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Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) |
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French sociologist, anthropologist, philosopher, and champion of the anti-globalisation movement, whose work spanned a broad range of subjects from ethnography to art, literature, education, language, cultural tastes, and television. Pierre Bourdieu's most famous book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984). It was named one of the 20th century's 10 most important works of sociology by the International Sociological Association. "Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed." (Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, translated by Richard Nice, with a new introduction by Tony Bennett, Routledge, 2010, p. xxix Pierre Bourdieu was born in the village of Denguin, in the
Pyrénees'
district of southwestern France. His father, the son of a peasant sharecropper, ran the village
post office; he voted on the Left and admired figures such as Robespierre, Jaurès, Léon Blum and
Edouard Herriot. While Bourdieu's father never completed his own schooling, his
mother continued her education to the age of sixteen. At home the
family spoke Gascon. After
leaving his local elementary school, Bourdieu went to
the lycée in Pau. Because of his classical education, Bourdieu was
fluent in Latin all his life. Besides being a bright student he gained
fame as a star rugby player. Upon graduation, he moved to Paris, where he
began his studies
at the École normale superiéure in 1951. His classmate was the
philosopher
Jacques Derrida. "One became a 'philosopher' because one had been
consecrated and one consecrated oneself by securing the prestigious
identity of 'philosopher'. The
choice of philosophy was thus a manifestation of status-based assurance
which reinforced that status-based assurance (or arrogance). This was
more than ever true at a time when the whole intellectual field was
dominated by the figure of Jean-Paul Sartre". (Sketch for a Self-Analysis by Pierre Bourdieu, translated by Richard Nice, University of Chicago Press, 2008, p. 5) Bourdieu became interested in Merleau-Ponty, Husserl –
Heidegger's Being and Time he had read earlier – and also in
the writings of the young Marx for academic reasons. His thesis from
1953 was a translation and commentary of the Animadversiones of
Leibniz. After
attaining agrégé in philosophy, Bourdieu worked as a teacher for a year
in the a lycée in Moulins, a small provincial town, and was
then drafted into the army. He served
for two years in Algeria, where French troops tried to crush the
Algerian rebels. Bourdieu was first assigned to guard duty at an
ammunitions deport, and then he was reassigned to a desk job. When his
military service was over he took a post of assistant processor in the
faculty of Letters of the University of Algiers. During vacations Bourdieu studied
traditional farming and ethnic culture in northern Algeria. He was
introduced to the
Berber-speaking Kabyle by his student and field
collaborator Abdelmalek Sayad. A friend of his sent him a copy of Max Weber's Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1904/1905).
Bourdieu learned German and translated entire sections of the work.
Weber's analysis of the relationship between religion – in this case
Calvinist theology and ethics – economy, and social development helped Bourdieu
to understand the lifestyle of Kharijites, traders, who practice very
ascetic Islam. "I thought of myself as a philosopher and it took me a very long time to admit to myself that I had become an ethnologist," Bourdieu said. (In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology by Pierre Bourdieu, translated by Matthew Adamson, Stanford University Press, 1990, p. 7) In 1960 he returned to France as a self-taught anthropologist committed to empirical research. His experiences Bourdieu recorded in the posthumously published books Images d'Algérie: Une affinité élective (2003) and Esquisse pour une auto-analyse (2004). Bourdieu
married in 1962 the former Marie-Claire Brisard; they
had
three children. He studied anthropology and sociology, and taught at
the University of Paris (1960-62) and at the University of Lille
(1962-64). In 1964 he joined the faculty of the École pratique des
Hautes Etudes. Bourdieu became in 1968 director of the Centre de Sociologie
Européenne, founded by Raymond Aron. There, with a group of colleagues,
he embarked on pioneering
extensive collective research on problems concerned with the
maintenance of a system of power by means of the transmission of a
dominant culture. Both Bourdieu and Aron appreciated Weber's work, but
Bourdieu come to realize that "the Weber with whom I was concerned was
very different from the Weber in whom Aros was interested." ('With
Weber Against Weber: In Conversation With Pierre Bourdieu' by Pierre
Bourdieu, Franz Schultheis, and Andreas Pfeuffer, in The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Essays, edited by Simon Susen and Bryan S. Turner, 2013, p. 112) The ideals of the French Revolution echoed in Bourdieu's writings. During the 1960s he published articles in the left-leaning cultural and political journal Le Temps Modernes, co-founded by Jean-Paul Sartre. Although he rarely signed public petitions or participated in public demonstrations, he appeared alonside strikers gathered at the Gare de Lyon, Paris, in December 1995. In discussing the role of the intellectuals, he repeatedly referred to Emile Zola's famous open letter J'accuse (1898). Bourdieu was regularly associated with the CFDT, the Socialist trade union. One
of the central themes in Bourdieu's work is that culture
and education are central in the affirmation of differences between
social classes and in the reproduction of those differences.
Preferences in literature, painting or music are closely linked to
educational level. Distinction
was based on empirical material gathered
in
the 1960s – he always insisted that the logic of social world is
grasped only if one plunges into the particularity of an empirical
reality . Bourdieu argued that taste, an acquired "cultural
competence", is used to legitimise social differences. The habitus of
the dominant class can be discerned in the ideological notion that
"taste" is a
gift from nature. Taste functions to make social "distinctions". In La Reproduction (1970) Bourdieu suggested, that the French educational system reproduces the cultural division of society. Because power structures have a tendency to reproduce themselves in order to ensure their own survival, the education system is designated to help the children of those in power to fill up similar positions of influence. He also implied a correspondence between "symbolic violence" of pedagogic actions and the state's monopoly of the legitimate use of physical violence. In 1975 Bourdieu launched the journal Actes de la
Recherche en Sciences Sociales,
devoted to deconsecrating the mechanism by which cultural production
helps sustain the dominant structure of society. With his election in
1981 to the chair of sociology at the prestigious Collège de France, he
joined the ranks of such prominent figures as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Claude
Lévi.Strauss, Raymond
Aron, and Michel Foucault, among others, who have taught at this
institution. At the beginning of his inaugural address Bourdieu said:
"Rite of aggregation and endowment, the inaugural lecture, inceptio,
symbolically performs the act of delegation at the end of which the new
master is authorized to speak with authority by instituting his word in
legitimate discourse, pronounced by those entitled." ('Pierre
Bourdieu, professor of sociology at the College de France' by Amurabi
Oliveira, SciELO - Scientific Electronic Library Online) By the late 1980s Bourdieu had become one of the French
social scientists most frequently cited in the United States. For his students he became a guru, Bour-dieu
(god), and for his fierce opponents a terrible example of terrorism in the disguise of sociology.
Bourdieu participated in the mid-1990s in a number of
activities outside academic circles. He supported striking rail
workers, spoke for the homeless, was a guest at television programs,
and in 1996 he founded the publishing company Liber/Raisons d'agir.
Though characterized as a theorist
of social reproduction, in dealing with these concerns he became an
advocate of social transformation. In 1998 Bourdieu published in the newspaper Le Monde an article, in which he compared the "strong discourse" of neoliberalism with the position of the psychiatric discourse in an asylum. Bourdieu's last writings dealt with such topics as masculine domination, neoliberal newspeak, Edouard Manet's art, and Beethoven. Bourdieu died of cancer in Paris, at the Saint-Antoine hospital, on January 24, 2002. Key terms in Bourdieu's sociological thought are social field,
capital, and habitus. When speaking of the idea of a social field, Bourdieu had the habit of referring to a
football field.
Habitus is adopted through upbringing and
education. The concept means on the individual level "a system of
acquired dispositions functioning on the practical level as categories
of perception and assessment . . . as well as being the organizing
principles of action . . ." (In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology, 1990, p. 13)
Bourdieu argues that the struggle for social
distinction is a fundamental dimension of all social life. "Habitus is
kind of grammar of actions which serves to differentiate one class
(e.g. the dominant) from another (e.g., the dominated) in the social
field." ('Pierre Bourdieu' in Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Postmodernity by John Lechte, Routledge, 1996, p. 47) Thorstein
Veblen's (1857-1929) thoughts about conspicuous consumption come near
Bourdieu's view, but Bourdieu has corrected that: "la distinction" has
another meaning. It refers to social space and is bound up with the
system of dispositions (habitus). "The very title Distinction serves as a reminder that what is commonly called distinction, that is, a certain quality of bearing and manners, most often considered innate (one speaks of distinction naturelle, "natural refinement"), is nothing other than difference, a gap, a distinctive feature, in short, a relational property existing only in and through its relation with other properties." (Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action by Pierre Bourdieu, Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 6) Social space has a very concrete meaning when Bourdieu presents graphically the space of social positions and the space of lifestyles. "This idea of difference, or a gap, is at the basis of the very notion of space, that is, a set of a distinct and coexisting positions which are exterior to one another and which are defined in relation to one another through their mutual exteriority and their relations of roximity, vicinity, ot distance, as well as through relations ot order, such as above, below, and between." ('Social Space and Symbolic Space' by Pierre Bourdieu, in Pierre Bourdieu: Volume IV, edited by Derek Robbins, SAGE Publications, 2000, p. 7) Bourdieu's diagram in Distinction shows that spatial distances are equivalent to social distances: university professors drink whisky and play piano and are opposed to those who are semi-skilled and drink ordinary red wine and play accordion. (Ibid., translated by Richard Nice, Harvard University Press, eighth printing, 1996, pp. 128-129) All human actions take place within social fields, which are
arenas
for the struggle of the resources. Bourdieu used the term in its wider
sense in the 1966 essay 'Champ intellectuel et projet créateur'
(Intellectual Field and Creative Project). The essay was prompted
by a dispute between Roland Barthes
and Raymond Picard. Bourdieu said that the two adversaries
tried to impose their particular critical approach to Racine as
legitimate. Other important writings in developing his theory of fields
were 'Genèse at structure du champ religieux' (1971) and 'Une
interprétation de la théorie de la religion selon Max Weber' (1971). According to Bourdieu, in modern societies, there are two distinct systems of social hierarchization. The first is economic, in which position and power are determined by money and property, the capital one commands. The second system is cultural or symbolic. In this one's status is determined by how much cultural or "symbolic capital" one possesses. Cultural capital (such as works of art) can be inherited, bought and sold. Most of all, culture is a source of domination. Intellectuals, dominant in the social space but dominated in the field of power, have a key role as specialists of cultural production and creators of symbolic power. Differing
from Marx, Bourdieu
pays more attention in social analysis to cultural and social
capital than to economic capital. Basically he agreed with Marx's
position that it is the economic field that dominates the cultural
field. Cultural capital is
unequally distributed among social classes. ". . . unlike a carefully
manicured football field, there is no level playing ground in a social
field; players who begin with particular forms of capital are
advantaged at the outset because the field depends on, as well as
produces more of, that capital. Such lucky players are able to use
their capital advantage to accumulate more and advantage further (be
more successful) than others." ('Field' by Patricia Thomson, in Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts, edited by Michael Grenfell, Routledge,second edition, 2014, p. 67) Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field
(1992) examined the work of Flaubert, and how it was shaped by the
different currents, movements, schools and authors of the time. It can
also be read as a collective biography, a Bildungsroman,
presentation of a method, and an examination of Bourdieu's own
philosophy. On Television
(1996), based on two lectures, was a
surprise best seller in France. Bourdieu considered television a
serious danger for all the various areas of cultural production.
Television is degrading journalism because it must attempt to be
inoffensive: journalism is a part of the field of power. "Above all,
time limits make it highly unlikely that anything can be said. I am
undoubtedly expected to say that this television censorship—of guests
but also of the true journalists who are its agents—is political. It
is true that political intervenes, and that there is political
control (particularly in the case of hiring for top positions in the
radio stations and television channels under direct government
control). It is also true that at a time such as today, when
great
numbers of people are looking for work and there is so little job
security in television and radio, there is a greater tendency toward
political conformity. Consciously or unconsciously, people censor
themselves—they don't need to be called into line." (Ibid., translated from the French by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, The New Press, 1998, p. 15) This deceptively simple book
was dismissed by some critics as "the same old Frankfurt school" or
"Althusserian." For further reading: Bourdieu and Sayad Against Empire: Forging Sociology in Anticolonial Struggle by Amín Pérez (2024); Bourdieu's Metanoia: Seeing the Social World Anew by Michael Grenfell (2023); Bourdieu in the City: Challenging Urban Theory by Loïc Wacquant (2023); Pierre Bourdieu: A Heroic Structuralism by Jean-Louis Fabiani (2021); Symbolic Violence: Conversations with Bourdieu by Michael Burawoy (2019); The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu, edited by Thomas Medvetz, Jeffrey J. Sallaz (2018); Bourdieu and Historical Analysis, edited by Philip S. Gorski (2013); Culture, Class, and Critical Theory: Between Bourdieu and the Frankfurt School by David Gartman (2013); Bourdieu, Language and the Media by John F. Myles (2010); Pierre Bourdieu: the Last Musketeer of the French Revolution by Gad Yair (2009); Art Rules: Pierre Bourdieu and the Visual Arts by Michael Grenfell and Cheryl Hardy (2007); Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field, edited by Rodney Benson and Erik Neveu (2005); Understanding Bourdieu by Jen Webb, Tony Schirato, and Geoff Danaher (2002); Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, ed. by Richard Shusterman (1999); Pierre Bourdieu; Language, culture and education - theory into practice, eds. Michael Grenfell, and Michael Kelly (1999); Le savant et la politique. Essai sur le terrorisme sociologique de Pierre Bourdieu by Jeannine Verdès-Leroux (1998); Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory by Bridget Fowler (1997); Pierre Bourdieu: A Bibliography by Joan Nordquist (1997); Culture and Power by David Swartz (1997); Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, ed. by Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone (1993); Cultural Capital by John Guillory (1993); Pierre Bourdieu by Richard Jenkins (1992); An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu, ed. by Richard Harker, Chellen Mahar, and Chris Wilkes (1990) - Documentary film: La sociologie est un sport de combat, dir. by Pierre Charles, 146 mininutes (2001) Selected works:
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