Pierre Bourdieu

6 Key excerpts on "Pierre Bourdieu"

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  Modern Sociologists on Society and Religion

  • Inger Furseth, Pål Repstad(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6 Pierre Bourdieu

  Social practice, capital, and power

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003181446-7

  Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) was a dominant figure in French social sciences in the late twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, and he became influential internationally, especially in cultural sociology and studies of social inequality. Bourdieu belongs to the structuralist tradition, but there are also similarities between Bourdieu and Goffman because both of them emphasize social practice (Postone, LiPuma, and Calhoun 1993, 2) (see Chapter 1 ). He was raised in moderate conditions in a village in Southern France, and his socioeconomic background has often been employed to explain his research interest in social inequality. Bourdieu carried out several research projects and wrote more than thirty books. He understood social life in terms of concepts of objective material, social, and cultural structures, and the experiences and practices of individuals and groups. An important goal for him was to transcend the oppositions in classical social theory between structuralism and phenomenology, which is a goal for Habermas (Chapter 4 ) and Giddens (Chapter 7 ) as well.

  Bourdieu’s view on religion has been termed “paradoxical” (Dianteill 2003, 529; Kühle 2004, 37). On the one hand, his direct contributions to the field are relatively modest. The articles that address religion are few and his major works have little focus on this issue. Religion appears here and there and is more integrated in his general work (Rey 2007, 58). On the other hand, some of his most important concepts such as belief, habitus, and field were developed from his early attempts at developing a sociology of religion (Bourdieu 1990a/1982–87, 22, 49). This has led some to describe his work as “a “generalized” sociology of religion” (Dianteill 2003, 530). In this chapter, we will first outline the key concepts Bourdieu develops in his early sociology of religion, before we see how he uses these concepts in his most famous book, Distinction

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  Pierre Bourdieu and Physical Culture

  • lisahunter, Wayne Smith, elke emerald, lisahunter, Wayne Smith, elke emerald(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part I An introduction to Pierre Bourdieu's concepts Passage contains an image

  1 Pierre Bourdieu and his conceptual tools

  lisahunter, Wayne Smith and elke emerald

  DOI: 10.4324/9780203628744-1

  Keywords: Theoretical tools, Habitus, Field, Capital, Practice, Hexis, Doxa, Symbolic violence, Reflexivity

  Here we introduce Pierre Bourdieu and those of his theoretical tools that have offered particular insight into studies of physical culture. We briefly explain who Pierre Bourdieu was and explain his tools, including Habitus, Field, Capital, Practice, Hexis, Doxa, Symbolic violence and Reflexivity.

  Pierre Bourdieu was a French social theorist who provided us with a reflexive social theory that drew from sociology, philosophy and anthropology. He was born in France to traditional rural peasant farmers in a small country town, Denguin, in 1930 (see Grenfell 2008 for more details). Knowing a little about his life situates where his ideas came from and what he was trying to do through his conceptual tools as developed within, and applied to, French society at a particular time and from his position within that society. As his work argues, he is a product of society, all the while acting with some form of agency to shape that society. He drew on the work of Émile Durkheim, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Marcel Mauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Blaise Pascal among others. Bourdieu was a social activist, known in France through the media and, over time, beyond France, with translations of his work into many languages. His work was taken up quickly, but behind his contemporaries such as Foucault, in the USA. Working in France, he was a prolific writer up until his death in 2002.

  Figure 1.1 Pierre Bourdieu 1930–2002

  As a means of understanding practice, Bourdieu provided conceptual tools that articulate the dialogue between structures that shape a society and their interaction with the individual person. Significantly, Bourdieu located the body as an important locus of social theory. His conceptual tools offer a theory of embodiment that is useful for understanding deeply entrenched forms of embodied existence and differentiated social power relations. Using these tools we can come to some understanding of how we embody culture while at the same time, through our practices, changing and/or replicating the status quo. The ontological and epistemological positioning of corporeality is of particular importance in the context of this book: the/our body’s definition and neglect within our practices

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  Aspirations, Education and Social Justice

  Applying Sen and Bourdieu

  • Caroline Sarojini Hart(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  habitus in relation to fields of action. These concepts are illuminated further in the following discussion.

  Bourdieu and the concepts of habitus, capital and field

  It has been argued that, Bourdieu did not write anything explicitly about ‘education policy’ (Rawolle and Lingard, 2008: 729). However, he did concentrate on issues relating to ‘education and social reproduction’ and there is much that can be learned from the application of Bourdieu’s ideas to understanding why, for example, ‘widening participation’ in higher education in England is such a monumental task (Lingard, Taylor and Rawolle, 2005: 663). Naidoo argues that, ‘at the heart of Bourdieu’s work on higher education has been his desire to expose higher education as a powerful contributor to the maintenance and reproduction of social inequality’ (Naidoo, 2004: 457).

  In particular, Bourdieu’s conceptions of habitus, field and forms of capital aid understanding of the way policies and institutions can contribute to reproducing inequalities as well as overcoming them (Bourdieu, 1986). These three Bourdieurian concepts are widely referred to in educational and sociological studies and there are many interpretations of Bourdieu’s work (indeed his own interpretations were somewhat fluid). Therefore an overview will be given alongside working definitions of Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital and field in order to facilitate the discussions that follow. It is not possible to give a full account of the depth and richness of Bourdieu’s work, this has been dealt with in his own works and by others.1

  Habitus The habitus is necessity internalized and converted into a disposition that generates meaningful practices and meaning-giving perceptions. (Bourdieu, 2010: 166)

  Bourdieu drew attention to what he called the ‘habitus’ of an individual which is related to the cultural and familial roots from which a person grows. Bourdieu explained that, habitus, ‘operates below the level of calculation and consciousness’ and that the, ‘conditions of existence’ influence the formation of the habitus which is manifested in the agent’s ‘tastes’, practices and works thus constituting a particular lifestyle (2010: 167).

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  Beyond Critique

  Exploring Critical Social Theories and Education

  • Bradley A. Levinson, Jacob P. K. Gross, Christopher Hanks, Julia Heimer Dadds, Kafi Kumasi, Joseph Link(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  She finds that they experience various forms of exclusion based on their gendered habitus and the forms of social and cultural capital that are implicitly valued. Ultimately, they find, in Taylor’s words, “the future that fits” their adjusted expectations (Taylor 2005 ; Morrison 2008). And in his book Producing Success: The Culture of Personal Advancement in an American High School (2009), educational anthropologist Peter Demerath uses Bourdieu’s concepts to understand how students at this high-achieving school draw upon their middle-class cultural capital and habitus to compete with one another and drive themselves to “advance” as much as possible—often at the expense of others, and even at the expense of their own broader learning and well-being. Finally, recently a vigorous literature on educational policy formation and the politics of educational reform and credentialing has drawn on Bourdieu’s framework. The concept of field, in particular, seems to inform the critical policy literature: The concept enables Eran Tamir to critically examine the power dynamics of teacher education and certification reform in the state of New Jersey, and it inspires Shaun Rawolle and Robert Lingard to develop an account of the local mediation of global policy discourses (Rawolle and Lingard 2008 ; Tamir 2008). In this sort of work, social fields are theorized as providing the arena of practice in which policy implementation unfolds. Theory and Educational Scholarship: A Closer Examination By examining more closely a small set of Bourdieu-inspired educational studies, we may better appreciate the analytic power of his concepts. In particular, we can see the seemingly intractable power of privilege, as well as the subtlety with which domination and inequality may be reproduced. We may be able to see how there is a constant work —the work of social practice—involved in establishing and reproducing domination

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  Theory as Method in Research

  On Bourdieu, social theory and education

  • Mark Murphy, Cristina Costa(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Bourdieu and Passeron also established relevant links between education, society, and culture not only through the notion of capitals – specifically cultural capital – but also through the concept of habitus, and the dispositions individuals acquire throughout their life trajectories, which orient their strategies towards social and professional practices. They describe the difference between primary and secondary habitus. According to them, the ‘habitus acquired in the family [primary] forms the basis of the reception and assimilation of the classroom message, and the habitus acquired at school [secondary] conditions the level of reception and degree of assimilation of … any intellectual message’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1979 [1990], pp. 43–4). Hence, the Bourdieuian perspective understands education mainly as a system of reproduction of social practices and social privileges, with social classes being defined not only in relation to the position they occupy in the field, but also, and above all, through the cultural capital and habitus associated with that very same position. This is naturally converted into forms of symbolic power, such as distinction and the sense of identity individuals confer on their position in the field.

  Later in his career Bourdieu studied distinction in taste, attitudes and social positions of social agents. In his book Distinction : A social critique of the judgement of taste (1984), he reflects on the economies of practices and cultural goods through ‘the role played by the education system in mediating the relations between the status hierarchies associated with different tastes and cultural preferences on the one hand, and the organization and reproduction of the occupational class, on the other’ (p. xx).

  At the core of Bourdieu’s argument is the idea that individuals’ dispositions are (re)produced in relation and in response to the social, economic and cultural structures on which agents operate and with which they identify themselves or detach themselves from. As Bourdieu concludes, ‘social identity is defined and asserted through difference’ (ibid., p. 172), with education playing a role in reproducing such differences.

  In Homo academicus

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  Re-Thinking Economics

  • Asimina Christoforou, Michael Lainé(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In all these works, a close connection was realised between economics and sociology through the use of concepts like ‘exchange’, ‘heritage’, ‘capital’ (especially ‘cultural capital’), ‘profit’, ‘market’ and ‘interest’. Bourdieu’s objective was to unify the conceptual apparatus of the social sciences without denying specificity to any particular social universe, like the economy itself. This double intellectual constraint led him to a sense of the multiplicity of social spheres, beyond that of economic production, in which a diverse set of economic and non-economic assets can be defined and accumulated. In a multidimensional conception of society, there are different sources of inequality, which need to be systematically analysed. Bourdieu would use Geometric Data Analysis, a set of statistical tools developed in France under the influence of Jean-Paul Benzécri, to grasp this multidimensionality of social structures (see Benzécri 1973). In this statistical framework based on abstract linear algebra, statistical observations are described as clouds of points in Euclidean spaces, a technique which allows us to have a more visual appraisal of statistical regularities (Lebaron 2010).

  From the second half of the 1960s, Bourdieu developed his own theoretical apparatus, based on a reflexive re-reading of his previous empirical works. This conceptual apparatus is summarised in the ‘tryptic’ capital–habitus–field. In the following, we briefly describe this tryptic in relation to economics and the economy, along with his conception of symbolic violence.

  Capital

  The concept of ‘cultural capital’ (first ‘cultural heritage’) was initially developed as a metaphor coming from economics, transferred into the realm of culture, allowing the analysis of particular inequalities and their familial process of transmission. Using economic models and concepts against economism (Lebaron 2003), Bourdieu attempted to unify economics, and the analysis of cultural spheres (‘cultural goods’, ‘cultural markets’ …) around a ‘materialistic’ system of concepts, without reducing cultural practices to economic determinants.

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