Jeremy F. Lane - Pierre Bourdieu: A Critical Introduction

Pierre Bourdieu

Modern European Thinkers

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Pierre Bourdieu

A Critical Introduction

Jeremy F. Lane

First published 2000 by Pluto Press
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Copyright Jeremy F. Lane 2000

The right of Jeremy F. Lane to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

For Ben Taylor, who first encouraged me
to think about French culture.

Acknowledgements

The PhD thesis on which this study is based was born of a snap decision to abandon a lucrative job at a London radio station, move to Glasgow and become a student once again. Pierre Bourdieu notes somewhere that those who have a decent stock of inherited cultural and economic capital can easily afford to make the most apparently risky career moves and this was no doubt true in my case. Nonetheless, the social and psychological risks involved in such a move could have been real enough, had it not been for the constant support of friends, family and colleagues in London and the immense warmth of my reception in the marvellous city of Glasgow. The individuals concerned are too numerous to be mentioned here by name, but they know who they are and without their support this project would never have come to fruition.

First amongst those who made a more tangible contribution to the completion of this study is my thesis supervisor, Professor Sian Reynolds, without whose acute mind, encyclopedic knowledge of French history and society, and unfailing good humour my work on Bourdieu would not have progressed far. Of the many other individuals who contributed their time, advice and encouragement, I should also like to thank Jon Beasley-Murray, Pierre Bourdieu, Peter Collier, Martyn Cornick, Jill Forbes, Michael Kelly, Bill Kidd, Bill Marshall, Martin McQuillan, Robin Purves, Graeme MacDonald, Graham Roberts, Stephen Thomson and all my colleagues in the French Departments at the Universities of Stirling and Aberdeen. The Faculty Research Committee of the University of Aberdeen offered much appreciated financial help in covering copyright expenses. The editorial board of Modern and Contemporary France kindly agreed to my reproducing, in , a modified version of an article, Domestiquer lexotique, exotiser le domestique: the symbiosis of ethnology and sociology in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, that first appeared in their journal in 1997, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 44556.

Introduction

In late August 1998, a photograph of the sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu appeared on the front cover of the weekly French news magazine LEvnement du jeudi. Below the photograph was a caption which read: Bourdieu, the most powerful intellectual in France. Inside the magazine, a lengthy dossier discussed the perceived strengths and weaknesses of Bourdieus work.

No doubt Bourdieu himself was less than delighted with this sudden burst of media attention, sparked as it was by the publication of Janine Verds-Lerouxs highly critical study of his work, Le Savant et la politique: essai sur le terrorisme sociologique de Pierre Bourdieu (Politics and the Scholar: an essay on Pierre Bourdieus sociological terrorism) (see Verds-Leroux 1998). Nonetheless, the intense media interest in Bourdieus work did genuinely reflect his current status as one of Frances most high-profile intellectuals, a status gained both through his extensive theoretical output in the domains of sociology and anthropology and his increasingly frequent political interventions in defence of Frances most impoverished and marginalised social groups, the homeless, the unemployed, illegal immigrants, striking workers. Bourdieus name perhaps first began to be associated with these social and political issues in 1993, with the publication of the immense collaborative study of contemporary forms of social exclusion published under his editorship, The Weight of the World (La Misre du monde 1993). The book clearly resonated with a broader sense of political, cultural, and social malaise in France; it sold in large numbers and certain of its passages have been performed as short plays by French theatre groups. Bourdieus public intervention in support of striking students and workers during the French public sector strikes of autumn 1995 raised his political profile still further. It was surely this experience of political engagement which encouraged him to found and edit the Raisons dagir series, a set of pamphlets presenting the most advanced state of research on current political and social problems written by a range of authors all animated by the politically engaged desire to circulate the knowledge indispensable for political reflection and action in a democracy (Halimi 1997, p. 4). Bourdieu has himself published two pamphlets in this series; an analysis of the threat to intellectual and artistic autonomy posed by the media in On Television and the Media (Sur la tlvision 1996), and a series of directly political interventions, propositions for resisting the neo-liberal invasion, in Acts of Resistance (Contre-feux 1998). Both books have prompted further heated debate and sometimes quite hostile responses in the French media (see Schneidermann 1999).

Bourdieus fame and influence are, however, by no means solely attributable to his recent, more directly political pronouncements in his native France. On the contrary, his work has for many years now exerted a significant influence over the fields of sociology and anthropology throughout the world. His theories of class, culture, and education, elaborated in texts such as The Inheritors (Les Hritiers 1964), Reproduction (La Reproduction 1970), and Distinction (La Distinction 1979), are obligatory points of reference for anyone writing in these areas. His three book-length studies of Kabylia in Algeria, Esquisse dune thorie de la pratique (1972), its much revised and extended English translation, Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977), and The Logic of Practice (Le Sens pratique 1980), have acquired a similar status within the domain of anthropology. The publication in 1992 of Bourdieus detailed study of the structure and genesis of the nineteenth-century French artistic and literary fields,