INTRODUCTION
I think there are two versions of Bourdieu’s past. One is the mythical one in which he is the peasant boy confronting urban civilisation, and the other one, which he actually thought through more seriously, is what it’s like to be a petit bourgeois and a success story. And all this obsession with other people’s language, and with the use of language to dominate and put down in nonrational ways is perhaps also the rethinking of his own experience. (Nice 1985)
In Chapter 1 we formally outlined what we felt to be Bourdieu’s major methodological themes and techniques. The intent of this chapter is to give a slightly more ethnographic approach to Bourdieu by providing the reader with an overview of the development of Bourdieu’s work and the genesis of his ideas as drawn directly from himself and his reflections upon his intellectual past. The material for this chapter is drawn from personal observations and interviews with Bourdieu at the Centre de Sociologie Europeenne in 1985 and 1986,1 as well as from his written work from 1985 to 1989. In addition to the Bourdieu material, I have also included sections from a particularly interesting interview between Bourdieu and a group of German scholars (see Honneth and Schwibs 1985), plus impressions of Bourdieu’s life and work by his first major English translator, Richard Nice. Finally, I would like to point out that the layout of this chapter differs from others in the book in that the text is interrupted by descriptive sections which take up particular ideas from the text. These sections are taken from an interview with Richard Nice and help illuminate certain points. Bourdieu has always maintained that it was imperative that the academic reflect upon his or her own practice. In this interpretive essay we have tried to allow him to speak for himself.
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NOTES
These interviews were conducted over two years, amounting to some ten hours in French, English and Spanish, with English predominating.
Here Bourdieu refers to the use of habitus by Hegel, Husserl, Weber, Durkheim and Mauss.
Readers interested in the parallels to Chomsky’s work may find the section in Outline of a Theory of Practice called ‘The Objective Limits of Obiectivism’ interesting reading (Bourdieu 1977:1–30.
.4. This contrasts strongly with reductionist criticisms made by education writers. See Chanter 4 for further comment.
In Algeria 1960 one of Bourdieu’s main points is to show the connection between class, temporality and expectations. In the preface he writes:
The relation to a future objectively inscribed in the material conditions of existence contains the basis of the distinction between the sub-proletariat and the proletariat — between the uprooted, demoralised masses’ disposition to revolt and the revolutionary dispositions of organised workers who have sufficient control over their present to undertake to reappropriate the future.’ (Bourdieu 1979: viii).
‘I believe that I was guided by a kind of theoretical feeling, but also and maybe above all by the rather deep-seated refusal of the ethical posture which implicated the structuralistic anthropology. This means, the noble and distant relation which was established between the scientist and his object, as being simple lay persons. This led me to favour the theory of practice, which is explicit among the followers of Althusser who transform the agent to a simple “support” (Träger) of the structure (the idea of the unconscious fulfilled the same function with Lévi-Strauss). Thus, I stubbornly keep on asking the informants the question of why, by breaking away from Lévi-Strauss’s discourse about the indigenous “rationalisations” which are totally incapable of clarifying the anthropological task, related to the real causes or the real reasons of the practices. This is what compelled me to do research, about marriages for instance.’ (Bourdieu, Fr. ed. 1987:31–2.)
See ‘The Sentiment of Honour in Kabyle Society’. This particular essay was included in the English translation of Algeria 1960 (Bourdieu 1979) and is also available in English in J. Peristiany (1965).
‘Wittgenstein is undoubtedly the philosopher who has been the most useful to me in difficult moments. He is a kind of life-saver in moments of great intellectual distress. When it is about questioning things as self-evident as “obésir à une règle” (to obey a rule). Or when it is about saying things as simple (and simultaneously nearly inexpressible) as to practise a practice.’ (Bourdieu, Fr. ed. 1987:19).
See Chapter 4 and Chapter 5.
The reference is to the book Distinction (Harvard University Press, 1984). It may be of interest to readers that the interview with Nice began with a brief discussion of Distinction, which was described by him as being an enormously important book, though difficult and definitely not ‘mainstream’. We discussed the problems that he and Bourdieu had had with the publishers, the difficulty of translating and publishing other work by Bourdieu, and the fact that the publishers would not add a complete bibliography of Bourdieu’s work at the back of Distinction.
Bourdieu’s research group publishes Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales. It was originally set up as a counter-cultural sociological magazine. In one of the issues an article by Luc Boltanski focused on road accidents. Nice (1985) describes the article as follows.
And one of the funniest things by Boltanski was a correlation between road accidents and social class showing that rich people don’t have so many accidents. (I think there’s a lot more to be said about that because if you drive around faster you do have more accidents.) But, it explains how the rich are able to run bigger and safer vehicles which get them out of trouble and their aggressive driving tends to push other people off the road into ditches! — with accompanying photographs to show them pushing cars off the road! . It is the class war on the roads!
The whole result of the domination exercised by American science, and also the more or less disgraceful or unconscious adhesion to a positivist philosophy of science, leads to insufficiencies and technical errors passing unnoticed in all the stages of research, from the sampling until the statistical analysis of the data. This is the positivist conception of science: one does not count the cases where experimental designs, imitating the experimental rigour, dissimulate the total absence of a real sociologically constructed object. (Honneth and Schwibs, 1985).
For Bourdieu, this domination of false technological impeccability hits upon an absence of genuinely theoretical problematics. This does not mean, however, that he has no sympathy for American social science. On the contrary he has shown considerable interest in Goffman, Cicourel, Geertz, Chomsky and many others, though his own work is so singular as to remain quite distinct.
Propositions pour l’enseignement de l’avenir: Elaborées à la demande de Monsieur le Président de la Réspublique par les Professeurs du Collège de France, by Pierre Bourdieu. Paris, Co118ge de France, 1985. 36 pp. NPL paper.
In 1989 Bourdieu was asked by Prime Minister Rocard (the expresident of the Socialist Party), to convene a committee of other prominent scientists which would submit a report on the transformation of secondary school programmes. It may be important to note that this report was for the Prime Minister himself, and not specifically for the Ministry of Education. The report was published in May 1989.
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© 1990 Richard Harker, Cheleen Mahar and Chris Wilkes
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Mahar, C. (1990). Pierre Bourdieu: The Intellectual Project. In: Harker, R., Mahar, C., Wilkes, C. (eds) An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21134-0_2
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