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| ISBN-13: | 9780226785950 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 02/28/1998 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 342 |
| Sales rank: | 631,209 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
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Culture & Power
The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu
By David Swartz
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 1997 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-78595-0
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCING PIERRE BOURDIEU
Culture provides the very grounds for human communication and interaction; it is also a source of domination. The arts, science, religion, indeed all symbolic systems—including language itself—not only shape our understanding of reality and form the basis for human communication; they also help establish and maintain social hierarchies. Culture includes beliefs, traditions, values, and language; it also mediates practices by connecting individuals and groups to institutionalized hierarchies. Whether in the form of dispositions, objects, systems, or institutions, culture embodies power relations. Further, many cultural practices in the advanced societies constitute relatively autonomous arenas of struggle for distinction. Intellectuals—the specialized producers and transmitters of culture—play key roles in shaping those arenas and their institutionalized hierarchies. So argues Pierre Bourdieu, today's leading French social scientist.
With his election in 1981 to the chair of sociology at the prestigious Collège de France, Pierre Bourdieu joined the distinguished ranks of the most revered postwar French social scientists, Raymond Aron and Claude Lévi-Strauss. A prolific writer and extraordinarily productive researcher, Bourdieu has published more than 30 books and 340 articles over the period 1958 to 1995. Many of these works are collaborative, as Bourdieu is also founder and director of his own research center, the Centre de Sociologie Européenne. He directs his own sociological journal, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, and his own collection (under the imprint, Le sens commun) of more than sixty books with the French publishing house, Editions de Minuit. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that Bourdieu's efforts have culminated in the development of a veritable new school of French sociology on a scale comparable to that produced earlier this century by one of his principal sources of inspiration: Emile Durkheim.
Prompted in part by increased accessibility due to numerous recent English-language translations of his work, interest in Bourdieu is rapidly growing in Britain and the United States. By the late 1980s Bourdieu had already become one of the French social scientists most frequently cited in the United States—surpassing Lévi-Strauss. Bourdieu is perhaps most widely known among sociologists for his early work with Jean-Claude Passeron on French higher education, particularly for their most frequently cited book, Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture (1977). But he is also recognized, particularly among anthropologists, for his work on colonial Algeria, which appears in The Algerians (1962a), Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977c), and The Logic of Practice (1990h). In addition, his contributions to the study of relations between culture and social class (Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste [1984a]), the sociology of language (Language and Symbolic Power [1991c]), and the sociology of culture (The Field of Cultural Production [1993b]) are rapidly gaining recognition. Many of his works are becoming standard references in current growth sectors like the sociology of culture. His work spans a broad range of subjects from ethnography among peasants in Algeria, to sociological analysis of nineteenth-century artists and writers, education, language, consumer and cultural tastes, religion, and science in modern French society. Bourdieu is a major social theorist who also does empirical research.
At the same time, acquaintance with his work has been fragmentary in Anglo-Saxon countries. An early problem of lack of translations of key works has now been rectified. Some of his work stressing the social reproduction effects of French education (Bourdieu 1973a; Bourdieu and Passeron 1977) was translated before some of his earlier reflection on a theory of practices (Bourdieu 1972). His conceptual development was thus read out of sequence and he became narrowly classified as a social reproduction theorist rather than appreciated for the broad range of conceptual concerns animating his thinking. By 1994, however, all of Bourdieu's major books had been translated into English.
A second problem has been that early interest in Bourdieu emerged along sectorial lines of academic specialization, which tended to limit knowledge of his oeuvre to the special concerns of selected fields, such as anthropology or the sociology of education. His early international reputation and much of the initial critical evaluation in sociology were based on his work on French education—notably Reproduction —rather than his earlier studies of Algerian peasants. Sociologists of education missed the anthropological concerns, garnered from his early research experience in Algeria, that animate his sociology of modern France. Thus, his overall conceptual framework has not received the kind of attention it deserves. Some of his most significant contributions to social theory have gone relatively unnoticed. Moreover, some of the criticisms leveled at Bourdieu appear to be based on a partial understanding of his overall approach to the study of social life. Yet, as I explain in chapters 3 and 4, Bourdieu's sociology emerges from a broad interdisciplinary background that reflects the particular organization of intellectual discourse that characterized France in the 1950s and '60s.
And third, the reception of Bourdieu's work has been frequently polarized between uncritical acclaim by disciples and disdainful dismissal by certain critics. Even in France Bourdieu's work has received strikingly little sympathetic critical review. This is no doubt due in part to the sharply critical stance Bourdieu takes toward most established approaches in the social sciences. His critical style tends to recruit disciples or establish enemies.
It is time for a more comprehensive presentation and critical assessment of Bourdieu's mode of sociological inquiry. This book joins the important efforts by Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992), Harker, Mahar, and Wilkes (1990), Jenkins (1992), Robbins (1991), and Thompson (1991), to accomplish that task. It will elucidate and critically evaluate Bourdieu's overall conceptual framework and situate it within the French intellectual context. While it attempts to give an overall grasp of Bourdieu's sociological project, it does not aim to be an exhaustive examination of Bourdieu's oeuvre. It offers a sympathetic but critical examination of selected themes and concepts central to Bourdieu's sociological project, some of which have thus far received relatively little attention in the Anglo-Saxon literature on Bourdieu. While considerable attention has been given to his concepts of cultural capital and habitus, relatively little attention has been given to the concept of field. Yet the concept of field is crucial to a fuller understanding of his theory of practices and the way he conceptualizes relations between culture and social structure. His analysis of intellectuals, their key role as specialists of cultural production and creators of symbolic power, their position in the social class structure, and their relation to politics have been noted but not sufficiently explored. Yet, as I will show in chapters 9 and 10, a theory of intellectuals stands at the heart of Bourdieu's sociological project. Moreover, his normative vision for the scientific intellectual and the critical practice of sociology have received almost no attention. These all represent essential components in Bourdieu's work and thus far have not received appropriate recognition or critical assessment. The objective of this book is to help address these lacunae in the Anglo-American literature on Bourdieu's work.
* * *
The rich complexity of Bourdieu's conceptual world resists easy summary. Few bodies of work are as comprehensive, complex, and innovative. Few approach Bourdieu's sophistication in scrutinizing the mundane operations of empirical research in terms of their epistemological and philosophical presuppositions. And few employ the kind of practical and strategic—indeed political—orientation to their sociological work that renders a strictly "theoretical reading" of its products potentially misleading. Bourdieu forges his concepts as correctives to opposing viewpoints. His work can be read as an ongoing polemic against positivism, empiricism, structuralism, existentialism, phenomenology, economism, Marxism, methodological individualism, and grand theory. He frames his rejection of these opposing views, however, by criticizing the subjectivist and objectivist forms of knowledge and the substantialist view of reality that he believes pervade them.
Thus, Bourdieu's primary concern is not one of conceptual genealogy, or faithful adherence to any given theoretical tradition. Bourdieu is a theorist but hardly a systems theorist in the tradition of Talcott Parsons. He in fact sharply criticizes "theoretical theory" for emphasizing abstract conceptualization independent of objects of empirical investigation. Bourdieu's concepts are not designed to respond in the first instance to the formal canons of internal consistency, generalizability, etc. Rather, they are pragmatically forged out of empirical research and confrontation with opposing intellectual viewpoints. His concepts shift in emphasis and scope depending on the opposing viewpoints they address. Nonetheless, they reveal a fairly consistent set of underlying metasociological principles that guide all of his investigations.
Bourdieu is a conceptual strategist whose choice of conceptual language is explicitly designed to establish distance from opposing viewpoints, particularly from those subjectivist and objectivist forms of knowledge that he believes hinder the development of a unified theory of practices. For this reason, I devote considerable attention, particularly in chapter 2, to the intellectual context and research experiences out of which Bourdieu develops his sociology. Chapter 3 presents Bourdieu's critique of subjectivist and objectivist forms of knowledge and chapter 11 outlines his alternative general theory of practices including a reflexive practice of sociology. Chapter 10 outlines the political project that undergirds his sociological program.
Finally, Bourdieu has developed distinct theories relative to action, culture, power, stratification, and sociological knowledge. Yet they intersect and interweave in complex ways that make it difficult to abstract one from the other even for expository purposes. This book attempts to highlight the principal conceptual interweavings so as to provide a richer understanding of Bourdieu's sociology. Chapters 3 through 6 explore the central arguments and concepts. Chapters 7 through 9 bring to the conceptual discussion substantive areas of investigation (social class structure, education, and intellectuals) that are particularly crucial to Bourdieu's sociological agenda.
Culture, Power, and Reproduction
Bourdieu proposes a sociology of symbolic power that addresses the important topic of relations between culture, social structure, and action. Whether he is studying Algerian peasants, university professors and students, writers and artists, or the church, a central underlying preoccupation emerges: the question of how stratified social systems of hierarchy and domination persist and reproduce intergenerationally without powerful resistance and without the conscious recognition of their members. The answer to this question, Bourdieu argues, can be found by exploring how cultural resources, processes, and institutions hold individuals and groups in competitive and self-perpetuating hierarchies of domination. He advances the bold claim that all cultural symbols and practices, from artistic tastes, style in dress, and eating habits to religion, science and philosophy—even language itself—embody interests and function to enhance social distinctions. The struggle for social distinction, whatever its symbolic form, is for Bourdieu a fundamental dimension of all social life. The larger issue, then, is one of power relations among individuals, groups, and institutions (particularly the educational system). Indeed, for Bourdieu power is not a separate domain of study but stands at the heart of all social life. And the successful exercise of power requires legitimation. The focus of his work, therefore, is on how cultural socialization places individuals and groups within competitive status hierarchies, how relatively autonomous fields of conflict interlock individuals and groups in struggle over valued resources, how these social struggles are refracted through symbolic classifications, how actors struggle and pursue strategies to achieve their interests within such fields, and how in doing so actors unwittingly reproduce the social stratification order. Culture, then, is not devoid of political content but rather is an expression of it.
The exercise and reproduction of class-based power and privilege is a core substantive and unifying concern in Bourdieu's work. It is his ambition to create a science, applicable to all types of societies, of the social and cultural reproduction of power relations among individuals and groups. In an early statement (Bourdieu 1973a), he calls for a "science of the reproduction of structures" that would be
a study of the laws whereby structures tend to reproduce themselves by producing agents invested with the system of dispositions which is able to engender practices adapted to these structures and thus contribute to their reproduction.
In a more recent statement, Bourdieu (1987b:92) describes his work as offering a genetic theory of groups. Such a theory would explain how groups, especially families, create and maintain unity and thereby perpetuate or improve their position in the social order. He charges the sociologist to ask "the question with which all sociology ought to begin, that of the existence and the mode of existence of collectives" (1985e:741). Bourdieu focuses on the role culture plays in social reproduction. How groups pursue strategies to produce and reproduce the conditions of their collective existence and how culture is constitutive of this reproductive process is for him a unifying problem in both sociology and anthropology and a substantive theme throughout his work (see Bourdieu 1985e:741).
At the core of Bourdieu's intellectual project for over thirty years stands the central issue in Western social thought since Marx: the debate between cultural idealism and historical materialism. Bourdieu's sociology represents a bold attempt to find a middle road that transcends the classic idealism/materialism bipolarity by proposing a materialist yet nonreductive account of cultural life.14His thinking begins with Marx but draws more substantively from Durkheim and Weber.
In his approach to culture, Bourdieu develops a political economy of practices and symbolic power that includes a theory of symbolic interests, a theory of capital, and a theory of symbolic violence and symbolic capital. His theory of symbolic interests reconceptualizes the relations between the symbolic and material aspects of social life by extending the idea of economic interest to the realm of culture. There are symbolic interests just as there are material interests. He conceptualizes culture as a form of capital with specific laws of accumulation, exchange, and exercise. The exercise of power, he argues, requires legitimation, so he also proposes a theory of symbolic violence and capital that stresses the active role that symbolic forms play as resources that both constitute and maintain power structures. These are not tidy, well-delimited theoretical arguments but orienting themes that overlap and interpenetrate. They draw from a wide variety of intellectual influences including Marxism, structuralism, phenomonology, the philosophy of science, and the classical sociological tradition, and they will be explored in chapters 3 and 4.
The Agency/Structure Problem
Another general area of concern is the relationship between individual action and social structure. What motivates human action? Do individuals act in response to external causes as much mainstream academic sociology tends to assume? Is individual action determined by "culture," "social structure," or "mode of production"? Or do actors act for their own identifiable reasons as the phenomenological, interpretative, and rational-actor schools in the social sciences maintain? Relatedly, what in fact is to be the epistemological status of actor conceptions in social scientific accounts of their behavior? Are they, as in the Durkheimian tradition, to be dismissed as epistemologically unreliable? Or are they to become the essential building blocks of scientific accounts, as the hermeneutical tradition would have it? These questions point to what Giddens (1979) identifies as one of the central problems in contemporary social theory, namely, the relation of agency and structure.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Culture & Power by David Swartz. Copyright © 1997 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements1: Introducing Pierre Bourdieu
2: Career and Formative Intellectual Influences
3: Bourdieu's Metatheory of Sociological Knowledge
4: Bourdieu's Political Economy of Symbolic Power
5: Habitus: A Cultural Theory of Action
6: Fields of Struggle for Power
7: Social Classes and the Struggle for Power
8: Education, Culture, and Social Inequality
9: Intellectuals and Intellectual Fields
10: The Scientific Intellectual and Politics
11: The Struggle for Objectivity: Bourdieu's Call for Reflexive Sociology
12: Conclusion
References
Author Index
Subject Index