BOURDIEU
We’ll put Pierre Bourdieu (born 1930, Denguin, France – died 2002, Paris, France) in conversation with Durkheim. Please start by reading the obituary for Bourdieu published in The Guardian.
DIFFERENTIATION AND DISPOSITION
Bourdieu. 1998. Practical Reason. (pp. vii-ix, 1-13, 19-34, 52-8, 75-88)
Bourdieu opens with a call for a “relational” and “dispositional” sociology, and he insists that this necessitates a break from a number of popular trends in the social sciences (e.g., “substantialist” models, rational choice theory, and some extreme varieties of structuralism). In opposition to these other approaches, Bourdieu is fundamentally concerned with the relation between objective structures and subjective constructions. This has motivated his conceptualizations of social space/field (objective relations of positions), habitus (incorporated structures, practical sense, and a “feel for the game”), and capital (possessed and/or embodied species of power that structure [dis]positions). These concepts are particularly useful for making sense of advanced or highly differentiated societies. In addition to detailing economic and cultural capital as two basic principles of differentiation, Bourdieu mentions a handful of fields: the economic field, the artistic field, the scientific field, and more. Each field comes with its own patterns of capital and habitus as well as its own rules (nomos) and interests (illusio). That said, differentiated societies are not made of relatively autonomous microcosms floating in the middle of nowhere. To understand why, we need to consider three domains: family/school (to study “modes of reproduction”), the bureaucratic field (to study symbolic violence), and the field of power (to study relations between different species of capital).
BOURDIEU AND DURKHEIM
Read the "Durkheim Excerpts for Bourdieu" in the Excerpt Packet.
Why should we pair Durkheim and Bourdieu? It’s a fair question. Practical Reason seems to offer a more obvious engagement with Weber (compare value-rationality with Bourdieu’s reflections on “disinterested acts”) and Marx (note Bourdieu’s critique of “classes on paper” and his defense of social space as an analytic tool). When Bourdieu does mention Durkheim, he doesn’t even explicitly engage the Division of Labor in Society. Instead, he typically turns to a 1912 book that's not included in the excerpt packet, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Nevertheless, we can stage a very fruitful conversation. We can compare fields with specialized “organs,” habitus with localized collective consciousness, and the bureaucratic field with the “nervous system.” With respect to the latter comparison, we may want to think about what Bourdieu might say about Durkheim’s vision of the state as an embodiment of the collective consciousness. We may also reflect on what Durkheim might say about Bourdieu’s now famous analysis of social reproduction.