Day: November 8, 2020

Question To Answer:
So, what do you think of Bourdieu?
Any concepts that you find especially intriguing?
And/or how might these concepts be applied in the field in which you work?

Notes:
Born in a small French town, Denguin, the current population of about 1,600, Bourdieu rose to become a star of the French intelligentsia. In fact, a few years before his death in 2002, the French equivalent of Time magazine carried his picture on the cover under a headline proclaiming him Frances leading intellectual. His was a meteoric rise, but not one achieved without struggle. His family was not well to do, nor were his parents well educated.

His father was a share-cropper who became a postman. The family spoke Gascon, a regional language. But Bourdieu was a brilliant student who attracted the attention of his teachers. He won a scholarship to attend Lyce Louis-le-Grand in Paris, a preparatory school for the French elite. From there he went on to study at the prestigious Ecole Normal Suprieure. Basically, a country boy with a funny accent had been dropped into the middle of the training ground for the French business, political and academic elite. Most of his fellow students at the Lyce were Parisian and came from educated and cultured families in a milieu where that mattered a lot. Things were probably pretty tough for him, especially when the children of the privileged realized Bourdieu was the smartest one in the room. Academically, however, he excelled. In the late 1950s, he was in the military and was posted to Algeria, arriving there during that countrys war for independence from France. The conflict was extremely brutal, and Bourdieu came to disagree with the repressive way the French were responding to the liberation movement. In Algeria be began a serious anthropological/sociological study of the Kabyle, a Berber ethnic group, and he began documenting what he saw as part of a photographic study.

In 1960, he returned to France and became an assistant to Raymond Aron, a controversial academic and journalist who angered much of the French intelligentsia with his anti-Marxist stands. In fact, one of his most famous books is entitled The Opium of the Intellectuals, in which he argued that Marxism was, as the title suggests, the opium of French intellectuals. He said they criticized democracy and capitalism but were blind to the oppression of Marxist governments. Like Bourdieu, Aron was something of an outsider to the French intellectual establishment who was too brilliant to dismiss. Over the course of his career, Bourdieu seemed to follow a pattern. First, he was a bit at the margins of the intellectual world. Although as his work for Aron shows, he was not a fringe figure but a man recognized for his intellectual talent. It is just that he was just not initially part of the charmed circle. In response, through sheer brilliance and force of will, he began to build his own circle. He served as an editor for an academic publisher ensuring a platform for focusing attention on work that he felt important. In 1968, he took over the Center for European Sociology, a position previously held by Aron. Under his leadership the center grew; today it has 32 researchers and 28 associate members. In the 1970s, he began his own sociology journal, ensuring that his work and the work of friends and followers were published. Eventually, Bourdieu was the center of his academic field and of broader intellectual life in France. The International Sociology Association even named his major work,

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, the sixth most important sociological work of the 20th century. Not bad for the kid from Denguin who never talked about his personal life.

Field:
The field is one of the concepts for which Bourdieu is well known. He argues that an organized sphere of activity academia, business, art, medicine or whatever operates in much the same fashion as a game. There are rules (formal and informal) to which the players are expected to adhere. These rules are inherent in the nature of the game; bankers for instance follow a set of protocols necessary to maintain the trust needed for their business. The players are also driven by similar motivations; they want to win recognition, money, power, or prestige (or some combination of them). To be engaged in the game is to be engaged in practice, a term used in the same sense that we say someone practices medicine. Bourdieu would probably be the first to disagree, but I cant help but see the influence of his own life on this concept. He is the outsider who falls into the game (field) of academia, bumping into the unwritten and informal rules that distinguish a player from a wannabe. He learns and masters the rules, emerging as the champ and winning the recognition, maybe even acceptance that he longed for when he entered the game. 

Capital:
Bourdieu developed a very sophisticated concept of capital that went way beyond anything Marx envisioned. Bourdieu saw capital as a resource that could be used for advantage in the field, and he recognized that money was not the only thing that fits that description. In fact, he described four types of capital:

Social capital:
who you know, your social connections, etc.

Financial capital money
Cultural capital education, intellect, style of speech, dress, or physical appearance (think about the person who has a good education, knows how to dress for success in their field, speaks eloquently and in a fashion congruent with their field, knows the right wine to order, the best music to listen to, etc.)

Symbolic capital honor, and prestige
Now, the thing is, each of these forms of capital is somewhat exchangeable for one another. A person with great symbolic capital might find themselves able to move in a social circle comprised of people with far more financial capital. Likewise, a person with financial capital might travel in high society circles, even though they otherwise would lack the social capital to move into that clique. Fans of old TV shows might remember the Beverly Hillbillies when Jed the millionaire hillbilly moves into the social whirl of Beverly Hills. These four forms of capital are very important to the field and different forms may play a greater role in one field than another. For example, cultural capital might be more important than financial capital in education. But again, to an extent, these forms can be substituted for one another. A person with high social, cultural, and symbolic capital might be able to maneuver into a berth on Wall Street.

Social-Space:
Collectively, the four forms of social capital function much like a stock portfolio, creating some quantity of resources we have at our disposal. That portfolio is a dominant factor in determining the position we occupy in social space. Grenfell has a great little diagram on page 88 that illustrates this point. Essentially it shows a divide between economic and cultural capital. My own take on it is a bit different. I like to think of a three-dimensional space in which clusters of people are floating about. Each of those clusters is composed of people with similar levels of the various types of capital, thus constituting a social class.

Doxa:
Doxa is a term for the stuff that is so much a part of our world that we dont even question it. We take it for granted that it is just the way things are. It becomes an embodied assumption about the world around us; i.e., a part of our habitus. For example, the kid who thinks that kids from his or her neighborhood dont grow up to lead successful lives because that is just the way things are. Or the assumption that people are competitive by nature. Are they, or is it that people in our little slice of the world are all competitive so we assume that this is the way things are?

Ghassan Hage on Pierre Bourdieu:
https://youtu.be/vn9daX6Jt4g

Pierre Bourdieu
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Pierre_Bourdieu

References:

Grenfel, Michael. 2014. Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts. London: Routledge.

Ghassan Hage on Pierre Bourdieu:
https://youtu.be/vn9daX6Jt4g

Pierre Bourdieu
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Pierre_Bourdieu