Pierre Bourdieu

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Pierre Bourdieu

• Habitus and Cultural Field

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Bourdieus life

• French sociologist (1930-2002)
• Interdisciplinarity philosophy, anthropology,
  ethnography, art, literature, education,
  language, and television.

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CV

• Born in a small village
• moved to Paris, (classmate Jacques Derrida)
• Interest in Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Heidegger and
  the writings of the young Marx.

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CV

• Degree in philosophy
• With French troops for two years in Algeria
• 1959-60 lecturer at the University of Algiers
• studied traditional farming and ethnic Berber
  culture.

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CV

• 1962 marries Marie-Claire Brisard.
• studies anthropology and sociology
• teaches at the University of Paris (1960-62), U.
  of Lille (1962-64).
• 1968 director of the Centre de Sociologie
  Européenne

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Power structures

• Extensive research on problems concerned with
  the maintenance of a system of power by means of
  the transmission of a dominant culture.

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Central Themes

• Culture and education are central in the
  affirmation of differences between social classes
  and in the reproduction of those differences.
• La Reproduction (1970) Bourdieu argues that the
  French educational system reproduces the cultural
  division of society.

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Taste

• The creation or maintenance of cultural hierarchy
  and distinctions of taste and value

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Cultural Taste

• "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 (1984)

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Sociology

• 1975 journal Actes de la Recherche en Sciences
  Sociales
• Aim Dismantle the mechanism by which cultural
  production helps sustain the dominant structure
  of society.
• 1981 chair of sociology at the Collège de France.
  

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A public intellectual

• Mid-1990s Bourdieu participates in a number of
  activities outside academic circles.
• supports striking rail workers
• speaks for the homeless
• guest at television programs
• 1996 founds the publishing company Liber/Raisons
  d'agir.

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Late work

• 1998 article in Le Monde in which he compares the
  "strong discourse" of neoliberalism with the
  position of the psychiatric discourse in an
  asylum.
• Bourdieu's last publications deal with masculine
  domination, neoliberal newspeak, Edouard Manet's
  art, and Beethoven.

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Death

• Bourdieu died
• of cancer in Paris
• on January 24,
• 2002.

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Key terms

• Key terms in Bourdieu's sociological thought are
• social field
• Capital
• and habitus.

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The concept of habitus

• Habitus is adopted through upbringing and
  education.
• "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.

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Habitus structure created through practise

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Habitus

• "One of the fundamental effects of the
  orchestration of habitus is the production of a
  commonsense world endowed with the objectivity
  secured by consensus on the meaning (sens) of
  practices and the world, in other words that each
  of them receives from the expression, individual
  and collective (in festivals, for example),
  improvised or programmed (commonplaces, sayings),
  of similar or identical experiences. The
  homogeneity of habitus is whatwithin the limits
  of the group of agents possessing the schemes (of
  production and interpretation) implied in their
  productioncauses practices and works to be
  immediately intelligible and foreseeable, and
  hence taken for granted" p.80

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Habitus

• describes practices and preferences within a
  society that express a basic attitude, a
  disposition towards the world
• is a collectively and historically attained
  system of unconsciously functioning ways of
  thinking and filters of perception

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Dimensions of Habitus

• Habitus is handed down to the next generation
  through socialisation and tradition.
• Social difference is evaluated by Habitus,
  therefore Habitus is reason as well as result of
  group boundaries and the formation of different
  milieus
• Habitus forms and limits our way of life, it
  determines the borders of thinking as the outer
  border of our freedom

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Habitus

• Habitus produces patterns of behaviour and
  evaluations and represents the social position of
  a person with the matching lifestyle .
• Bourdieus central theme is the existence of the
  interdependence of the social position of people
  and their ways of life

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Dimensions

• Habitus forms and limits our way of life, it
  determines the borders of thinking as the outer
  border of our freedom
• Doxa the experience by which the natural and
  social world appears as self-evident, field that
  is taken for granted, undisputed
• Discourse takes place within the field

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La distinction

• The struggle for social distinction is a
  fundamental dimension of all social life. "la
  distinction" refers to social space and is bound
  up with the system of dispositions (habitus).
• Social space the space of social positions and
  the space of lifestyles.

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Distinction

• Distinction a certain quality of bearing and
  manners
• nothing other than difference
• a gap, a distinctive feature, a relational
  property existing only in and through its
  relation with other properties.
• (Practical Reason On the Theory of Action, 1994)
  

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Value

• intellectuals and artists, through symbolic
  labor, have the power to redefine the value of
  cultural capitalinvesting in cultural capital
  by elites and by intellectuals and artists

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Social field

• All human actions take place within social fields
• arenas for the struggle of the resources
• Individuals, institutions, and other agents try
  to distinguish themselves from others, and
  acquire capital which is useful or valuable on
  the arena.

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Hierarchy

• In modern societies, there are two distinct
  systems of social hierarchisation.
• Economic position and power determined by money
  and property, the capital one commands.
• Cultural or symbolic. Status is determined by how
  much cultural or "symbolic capital" one
  possesses.

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Social chance

• The social position of people depends on their
  social chances which depend on the social powers
  a person may or may not have

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Life chances

• Predetermined?

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Power

• Bourdieu differentiates between 3 kinds of power
  tools
• Economic capital (income, assets)
• Cultural capital (education, language, tradition,
  titles given by institutions
• And social capital (connections, origin, group
  affiliation). Similar social positions are
  combined to Milieus

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Convertible capital

• Marx would term cultural, social, and symbolic
  capital forms of "fictive capital," meaning that
  it is not directly economically productive
• Bourdieu shows that cultural/social/symbolic
  capital (in the form of prestige, honors, etc.)
  is convertible back into economic capital. 
• For example, tuition (economic capital) is traded
  for academic credentials (cultural/symbolic
  capital) that is then converted back into
  economic capital on the job market.

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Culture as source of domination

• Intellectuals are in the key role as specialists
  of cultural production and creators of symbolic
  power.
• In Distinction, based on empirical material
  gathered in the 1960s, 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 notion that 'taste' is a gift
  from nature. Taste functions to make social
  "distinctions".

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Resistance

• Criticising dominant culture can be seen as the
  realm of artists
• Media makers depend more on general approval
  (finance)
• Parody and satire may be used by more mainstream
  media makers to critique the dominant culture
  (Simpsons)
• The different levels of freemdom regarding
  critique of the dominant culture ties in to
  Bourdieus ideas of the positions, and the
  position-takings that creative people have in
  society.

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Later work

• Rules of Art Genesis and Structure of the
  Literary Field (1992)
• On Flauberts work
• a Bildungsroman, presentation of a method, and an
  examination of Bourdieu's own philosophy.

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Writing for Television

• On Television (1996), a surprise best seller in
  France.
• Bourdieu considers television a serious danger
  for all the various areas of cultural production.
  
• Television is degrading journalism because it
  must attempt to be inoffensive.

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Self censorship

• "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... 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."

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Culture

• culture plays a paramount role in structuring
  life chances.
• Each class has its own cultural background,
  knowledge, dispositions, and tastes that are
  transmitted through the family.
• The culture of dominant groups forms the
  knowledge and skills that are most highly valued,
  and the basis of what is taught in schools.
• To possess these ways of knowing and skills,
  which Bourdieu calls cultural capital, means that
  one is considered educated or talented.

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Bourdieus theoretical framework

• explanations for how the dominant ideas of a
  society (i.e., economic development and digital
  divide) are related to structures of
  socio-economic class, production and power
• how these ideas are legitimated
• how advantages fail to be passed on to dominated
  groups
• how we come to perceive the status quo as natural
  and inevitable (legitimacy through powerful
  institutions such as the media and schools).

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Theory

• Bourdieu argues that the status quo is preserved
  because it is essentially unquestioned and
  naturalized. We do not pose the theoretical
  questions of legitimacy because the social world
  is embodied in both practices and thoughts (i.e.,
  habitus). We reproduce it without active
  reflection.
• This does not mean that the oppressed do not
  reflect on their position, but their perception
  of themselves as oppressed is often impaired by
  their submersion in the reality of being
  oppressed (Freire, 1970).

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Sources

• Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction A social
  critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge,
  MA Harvard University Press.
• Bourdieu, P, (1993) The field of cultural
  production, or the economic world reversed. In
  Johnson, R. (ed) The field of cultural
  production Essays on art and literature.
  Cambridge Polity Press. pp 1-25.

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Sources

• Bordieu, P. (1994) Practical Reason On the
  Theory of Action. Stanford University Press
• http//ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/viewA
  rticle/342/248
• http//www.kirjasto.sci.fi/bourd.htm

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Reading suggestions

• Bourdieu, Pierre (1990a) In Other Words.
  Cambridge Polity.
• Bourdieu, Pierre (1991) On the Possibility of a
  Field of World Sociology, in Pierre
• Bourdieu and J.S. Coleman (eds) Social Theory for
  a Changing Society. Boulder, CO Westview Press.

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Reading suggestions

• Bourdieu, Pierre (1997) The Logic of Practice.
  Cambridge Polity.
• Bourdieu, Pierre (1999) The Weight of the World.
  Cambridge Polity.
• Bourdieu, Pierre and Terry Eagleton (1999) Doxa
  and Common Life An Interview, in Slavoj iek
  (ed.) Mapping Ideology. London Verso.
• Bourdieu, Pierre and Loïc Wacquant (1992)
  Invitation