom said Bourdieu "was, for many, the leading intellectual of present-day France... a thinker in the same rank as Foucault, Barthes and Lacan". His works have been translated into two dozen languages and have impacted the whole gamut of disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. Several works of his are considered classics, not only in sociology, but also in anthropology, education, and cultural studies. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste was named as one of the 20th century's ten most important works of sociology by the International Sociological Association. His book Outline of a Theory of Practice is among the most cited in the world. The Rules of Art has impacted sociology, history, literature and aesthetics.

In France, Bourdieu was not seen as an ivory tower academic or cloistered don, but as a passionate activist for those he believed subordinated by society. Again, from The Guardian: "2003 a documentary film about Pierre Bourdieu — Sociology is a Combat Sport — became an unexpected hit in Paris. Its very title stressed how much of a politically engaged intellectual Bourdieu was, taking on the mantle of Emile Zola and Jean-Paul Sartre in French public life, and slugging it out with politicians because he thought that was what people like him should do."

Bibliography

Selected works:

Les héritiers: les étudiants et la culture (1964), engl. The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relations to Culture, University of Chicago Press 1979
Algeria 1960: The Disenchantment of the World: The Sense of Honour: The Kabyle House of the World Reversed: Essays, Cambridge Univ Press 1979
Esquisse d'une théorie de la pratique, précédé de trois études d'ethnologie kabyle (1972), engl. Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press 1977
La distinction (1979), engl. //www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/BOUDIX.html Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Harvard University Press 1987
Homo Academicus, (French Edition) Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1984. (English Edition) Polity press 1990
Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Theory, Culture and Society Series), Sage, 1990, with Jean-Claude Passeron (in French: La Reproduction. Éléments pour une théorie du système d'enseignement, Minuit, 1970)
Choses dites, 1987 - In Other Words: Essays toward a Reflective Sociology, Stanford, 1990
The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, Polity press 1991
The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public, Stanford University Press 1991
Language & Symbolic Power, Harvard University Press 1991, paperback edition, Polity press 1992
An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (with Loic Wacquant), University of Chicago Press and Polity press 1992
Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, Stanford University Press 1996
Les régles de l'art, 1992 - Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, Stanford University Press 1996
(with Monique De Saint Martin, Jean-Claude Passeron),Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power, Polity Press 1996
Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, Stanford University Press 1998
"La domination masculine" (1998), engl. Male Domination, Polity Press 2001
State nobility. Elite Schools in the Field of Power, Polity press 1998
Weight of the World. Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, Polity press 1999
On Television, New Press 1999
Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market, New Press 1999
Pascalian Meditations, Polity press 2000
"Contre-Feux" (1998), engl. Counterfire: Against the Tyranny of the Market, Verso Books 2003
"Science de la science et réflexivité" (2002), engl Science of Science and Reflexivity, Polity press 2004
Interventions politiques (1960-2000). Textes & contextes d’un mode d’intervention politique spécifique, 2002
The Social Structures of the Economy, Polity press 2005

References

Calhoun, C. et al. (1992) "Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives." University of Chicago Press.
Lane, J.F. (2000) Pierre Bourdieu. A Critical Introduction. Pluto Press.
Wacquant, L. (2005) "Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics". Polity Press.
Fowler, Bridget, Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory: Critical Investigations (London, California and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1997).

External links

Obituaries and biographical material

Guardian obituary
Biography at Pegasos
The Nation remembrance
La sociologie est un sport de combat French Documentary by Pierre Carles

Other resources

Bourdieu's Key Concepts: Habitus, Capital, Field Introduction to Bourdieu's key concepts
HyperBourdieu@WorldCatalogue - a multilingual bibliography
Bourdieu bibliography at Massey University
"Practice and field: Revising Bourdieusian concepts
"End of the Line" Review of Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market by critic Mark Greif in The American Prospect, (November 1, 2003)
Bourdieu articles on neo-liberalism and globalisation
Comment on Bourdieu and international crisis

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