Pierre Bourdieu (1 August 1930 – 23 January 2002) was a French sociologist, anthropologist,[1]

and philosopher.[2]

Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and
symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal
the dynamics of power relations in social life. His work emphasized the role of practice and
embodiment or forms in social dynamics and worldview construction, often in opposition to
universalized Western philosophical traditions. He built upon the theories of Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx,
Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Erwin Panofsky, and Marcel Mauss. A notable
influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations.

Bourdieu rejected the idea of the intellectual "prophet," or the "total intellectual," as embodied
by Sartre. His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in
which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position. His argument is put
forward by an original combination of social theory and data from surveys, photographs and
interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within
objective structures. In the process, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social
structures and subjective experience on the individual (see structure and agency).

Contents
[hide]

 1 Biography
 2 Influences
 3 Bourdieu as public intellectual
 4 Work
 5 Bourdieu's theory of class distinction
 6 Bourdieu’s theory of power and practice
o 6.1 Bourdieu's theory about media and cultural production
o 6.2 Field and Habitus
 6.2.1 Field
 6.2.2 Habitus
 6.2.3 Habitus and Doxa
 6.2.4 Reconciling the Objective (Field) and the Subjective (Habitus)
o 6.3 Symbolic capital and symbolic violence
o 6.4 Reflexivity
o 6.5 Science and objectivity
o 6.6 Language
 7 Legacy
 8 See also
 9 Notes
 10 Bibliography
 11 References and further reading
  12 External links

[edit] Biography
He was born Pierre Felix Bourdieu in Denguin (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), in southern France on 1
August 1930, to a postal worker and his wife; Gascon was the language spoken at home. He
married Marie-Claire Brizard in 1962; the couple had three sons, Jérôme, Emmanuel and
Laurent.

Bourdieu was educated at the lycée in Pau, before moving to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris,
from which he gained entrance to the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Bourdieu studied philosophy
with Louis Althusser in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure. After getting his agrégation
Bourdieu worked as a lycée teacher at Moulins from 1955 to 1958 when he then took a post as
lecturer in Algiers.[3] During the Algerian War in 1958-1962, Bourdieu undertook ethnographic
research into the clash through a study of the Kabyle peoples, of the Berbers laying the
groundwork for his anthropological reputation. The result was his first book, Sociologie de
L'Algerie (The Algerians), which was an immediate success in France and published in America
in 1962.

In 1960 Bourdieu returned to the University of Paris before gaining a teaching position at the
University of Lille where he remained until 1964. From 1964 onwards Bourdieu held the
position of Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (the future École des
Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), in the VIe section, and from 1981, the Chair of Sociology
at the Collège de France, in the VIe section (held before him by Raymond Aron and Maurice
Halbwachs). In 1968, he took over the Centre de Sociologie Européenne, the research center that
Aron had founded, which he directed until his death.

In 1975, with the research group he had formed at the Centre de Sociologie Européenne, he
launched the interdisciplinary journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, with which he
sought to transform the accepted canons of sociological production while buttressing the
scientific rigor of sociology. In 1993 he was honored with the "Médaille d'or du Centre National
de la Recherche Scientifique" (CNRS). In 1996, he received the Goffman Prize from the
University of California, Berkeley and in 2001 the Huxley Medal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute.[4] Bourdieu died of cancer at the age of 71.[3]

[edit] Influences
Bourdieu's work is influenced by much of traditional anthropology and sociology which he
undertook to synthesize into his own theory. From Max Weber he retained the importance of
domination and symbolic systems in social life, as well as the idea of social orders which would
ultimately be transformed by Bourdieu into a theory of fields.

From Karl Marx, among other insights he gained an understanding of 'society' as the sum of
social relationships: "what exist in the social world are relations – not interactions between
agents or intersubjective ties between individuals, but objective relations which exist
'independently of individual consciousness and will'."[5] (grounded in the mode and conditions of
economic production), and of the need to dialectically develop social theory from social practice.
[6]

From Émile Durkheim, finally, through Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu
inherited a certain structuralist interpretation of the tendency of social structures to reproduce
themselves, based on the analysis of symbolic structures and forms of classification. However,
Bourdieu critically diverged from Durkheimian analyses in emphasizing the role of the social
agent in enacting, through the embodiment of social structures, symbolic orders. He furthermore
emphasized that the reproduction of social structures does not operate according to a
functionalist logic.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, through him, the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl played an
essential part in the formulation of Bourdieu's focus on the body, action, and practical
dispositions (which found their primary manifestation in Bourdieu's theory of habitus).

Bourdieu was also influenced by Wittgenstein (especially with regard to his work on rule-
following) stating that "Wittgenstein is probably the philosopher who has helped me most at
moments of difficulty. He's a kind of saviour for times of great intellectual distress".[7]

Bourdieu's work is built upon the attempt to transcend a series of oppositions which
characterized the social sciences (subjectivism/objectivism, micro/macro, freedom/determinism).
In particular he did this through conceptual innovations. The concepts of habitus, capital, and
field were conceived, indeed, with the intention to abolish such oppositions.

[edit] Bourdieu as public intellectual

During the 1990s Bourdieu became more and more involved in political debate, turning himself
into one of the most important public faces of intellectuality in France. While a fierce critic of
neoliberalism, Bourdieu was also critical of the "total intellectual" role played by Sartre, and he
dismissed Sartre's attempts within the political sphere of France as "irresponsible" and
"opportunistic."[8] Bourdieu saw sociology not as a form of "intellectual entertainment" but as a
serious discipline of a scientific nature. The paradox between Bourdieu's earlier writings against
using sociology for political activism and his later launch into the role of a public intellectual
involved some highly "visible political statements"[8] asking whether the role of the academic, in
this case the sociologist, is preparation for life as a public intellectual, especially when
considering the political implications of Bourdieu's work in the public domain. Although much
of his early work stressed the importance of sociology as a serious discipline, his later working
life saw him in the spotlight of political debate in France, raising the issue of whether the
sociologist has political responsibilities extending to the public domain.

In 2004 Marxist sociologist Michael Burawoy's presidential address to The American

Sociological Association called for a public sociology.[9] Burawoy considers the point that
sociology has a role to play in the public domain and suggests that the academic sociologist
should be more involved in public debate.[9] However, whereas Burawoy suggests that there are
shared values amongst sociologists, it also limits the discipline.[10] Burawoy argued that the early
work of sociologists to change and interpret the world changed to a role of conserving it, as
evidenced in Bourdieu's life.

Analysis of Bourdieu's political activism suggests that although he earlier faulted public
intellectuals such as Sartre, he always had political aspirations with political ideology
influencing his sociology from the beginning. On the other hand, between his earlier writings of
the 1960s and his later work the world had changed considerably, and his main concern was the
effect of globalisation and for those who benefited least from it. In that light, Bourdieu's role as
public intellectual was born from an "urgency to speak out against neo-liberal discourse that had
become so dominant within political debate."[8] His role as critical sociologist prepared him for
the public role, fulfilling his "constructionist view of social life" as it relied upon the idea of
social actors making change through collective struggles. His relationship with the media was
improved through his very public action of organizing strikes and rallies that raised huge media
interest in him and his many books became more popular through this new notoriety. One of the
main differences between the role of the critical sociologist and public intellectual is the ability
to have a relationship with popular media resources outside the academic realm.[11] Research is
needed on what conditions transform particular intellectuals into public intellectuals. [8]

[edit] Work

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v·d·e

Bourdieu routinely sought to connect his theoretical ideas with empirical research, grounded in
everyday life, and his work can be seen as sociology of culture or, as he labelled it, a "Theory of
Practice". His contributions to sociology were both evidential and theoretical (that is, calculated
through both systems). His key terms were habitus, capital and field.

He extended the idea of capital to categories such as social capital, cultural capital, and symbolic
capital. For Bourdieu each individual occupies a position in a multidimensional social space; he
or she is not defined only by social class membership, but by every single kind of capital he or
she can articulate through social relations. That capital includes the value of social networks,
which Bourdieu showed could be used to produce or reproduce inequality.

Ultimately, each relatively autonomous field of modern life, such as economy, politics, arts,
journalism, bureaucracy, science or education engenders a specific complex of social relations
where the agents will engage their everyday practice. Through this practice, they'll develop a
certain disposition for social action that is conditioned by their position on the field
(dominant/dominated and orthodox/heterodox are only two possible ways of positioning the
agents on the field; these basic binary distinctions are always further analysed considering the
specifities of each field). This disposition, combined with every other disposition the individual
develops through his engagement on a multidimensional (in the sense of multi-field) social
world, will eventually tend to become a sense of the game, a partial understanding of the field
and of social order in general, a practical sense, a practical reason, a way of di-vision (or
classification) of the world, an opinion, a taste, a tone of voice, a group of typical body
movements and mannerisms and so on. Through this, the social field may become more complex
and autonomous, while the individual develops a certain habitus that is typical of his position in
the social space. By doing so, social agents will often acknowledge, legitimate and reproduce the
social forms of domination (including prejudices) and the common opinions of each field as self-
evident, clouding from conscience and practice even the acknowledgment of other possible
means of production (including, of course, symbolic production) and power relations.
Though not deterministic, the inculcation of the subjective structures of the habitus can be
observed through statistical data, for example, while its selective affinity with the objective
structures of the social world explains the continuity of the social order through time. As the
individual habitus is always a mix of multiple engagements in the social world through the
person's life, while the social fields are put into practice through the agency of the individuals, no
social field or order can be completely stable. In other words, if the relation between individual
predisposition and social structure is far stronger than common sense tends to believe, it is not a
perfect match also.

Some examples of his empirical results include showing that despite the apparent freedom of
choice in the arts, people's artistic preferences (such as classical music, rock, traditional music)
strongly tie in with their social position; and showing that subtleties of language such as accent,
grammar, spelling and style – all part of cultural capital – are a major factor in social mobility
(for example, getting a higher-paid, higher-status job).

Pierre Bourdieu's work emphasized how social classes, especially the ruling and intellectual
classes, preserve their social privileges across generations despite the myth that contemporary
post-industrial society boasts equality of opportunity and high social mobility, achieved through
formal education.

Bourdieu was an extraordinarily prolific author[citation needed], producing hundreds of articles and
three dozen books, nearly all of which are now available in English. His style is particularly
dense and has sometimes been faulted for being overly opaque[citation needed].

[edit] Bourdieu's theory of class distinction

Summary

Pierre Bourdieu developed theories of social stratification based on aesthetic taste in his 1984
work Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (in French, La Distinction)
published by Harvard University Press. Bourdieu claims that how one chooses to present one’s
social space to the world—one’s aesthetic dispositions—depicts one’s status and distances
oneself from lower groups. Specifically, Bourdieu hypothesizes that these dispositions are
internalized at an early age and guide the young towards their appropriate social positions,
towards the behaviors that are suitable for them, and an aversion towards other behaviors.

Theory

Pierre Bourdieu theorizes that class fractions teach aesthetic preferences to their young. Class
fractions are determined by a combination of the varying degrees of social, economic, and
cultural capital. Society incorporates “symbolic goods, especially those regarded as the attributes
of excellence, […as] the ideal weapon in strategies of distinction.”[12] Those attributes deemed
excellent are shaped by the interests of the dominating class. He emphasizes the dominance of
cultural capital early on by stating that “differences in cultural capital mark the differences
between the classes.”[13]
The development of aesthetic dispositions are very largely determined by social origin rather
than accumulated capital and experience over time. The acquisition of cultural capital depends
heavily on “total, early, imperceptible learning, performed within the family from the earliest
days of life.”[12] Bourdieu argues that, in the main, people inherit their cultural attitudes, the
accepted “definitions that their elders offer them.”[14]

He asserts the primacy of social origin and cultural capital by claiming that social capital and
economic capital, though acquired cumulatively over time, depend upon it. Bourdieu claims that
“one has to take account of all the characteristics of social condition which are (statistically)
associated from earliest childhood with possession of high or low income and which tend to
shape tastes adjusted to these conditions.”[15]

According to Bourdieu, tastes in food, culture and presentation are indicators of class because
trends in their consumption seemingly correlate with an individual’s fit in society. [16] Each
fraction of the dominant class develops its own aesthetic criteria. A multitude of consumer
interests based on differing social positions necessitates that each fraction “has its own artists and
philosophers, newspapers and critics, just as it has its hairdresser, interior decorator, or tailor.” [17]

However, Bourdieu does not disregard the importance of social capital and economic capital in
the formation of cultural capital. For example, the production of art and the ability to play an
instrument “presuppose not only dispositions associated with long establishment in the world of
art and culture but also economic means…and spare time.”[18] However, regardless of one’s
ability to act upon one’s preferences, Bourdieu specifies that “respondents are only required to
express a status-induced familiarity with legitimate…culture.”[19]

“[Taste] functions as a sort of social orientation, a ‘sense of one’s place,’ guiding the occupants
of a given…social space towards the social positions adjusted to their properties, and towards the
practices or goods which befit the occupants of that position.”[20] Thus, different modes of
acquisition yield differences in the nature of preferences.[21]

These “cognitive structures…are internalized, ‘embodied’ social structures,” becoming a natural

entity to the individual (Bourdieu 468). Different tastes are thus seen as unnatural and rejected,
resulting in “disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance (‘feeling sick’) of the tastes of
others.”[22]

Bourdieu himself believes class distinction and preferences are “most marked in the ordinary
choices of everyday existence, such as furniture, clothing, or cooking, which are particularly
revealing of deep-rooted and long-standing dispositions because, lying outside the scope of the
educational system, they have to be confronted, as it were, by naked taste.”[23] Indeed, Bordieu
believes that “the strongest and most indelible mark of infant learning” would probably be in the
tastes of food.[24] Bourdieu thinks that meals served on special occasions are “an interesting
indicator of the mode of self-presentation adopted in ‘showing off’ a life-style (in which
furniture also plays a part).”[24] The idea is that their likes and dislikes should mirror those of
their associated class fractions.
Children from the lower end of the social hierarchy are predicted to choose “heavy, fatty
fattening foods, which are also cheap” in their dinner layouts, opting for “plentiful and good”
meals as opposed to foods that are “original and exotic.”[25] These potential outcomes would
reinforce Bourdieu’s “ethic of sobriety for the sake of slimness, which is most recognized at the
highest levels of the social hierarchy,” that contrasts the “convivial indulgence” characteristic of
the lower classes.[26] Demonstrations of the tastes of luxury (or freedom) and the tastes of
necessity reveal a distinction among the social classes.

The degree to which social origin affects these preferences surpasses both educational and
economic capital. Demonstrably, at equivalent levels of educational capital, social origin remains
an influential factor in determining these dispositions.[19] How one describes one’s social
environment relates closely to social origin because the instinctive narrative springs from early
stages of development.[27] Also, across the divisions of labor “economic constraints tend to relax
without any fundamental change in the pattern of spending,”[28] This observation reinforces the
idea that social origin, more than economic capital, produces aesthetic preferences because
regardless of economic capability, consumption patterns remain stable.

[edit] Bourdieu’s theory of power and practice

At the center of Bourdieu's sociological work is a logic of practice that emphasizes the
importance of the body and practices within the social world. Against the intellectualist tradition,
Bourdieu stressed that mechanisms of social domination and reproduction were primarily
focused on bodily know-how and competent practices in the social world. Bourdieu fiercely
opposed Rational Choice Theory as grounded in a misunderstanding of how social agents
operate. Social agents do not, according to Bourdieu, continuously calculate according to explicit
rational and economic criteria. Rather, social agents operate according to an implicit practical
logic—a practical sense—and bodily dispositions. Social agents act according to their "feel for
the game" (the "feel" being, roughly, habitus, and the "game" being the field).

Bourdieu’s anthropological work was dominated by an analysis of the mechanisms of

reproduction of social hierarchies. In opposition to Marxist analyses, Bourdieu criticized the
primacy given to the economic factors, and stressed that the capacity of social actors to actively
impose and engage their cultural productions and symbolic systems plays an essential role in the
reproduction of social structures of domination. What Bourdieu called symbolic violence is the
self-interested capacity to ensure that the arbitrariness of the social order is either ignored, or
posited as natural, thereby justifying the legitimacy of existing social structures. This concept
plays an essential part in his sociological analysis.

For Bourdieu, the modern social world is divided into what he calls fields. For him, the
differentiation of social activities led to the constitution of various, relatively autonomous, social
spaces in which competition centers around particular species of capital. These fields are treated
on a hierarchical basis wherein the dynamics of fields arises out of the struggle of social actors
trying to occupy the dominant positions within the field. Although Bourdieu embraces prime
elements of conflict theory like Marx, he diverges from analyses that situate social struggle only
within the fundamental economic antagonisms between social classes. The conflicts which take
place in each social field have specific characteristics arising from those fields and that involve
many social relationships which are not economic.[29]

Pierre Bourdieu developed a theory of the action, around the concept of habitus, which exerted a
considerable influence in the social sciences. This theory seeks to show that social agents
develop strategies which are adapted to the needs of the social worlds that they inhabit. These
strategies are unconscious and act on the level of a bodily logic.

[edit] Bourdieu's theory about media and cultural production

Bourdieu’s most significant work on cultural production is available in two books: The Field of
Cultural Production (1993) and The Rules of Art (1996).

Bourdieu builds his theory of cultural production his own characteristic theoretical vocabulary of
habitus, capital and field.

David Hesmondhalgh writes that “by ‘Cultural production’ Bourdieu intends a very broad
understanding of culture, in line with the tradition of classical sociology, including science
(which in turn includes social science), law and religion, as well as expressive-aesthetic activities
such as art, literature and music. However, his work on cultural production focuses
overwhelmingly on two types of field or sub-field of cultural production (…): literature and
art.”Hesmondhalgh's article

According to Pierre Bourdieu “the principal obstacle to a rigorous science of the production of
the value of cultural goods” is the “charismatic ideology of ‘creation’ “ which can be easily
found in studies of art, literature and other cultural fields. In Bourdieu’s opinion charismatic
ideology ‘directs the gaze towards the apparent producer and prevents us from asking who has
created this “creator” and the magic power of transubstantiation with which the “creator” is
endowed’.[30]

Bourdieu was not a proponent of revolutionary transformations in culture. According to him such
moments are always dependent on the possibilities present in the positions inscribed in the field.

[edit] Field and Habitus

This section does not cite any references or sources.

Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and
removed. (August 2007)

[edit] Field

Bourdieu shared Weber's view that society cannot be analyzed simply in terms of economic
classes and ideologies. Much of his work concerns the role of educational and cultural factors.
Instead of analyzing societies solely in terms of classes, Bourdieu uses the concept of field: a
structured social space with its own rules, schemes of domination, legitimate opinions and so on.
Fields are relatively autonomous from the wider social structure (or space, in his terminology), in
which people relate and struggle through a complex of connected social relations (both direct and
indirect). Among the main fields in modern societies, Bourdieu cited the arts, education, politics,
law and economy. Other societies, like the Kabyle people, have not developed such autonomous
fields, concentrating the social relations, rules, accumulation of capital and production of habitus
to the larger social field.

[edit] Habitus

Bourdieu's concept of habitus was inspired by Marcel Mauss' notion of body technique and
hexis. The word itself can be found in the works of Norbert Elias, Max Weber, Edmund Husserl
and Erwin Panofsky. For Bourdieu, habitus was essential in resolving a prominent antinomy of
the human sciences: objectivism and subjectivism. Habitus can be defined as a system of
dispositions (lasting, acquired schemes of perception, thought and action).

The individual agent develops these dispositions in response to the objective conditions it
encounters. In this way Bourdieu theorizes the inculcation of objective social structures into the
subjective, mental experience of agents. For the objective social field places requirements on its
participants for membership, so to speak, within the field. Having thereby absorbed objective
social structure into a personal set of cognitive and somatic dispositions, and the subjective
structures of action of the agent then being commensurate with the objective structures and
extant exigencies of the social field, a doxic relationship emerges.

Habitus is somewhat reminiscent of pre-existing sociological concepts such as socialization, but

habitus also differs from the more classic concepts in several important ways. Firstly, a central
aspect of the habitus is its embodiment: Habitus does not only, or even primarily, function at the
level of explicit, discursive consciousness. The internal structures become embodied and work in
a deeper, practical and often pre-reflexive way. In this sense, the concept has something in
common with Anthony Giddens' concept of practical consciousness.

[edit] Habitus and Doxa

Doxa refers to the learned, fundamental, deep-founded, unconscious beliefs, and values, taken as
self-evident universals, that inform an agent's actions and thoughts within a particular field. Doxa
tends to favor the particular social arrangement of the field, thus privileging the dominant and
taking their position of dominance as self-evident and universally favorable. Therefore, the
categories of understanding and perception that constitute a habitus, being congruous with the
objective organization of the field, tend to reproduce the very structures of the field. A doxic
situation may be thought of as a situation characterized by a harmony between the objective,
external structures and the 'subjective', internal structures of the habitus. In the doxic state, the
social world is perceived as natural, taken-for-granted and even common sensical.

Bourdieu thus sees habitus as an important factor contributing to social reproduction because it is
central to generating and regulating the practices that make up social life. Individuals learn to
want what conditions make possible for them, and not to aspire to what is not available to them.
The conditions in which the individual lives generate dispositions compatible with these
conditions (including tastes in art, literature, food, and music), and in a sense pre-adapted to their
demands. The most improbable practices are therefore excluded, as unthinkable, by a kind of
immediate submission to order that inclines agents to make a virtue of necessity, that is, to refuse
what is categorically denied and to will the inevitable.[31]

[edit] Reconciling the Objective (Field) and the Subjective (Habitus)

As mentioned above, Bourdieu used the methodological and theoretical concepts of habitus and
field in order to make an epistemological break with the prominent objective-subjective
antinomy of the social sciences. He wanted to effectively unite social phenomenology and
structuralism. Habitus and field are proposed to do so for they can only exist in relation to each
other. Although a field is constituted by the various social agents participating in it (and thus
their habitus), a habitus, in effect, represents the transposition of objective structures of the field
into the subjective structures of action and thought of the agent.

The relationship between habitus and field is a two-way relationship. The field exists only
insofar as social agents possess the dispositions and set of perceptual schemata that are necessary
to constitute that field and imbue it with meaning. Concomitantly, by participating in the field,
agents incorporate into their habitus the proper know-how that will allow them to constitute the
field. Habitus manifests the structures of the field, and the field mediates between habitus and
practice.

Bourdieu attempts to use the concepts of habitus and field to remove the division between the
subjective and the objective. Whether or not he successfully does so is open to debate. Bourdieu
asserts that any research must be composed of two "minutes." The first an objective stage of
research—where one looks at the relations of the social space and the structures of the field. The
second stage must be a subjective analysis of social agents' dispositions to act and their
categories of perception and understanding that result from their inhabiting the field. Proper
research, he says, cannot do without these two together[citation needed].

[edit] Symbolic capital and symbolic violence

For Marx, "cap2ital is not a simple relation, but a process, in whose various movements it is
always capital".[32] For Bourdieu, "social capital is the sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that
accrue to an individual or a group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less
institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition."[33]

Bourdieu sees symbolic capital (e.g., prestige, honour, attention) as a crucial source of power.
Symbolic capital is any species of capital that is perceived through socially inculcated
classificatory schemes. When a holder of symbolic capital uses the power this confers against an
agent who holds less, and seeks thereby to alter their actions, they exercise symbolic violence.
We might see this when a daughter brings home a boyfriend considered unsuitable by her
parents. She is met with disapproving looks and gestures, symbols which serve to convey the
message that she will not be permitted to continue this relationship, but which never make this
coercive fact explicit. People come to experience symbolic power and systems of meaning
(culture) as legitimate. Hence, the daughter will often feel a duty to obey her parents' unspoken
demand, regardless of her suitor's actual merits. She has been made to misunderstand or
misrecognize his nature. Moreover, by perceiving her parents' symbolic violence as legitimate,
she is complicit in her own subordination - her sense of duty has coerced her more effectively
than explicit reprimands could have done.

Symbolic violence is fundamentally the imposition of categories of thought and perception upon
dominated social agents who then take the social order to be just. It is the incorporation of
unconscious structures that tend to perpetuate the structures of action of the dominant. The
dominated then take their position to be "right." Symbolic violence is in some senses much more
powerful than physical violence in that it is embedded in the very modes of action and structures
of cognition of individuals, and imposes the specter of legitimacy of the social order.

In his theoretical writings, Bourdieu employs some terminology of economics to analyze the
processes of social and cultural reproduction, of how the various forms of capital tend to transfer
from one generation to the next. For Bourdieu, formal education represents the key example of
this process. Educational success, according to Bourdieu, entails a whole range of cultural
behaviour, extending to ostensibly non-academic features like gait, dress, or accent. Privileged
children have learned this behaviour, as have their teachers. Children of unprivileged
backgrounds have not. The children of privilege therefore fit the pattern of their teachers'
expectations with apparent 'ease'; they are 'docile'. The unprivileged are found to be 'difficult', to
present 'challenges'. Yet both behave as their upbringing dictates. Bourdieu regards this 'ease', or
'natural' ability—distinction—as in fact the product of a great social labour, largely on the part of
the parents. It equips their children with the dispositions of manner as well as thought which
ensure they are able to succeed within the educational system and can then reproduce their
parents' class position in the wider social system.

Cultural capital (e.g., competencies, skills, qualifications) can also be a source of misrecognition
and symbolic violence. Therefore working class children can come to see the educational success
of their middle-class peers as always legitimate, seeing what is often class-based inequality as
instead the result of hard work or even 'natural' ability. A key part of this process is the
transformation of people's symbolic or economic inheritance (e.g., accent or property) into
cultural capital (e.g., university qualifications) - a process which the logic of the cultural fields
impedes but cannot prevent.

[edit] Reflexivity

Bourdieu insists on the importance of a reflexive sociology in which sociologists must at all
times conduct their research with conscious attention to the effects of their own position, their
own set of internalized structures, and how these are likely to distort or prejudice their
objectivity. The sociologist, according to Bourdieu, must engage in a "sociology of sociology" so
as not to unwittingly attribute to the object of observation the characteristics of the subject.
She/he ought to conduct their research with one eye continually reflecting back upon their own
habitus, their dispositions learned through long social and institutional training. It is only by
maintaining such a continual vigilance that the sociologists can spot themselves in the act of
importing their own biases into their work. Reflexivity is, therefore, a kind of additional stage in
the scientific epistemology. It is not enough for the scientist to go through the usual stages
(experiment, repetition, falsification, peer review, etc.); Bourdieu recommends also that the
scientist purge their work of the prejudices likely to derive from their social position. In a good
illustration of the process, Bourdieu chastises academics (including himself) for judging their
students' work against a rigidly scholastic linguistic register, favouring students whose writing
appears 'polished', marking down those guilty of 'vulgarity'.[34] Without a reflexive analysis of the
snobbery being deployed under the cover of those subjective terms, the academic will
unconsciously reproduce a degree of class prejudice, promoting the student with high linguistic
capital and holding back the student who lacks it - and all not because of the objective quality of
the work but simply because of the register in which they write. Reflexivity should enable the
academic to be conscious of their prejudices, e.g. for apparently sophisticated writing, and impel
them to take steps to correct for this bias.

Bourdieu also describes how the "scholastic point of view"[35] unconsciously alters how scientists
approach their objects of study. Because of the systematicity of their training and their mode of
analysis, they tend to exaggerate the systematicity of the things they study. This inclines them to
see agents following clear rules where in fact they use less determinate strategies; it makes it
hard to theorise the 'fuzzy' logic of the social world, its practical and therefore mutable nature,
poorly described by words like 'system', 'structure' and 'logic' which imply mechanisms, rigidity
and omnipresence. The scholar can too easily find themself mistaking "the things of logic for the
logic of things" - a phrase of Marx's which Bourdieu is fond of quoting.[36] Again, reflexivity is
recommended as the key to discovering and correcting for such errors which would otherwise
remain unseen, mistakes produced by an over-application of the virtues that produced also the
truths within which they are embedded.[37]

[edit] Science and objectivity

Bourdieu contended there is transcendental objectivity, only there were certain historical
conditions necessary for its emergence. Bourdieu's ideal scientific field is one that persistently
designates upon its participants an interest or investment in objectivity. Transcendental
objectivity, he argued, requires certain historical and social conditions for its production. The
scientific field is precisely that field in which objectivity may be acquired. The structure of the
scientific field is such that it becomes increasingly autonomous and its "entrance fee" becomes
increasingly strict. Further, the scientific field entails rigorous intersubjective scrutinizing of
theory and data. This makes it difficult for those within the field to bring in, for example,
political influence.

[edit] Language

Bourdieu takes language to be not merely a method of communication, but also a mechanism of
power. The language one uses is designated by one's relational position in a field or social space.
Different uses of language tend to reiterate the respective positions of each participant. Linguistic
interactions are manifestations of the participants' respective positions in social space and
categories of understanding, and thus tend to reproduce the objective structures of the social
field. This determines who has a "right" to be listened to, to interrupt, to ask questions, and to
lecture, and to what degree.

[edit] Legacy
Bourdieu "was, for many, the leading intellectual of present-day France... a thinker in the same
rank as Foucault, Barthes and Lacan".[3] His works have been translated into two dozen
languages and have had an impact on the whole gamut of disciplines in the social sciences and
the humanities. Several works of his are considered classics, not only in sociology, but also in
anthropology, education, and cultural studies. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of
Taste (La Distinction) was named as one of the 20th century's ten most important works of
sociology by the International Sociological Association.[38] The Rules of Art has had great impact
on sociology, history, literature and aesthetics.

In France, Bourdieu was seen not as an ivory tower academic or "cloistered don" but as a
passionate activist for those he believed to be subordinated by society. In 2001, a documentary
film about Bourdieu – Sociology is a Martial Art – "became an unexpected hit in Paris. Its very
title stressed how much of a politically engaged intellectual Bourdieu was, taking on the mantle
of Émile Zola and Jean-Paul Sartre in French public life and slugging it out with politicians
because he thought that was what people like him should do."[3]

For Bourdieu, sociology was a combative effort, exposing the un-thought structures beneath the
physical (somatic) and thought practices of social agents. He saw sociology as a means of
confronting symbolic violence and exposing those unseen areas where one could be free.

Bourdieu's work continues to be influential. His work is widely cited, and many sociologists and
other social scientists work explicitly in a Bourdieusian framework. One example is Loïc
Wacquant, who persistently applies the Bourdieusian theoretical and methodological principles
to subjects such as boxing, employing what Bourdieu termed participant objectivization, or what
Wacquant calls "carnal sociology."

Bourdieu also played a crucial role in the popularisation of correspondence analysis and
particularly multiple correspondence analysis. Bourdieu held that these geometric techniques of
data analysis are, like his sociology, inherently relational. "I use Correspondence Analysis very
much, because I think that it is essentially a relational procedure whose philosophy fully
expresses what in my view constitutes social reality. It is a procedure that 'thinks' in relations, as
I try to do it with the concept of field," Bourdieu said, in the preface to The Craft of Sociology.[39]