Pierre Bourdieu.
The most important sociological author of the last century.
Huge in France, but also internationallly.
Studied philosophy and did ethnographic fieldwrk in Algeria: Kabyle peasants.
A peasant group in the mountainous parts of Algeria, an older culture that had not undegone the full impact of modernisation.
An extremely theoretical author but able to combine his theretical claims with empirical research.
Studied a wide range of topics.
Came from a lower class family. Ie he has real experience of what class inequality actually means. Enters an environment where the culture is very different from his own family background. It was very difficult to get accepted in the academic field. One of the most important elements that made him different as a sociological observer. He could see the clear contrasts between his family and the academic field area he went to.
The study of the Kabylian house
- He studies very mundane things, in order to understand how that organisation works in a general sense. The house is ordered, everything has a general place. There is a kind of classification of objects. Eg. ”If your toothbrush is on your living table, we find this dirty, but there is no intrinsic dirtiness to this, but it shows that we operate with a kind of classification in which we show that certain things belong somewhere in order to be non-dirty”.
Anthropologists like Bourdieu here shows that there is a kind of meaning that is attached to where each object fundamentally goes. There is symbolic meaning in the way in which different objects in a house is placed. For this, he uses a structuralist method. And very successfully so.
We have to understand meaning through a relation of difference, things have meaning in a field of opposition.
eg. a house. Outside the house is a sphere of culture. Inside the house is a sphere of culture. Outside the house is male, and inside is female. During the day, men should not come into the house. If it is warm enough the men should even sleep outside. The inside of the house is an entirely female domain. Women are associated with natural functions and thus to stay in the house.
Behind this kind of opposition, there is also a reflection of how the universe generally is structured. These oppositions then, are replicated within the house. There is a kind of duality in the house. The left is lower and female and darker, the right is higher and male and more light, physically. The left is also where they keep animals. Ie. Nature. Whilst the cultural weaving loom is on the right. The left part is associated with objects that have a kind of humidity, whilst the right is dry. So there are all kinds of oppositions which structure the meaning of the objects in the house.
An especially important place is the weaving loom. When a girl is born, she will spend most of the time behind the weaving loom. When she gets married she gets to take place in front of it instead however. The structure of the house also has a kind of middle piller which is female, which is attached to a beam, which is male. Boys go through certain rituals of aging, which all happen by sitting on the beam. So every element in the house is entirely gendered and so carries a symbolic meaning.
This can be understood through structuralist methods. One can formalise this in a kind of quasi-mathematical formula which are entirely synthetic, that are sound.
The early Bourdieu was a kind of structuralist, but he quickly moved away from this.
If you look at the house as such, and the objects as such, you will never find the structure. Rather, you look at what people do and how they interact with each other. How they interact and order the objects. We can only discover the structures by looking at actual activities. What should be studied is practice and action.
If the structures are only in practice, there will be variations, as people do differ.
Not all houses are perfectly identical, like in the case of kabylian houses.
So Bourdieu starts a debate about how the structure of objects cannot be without the action that creates. And this action is in itself structured. So the structure of meanings is related to the pattern of actions that take place with it.
Bourdieu thus critiques what he calls subjectivism and objectivism
Subjectivism: emphasis on subjective experience nad choice.
Objectivism:emphasis on structure (most french sociologists, such as Durkheim or Marx, and LeviStrauss). They study order and structure as such, apart from human practice.
He wants to move beyond both.
How is structure maintained through time then?
There is indeed a kind of structure, and it is maintained, and how does this come out? How is this observable?
We have to analyse the interaction between structure and practice.
Bourdieu also considers sociology as a kind of practice, and so as something that is itself related to structures. He wants to have sound methods. So they need to be self-applied.
For Bourdieu, practices are based on their own structure, their own pattern. And to grasp this structure of practice, Bourdieu uses the notion of Habitus. Stable dispositions and habits that are engrained in the body (both seen in Aristotle and Husserl, so very phenomenological).
There is not just social structure outside of us, but we have interiorised that structure into ourselves.
This is what Bourdieu tries to express by Habitus. By having lived somewhere and having been told and educated in that place, you live there and have practices, and all of that is done in correspondence with the structure. So people are not taught the concept of structure itself, but instead are embraced into the structure.
The habitus is not something we are aware of. They are a learned disposition which comes from doing, from practice.
These we have acquired by doing, through our education, through what we are taught throughout life. And if we see someone with a different habitus, you immediately see the difference. This difference is not biological, but is an expression of social structure. People act in certain ways without willing or being aware of it, but through which social structure is enacted.
We then have to describe the habitus of every kind of person, every kind of class of peoples’.
(The term Hysesteresis in Sartre refers to the idea of a habitus being wrong for the time period you are in, if you were taught in the 80s, you will lack the habitus of the time sometimes).
Because we have this kind of habitus, we can always deal with unexpected situations, and this kind of improvisation is only possible through an internalised structure.
”A system of durable, transposabledispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organise practices and representation that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.”
There is a kind of circularity on the structurisation going on, and this is quite hard to put to words.
However, the habitus is a very useful tool to put into practice. It is quite easy to put into practice even.
[Sociology: Psychology + Physics + Groups]
For Bourdieu, social life is like a game. And in it there are rules. The structures are a set of rules that allows one to improvise and strategise. Participating in social life is a kind of game, and there are rules which we are not always reflectively aware of, but which we can’t really express. People speak differently here, they use language differently from other people. And becoming part of this kind of institution is done through a practice of learning, which happens even if you cannot spell out these rules per say. However, you are not entirely determined by most structures, most structures allow some kind of freedom within the structure, and the habitus is the set of dispositions which allow you to act within a set of structures. (Bourdieu is influenced by Merleau-Ponty: ”It is through the body which I relate everything to me”, though he moves away from Phenomenology generally). The location of the Habitus is thereby very deeply the body.
”We all know that we are able to walk quickly up on different types of stairs and we can do so without thinking about it, until we start to actively reflect on the walking up of stairs whilst we are doing. There is so on a kind of knowledge that is deeply rooted in our body, which is superior to our reflective knowledge.”
This gives us a general image of what the habitus is.
In our bodily dispositions there is a kind of knowledge of how to behave and act and proceed which I cannot explain but it’s there.
Certain things that we do, become part of our body, they become ingrained in our very physical self.
And so improvisation becomes possible, but only so within the structure.
This implicit unreflexive knowledge that we have in regards to our habitus is the doxa. Knowing how to play the social game without being able to explain how that works. It feels natural to act in certain ways, but it is in fact not natural but is structured in a particular way. Having acquired the right habitus and the doxa of it, makes it feel as if what you are doing is natural. It is often compared to Marx’s ideology. What appears as natural is not natural at all, but is produced by social structures.
This implies certain challenges for sociological research. If what really matters is the doxa and the habitus, then we should be very careful in relying on the responses given by certain interviewees. The expressions they give is entirely clouded by the doxa through which they are acting. So instead we have to see what they say in relation to what kind of doxa it might be reconstructed into by the sociologist. So in this sense, Bourdieu remains a bit Durkheimian. The sociologist studies his objects objectively, and understands the objects as not always relaying the truth.
”If you want to study modern society, you cannot go off of what modern society says about it itself” – Marx.
If our spontaneous views gave an accurate depiction of society, sociology itself would not be necessary.
For Bourdieu, there is always a sense of strategy about how people participate in the social game, the structure.
There is something strategic about eg. the action of gift-giving, even if we don’t generally talk about it as being such. In order to get the attention of a more prestigious professor, this requires being able to play the game of academic life, which is strategic. The way in which we play the game is a strategy.
We have to have the sense of the game (sens du jeu) which allows us to play it intelligently.
Society consists of different fields, academic, social, etc, and in all of these fields a kind of struggle of strategies are taking place. And what is at stake in that struggle is capital. A very specific kind of capital.
Success in one field does not imply recognition in another. Each field has its own rules and its own dynamics, but all share what is at stake; accumulation of its captial (not money).
Each success in a field is different however.
So in Bourdieu, there are different forms of capital. There is certainly economic capital, but there is also social and cultural capital. Social capital can be seen as the relations and networks that you have; the more people you know, the better connected you are, the more successful you will be in life. To play the game of social life intelligently we need a social network, which is our capital, it is something we can invest in.
Cultural capital is about what is at stake in the struggle of for example academic philosophy. It is prestige, and honor and all these kinds of things. The field of philosophy for example is not a level playing-field. There are important philosophers and then there are those that are more or less lesser and entirely unknown. So when you continue in this kind of field, you have to strategise about what kind of professor you think would benefit you. And the struggle here is also for example about what is good philosophy. What counts as good philosophy is based on where there is a possibility to earn a kind of prestige. This is the object of struggle for us. Eg. The generation of the existentialists had to make space for a new type of philosophy and they were successful in waging that struggle by making it so that existentialism was what itself gave you prestige. Now this is not the case at all in France, there have been structuralists, and now there are post-structuralists. This was literally a struggle of taking positions of PHD-places, and seats of teaching. The philosophers themselves think they are pursuing the truth, but their behaviour is social and active between each other in a kind of strategic game which in this case is cultural capital.
Sometimes conversion between one capital and another is possible. Economic capital can often lead to the others but this is not an automatic thing that happens.
We can also understand class formation in this sense. Capital will be reproduced between generations. Children with parents that have more cultural capital will inherently have more cultural capital due to their habitus.
Through these terms, Bourdieu analyses the social and class structure of society. He connects this to the symbolic meanings of a number of practices.
Economic, cultural and social capital is unevenly distributed. There are people, such as parts in the bourgoisie, who have economic capital without a lot of cultural capital.
So through these distinctions, we can map the different class segments in society, such as farmers, shopkeepers, industrialists and so on.
Class positions also have a corresponding habitus. The habitus of a farmer will be different from a university professor. We also have to analyse the habitus through time. It changes, and so any analysis made is only valid for that amount of time which is analysed.
And what Bourdieu wants to find out is the symbolic meaning of why certain things have certain perceptions.
Is there something intrinsic about Golf that makes it for rich people? Not really. But it has been made in such a way that it is expensive. We must not look at golf as something intrinsic, but we should think about it relationally. It isn’t a substance or an intrinsic kind of thing, but it exists in a sphere of relations. It has an elite character through its contrast to other popular sports.
We need to go beyond the substantialist method that asks whether there is something intrinsic to things that make it that way, such as asking if there is something that intrinsically make music beautiful, as this sort of thinking actually has ethical implications. To think substantially always underlies racism. You think about people as their being (white people do that because they are white and so on), but we should think about them as their relation.
So there is social space and symbolic space.
A practice or taste is connected to a particular class at a given moment: this is the product of structure.
There is a kind of homology. There is a structure of class position, and with it there is a homology of certain activities which are related and characterised by that relation.
If one practice gets a meaning in relation to another, we see that there is a relation of difference. What Bourdieu does is translate this insight for sociological analysis, and what matters is distinction. By playing eg. Golf, you distinguish yourself from other groups. This is a way to affirm your distinctiveness as a person. It is part of what you unconsciously do. It is a dynamic of distinction.