Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu (August 1, 1930 – January 23, 2002) was an acclaimed French sociologist whose work ranged widely from philosophy to anthropology.
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 the position an individual is located in the social space and is defined not by social class, but by the amount of capital across all kinds of capital, and by the relative amounts 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.
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, structured internally in terms of power relationships. Different fields can be quite autonomous and more complex societies have more fields.
In his theoretical writings, Bourdieu employs the terminology of economics to analyze the process of social reproduction, of how social and linguistic capital tend to transfer from one generation to the next. For Bourdieu, education represents the paradigmatic 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 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 class position in the wider social system.
Bourdieu sees the legitimation of cultural capital as crucial to its effectiveness as a source of power. It is seen as symbolic violence, violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity. What this means is that people come to experience systems of meaning (culture) as legitimate; there is a process of misunderstanding or misrecognition of what is really going on. So it comes that working class children see it as legitimate that their middle-class peers have more success in the educational system as based on their objective performance. A key part of this process is the transformation of people's cultural habits or economic positions into symbolic capital that has legitimacy and is seen as real. Symbolic capital is nothing more than economic or cultural capital which is acknowledged and recognized and then tends to reinforce the power relations which constitute the structure of social space.
Habitus can be defined as a system of dispositions: durably acquired schemes of perception, thought and action, engendered by objective conditions but tending to persist even after an alteration of those conditions. Bourdieu sees habitus as the key to reproduction because it is what actually generates the regular practices that make up social life. It is the product of social conditioning and so links actual behavior to class structure.
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, and in particular their own set of internalized structures.
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: "[In 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. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Harvard University Press 1987
- Homo Academicus, Polity press 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, paperback edition, Polity press 1992
- An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (with Loic Wacquant), University of Chicago Press and Polity press 1992
- Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, Stanford University Press 1998
- Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, Stanford University Press 1996
- 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
- "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
- Pascalian Meditations, Polity press 2000
- Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market, New Press 1999
- "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
- 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).
See also
