Sociology in Question

by Pierre Bourdieu, Richard Nice (Translator)

The works of Pierre Bourdieu occupy a central place in the current development of world sociology. This volume offers an accessible but challenging introduction to Bourdieu′s ideas. In a series of discussions, lectures and interviews, the range of Bourdieu′s ideas is laid out and its relation to other disciplines and other sociological schools is explored. The issues developed include the sociology of culture, leisure and taste; the intrinsic reflexivity of social science; and the role of language in society and social sciences.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

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).

Reviews

[Eli Za · Rating 4 out of 5]

کتاب بصورت مجموعه مقالات یا مجموعه سخنرانی است. ترجمه روان و چندان خوبی هم ندارد، اما قابل تحمل است. خود بوردیو می‌گوید هدف از این کتاب این است که اندیشه‌های جامعه‌شناسانه را در اختیار عموم قرار دهد. البته وقتی بوردیو چنین حرفی می‌زند، منظورش ساده‌سازی و تولید محتوایی تقلیل‌یافته نیست. متن‌ها از نظر میزان سختی و آسانی، تفاوت دارند. کتاب شاید حکم دایره‌المعارف نه چندان کاملی، برای ورود به آرای بوردیو را داشته باشد که تا آخر هم هنگام خواندن آثار بوردیو، به شکل رفت و برگشتی باید به آن بازگشت. محتوای بعضی مقالات، بصورت مفصل در سایر کتاب‌های بوردیو موجود است و آنچه در این کتاب آمده می‌تواند حکم پیش‌درآمد داشته باشد.

مقالات ابتدایی کتاب، عمدتا پرسش و پاسخ‌هایی پیرامون خود جامعه‌شناسی، رسالت آن، وظیفه و نحوه عمل جامعه‌شناس و به نوعی جامعه‌شناسی جامعه‌شناس است. مقالات بعدی درباره مسائل اجتماعی مختلفی از قبیل هنر، سانسور، افکار عمومی و نقد نظرسنجی‌ها، سیاست و غیره است. آنچه هنگام مطالعه آثار بوردیو همواره مرا به خود جذب می‌کند، فراتر رفتن او از تحلیل‌های تقلیل‌گرایانه و دوگانه‌ساز رایج است. او همیشه به پسِ پشتِ رویدادها نور می‌افکند، جایی که به سادگی قابل دیدن نیست، جایی که پدیده‌ها را آنطور که هستند می‌بینیم، نه آنطور که خود را نشان می‌دهند. وظیفه جامعه‌شناسی هم همین است.

بوردیو در این کتاب به ما می‌گوید که از وظایف جامعه‌شناسی «نشان دادن محدودیت‌های شناخت جهان اجتماعی و در نتیجه دشوار ساختن کلیه اشکال پیشگویی است که البته با آن نوع پیشگویی آغاز می‌شود که علم سردمدار آن است.» در اینجا چندجانبه‌نگری‌های بوردیو و تأکید و توصیه دائمی‌اش به اجتناب از ساده‌سازی مسائل باز هم خود را نشان می‌دهد، با اشاره به جنبه‌های مختلف خود علم. به زعم بوردیو، هرچه علم بیشتر پیشرفت کند، بیشتر می‌تواند ضرورت‌ها را درک کند و در مقابل، ابزار لازم برای آزادی از این ضرورت‌ها را نیز کسب می‌کند، در نتیجه تقابل جبر یا اختیار موضوعیت خود را از دست می‌دهد. این تعریف از علم در کنار تعریفی که بوردیو از سیاست ارائه می‌دهد، این دو را در پیوند ذاتی با یکدیگر قرار می‌دهد. بوردیو کنش سیاسی را به خدمت گرفتن امر محتمل برای وقوع امر ممکن می‌داند. به عبارت دیگر کنش سیاسی به معنای استفاده از گرایشات و تناقضات درونی جهان موجود اجتماعی برای افزایش احتمال وقوع امر ممکنی است که احتمال وقوع آن اندک است.

در مقاله «چه کسی آفرینش‌گران را خلق کرده است؟» بوردیو از ساز و کارهای اجتماعی می‌گوید که هنرمند را تبدیل به هنرمند می‌کند. به عقیده او، آنچه یک اثر هنری را می‌سازد، در اغلب موارد کمیابی هنرمند است و نه کمیابی اثر هنری و برای اثبات ادعای خود، به مقایسه ارزش آثار هنری اصل و کپی می‌پردازد. آنچه اثر هنری اصل را نسبت به کپی ارزشمند می‌کند، نه خود آن، که امضای هنرمند است و هنرمند نیز در اثر سازوکارهای اجتماعی مشروعیت‌بخشی در میدان نسبتا مستقلی به نام هنر که خود در داخل میدان اجتماعی بزرگ‌تر قرار دارد، تبدیل به هنرمند می‌شود.

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

While all of these short pieces are worth reading, this book takes off from chapter 13. This is a really nice introduction to Bourdieu as these are written for a popular audience and so aren’t as hard to read as some of his other books. He even explains why his normal writing is so hard – basically, that language comes with so many assumptions thrown in, that unless you ‘force’ people to think, and therefore qualify everything you say to avoid their likely misreadings, then you will be guaranteed to be misread. I’m not sure about this – I think the interviewer that brought this response from Bourdieu was onto something. If you are trying to present ideas designed to encourage people (people abused by ‘the system’) to be able to fight back then using language that completely alienates those people seems counter-productive.

Now, the bits of this I really liked were the bits on music and the bits on sport. The bit on sport was particularly interesting, as I don’t really pay much attention to sport in real life and so would generally not really think about its sociological implications. He first talks about sport as a form of social distinction. Rich people play different kinds of sports than poor people do. You know, the Olympics, for instance, is basically a rich person’s sporting event, even if we mostly want to read it as a moment of national pride. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisf...

And different classes have different responses to the kinds of sport and physical fitness they engage in. So that working class males, for instance, are much more likely to engage in sports that are ‘dangerous’ and that require physical strength – this being one of the main defining characteristics of their masculinity. Whereas upper middle class males are probably more likely to engage in activity that is more about what could be called ‘physical hygiene’: walking, jogging, cycling, gymnastics. In fact, exercise that is probably not competitive, but rather ‘rational’ – that is, designed to provide ‘health benefits’ that are only realisable (if at all) after years of repetition, that is, after years of pandering to that most middle class of rewards – ‘delayed gratification’.

I had never really thought about the development of sports clubs and how these are sponsored and supported by the upper classes mostly for participation by the lower classes. That fact in itself ought to give people reason for pause. Sport provides virtually meaningless competitions played out with all the seriousness and concern of the deciding battle in a war. Meanwhile, those fighting – one team of lower class people against another team of lower class people – are expending their energies on a meaningless struggle while the things that really matter (like their wages and conditions at work) are relegated out of consideration entirely. We really should marvel at how successfully and constantly we are bought off by so few crumbs of bread and such pointless circuses.

But the part of this book that really made me think was the chapter on opinion polls called Public Opinion Does Not Exist. Basically, he tackles the problem of why it is that opinion polls are so crap at predicting changes in our society. This is the thing – if opinion polls were any good you’d be able to track them and see when things like gay marriage were going to become hot topics long before they actually were hot topics. Bourdieu’s example is education and France in 1968. There were opinion polls taken prior to 1968 in France and they didn’t exactly give any indication of the riots that were about to nearly tear down the system. Why not?

The problem is not as simple as it sounds. Firstly, not everyone has an opinion. He gives a lovely example of asking people if they believe there was a connection between the Vietnam war and the oil crisis in the early 1970s. How, in the name of Jesus, could anyone really answer that with a ‘yes, no, or maybe’? And then – and this is the really interesting bit – not everyone answers. It is hard to know what to do with the don’t knows and the no responses. Worse still is the fact that certain groups of people are infinitely more likely to give no response – women and working class people, for instance. As he makes really clear, those who occupy social positions that are viewed as being without power within our society are much more likely to self-exclude themselves from having ‘opinions’. And to self-exclude much more rigorously than even 'their betters' would go about excluding them. The benefit of self-exclusion is that you can't complain afterwards. If someone says to you, "What would you know, you dumb bitch?" you are likely to get your back up and to have an opinion - but if you are the one who says, "I don't care about politics - that's something for other people to take an interest in", then your self-exclusion is infinitely more effective than any forced exclusion could possibly have been. Another book I read recently said that the people in Eastern Germany who had access to Western television were much less likely to revolt against the East German Communist Party than people who did not have access to Western television stations. It has tormented me since I read it.

The stuff about self-exclusion from opinion polls is particularly interesting as he uses this fact to explain something I’ve often wondered about myself. Why members of the Communist Party (something particularly large in France) are so keen to accept the restrictions of ‘democratic centralism’. It would seem reasonable to assume that one would join a communist party seeking the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order and that this would be – well, a sign of someone who doesn’t want to put up with shit from anyone. But democratic centralism in most of the communist parties effectively meant bowing to the will of the party leadership, having someone else think for you and agreeing with them even when you didn't 'agree' – it always meant much more centralism than democracy. Bourdieu explains this paradox with reference to how people answer opinion polls – with people keen to answer questions that have no immediate or practical significance to them according to what they take to be the position of the group they themselves associate with. The communist party allowed a wide range of people to respond in ways that did not require thinking. Of course, they were not the only section of society that responded in this way – it is just that they might not have seemed the most obvious group to play ‘follow the leader’.

There is a fascinating chapter on Haute Couture, like sport, not something I've ever really taken all that much interest in, and many of the first chapters of the book focus on the nature of culture and language – but the last chapter on the racism of intelligence is a must read. Yes, I know, my obsession with meritocracy continues.

This really is a good introduction to Bourdieu and is very readable – which is saying something, as he can be a real prick to read when he wants to be. I want to end by talking about his notions of fields and habitus, which are particularly well explained in this book. His idea of a field is literally like a sporting field. So, you get the field of law or education or art. Anyway, the thing that makes these things like sporting fields is that there is no such thing as a disinterested player. You’ve got to remember the difference between disinterested and uninterested here. A disinterested player is supposed to be someone who doesn’t care about the outcome, but takes part to make sure the game is played fairly and properly - like the umpire. Someone who is uninterested wouldn’t be taking part at all. (Much like the statistically significant females who didn’t answer questions on politics in the opinion polls – uninterested, not disinterested.) Now, the thing is that to be really ‘disinterested’ is actually impossible. To engage in the game at all implies a fundamental interest in the game as a game. Recently I’ve seen stickers on the back of cars – one of them has a stick figure with his middle finger up and the text says, “I don’t give a fuck about your stick figure family”. Do you know what – the fact you have that sticker on the back of your car proves you do care. Being disinterested is a very, very hard thing to be – I suspect Bourdieu thinks it is actually impossible.

You can be either uninterested or interested, and if you are interested then you are basically playing the game, in one capacity or another. And if you are playing the game, the game is also ‘playing you’, in a sense. The game is played on a field – but how you play is determined by how the game has become part of your body. The more the game is part of your body – the less you have to think about your next move, the more ‘natural’ your moves are, the more they are 'just habits' – the more you are part of the habitus of the game. And this is what is so interesting about Bourdieu, to me anyway. Being placed in a particular social position provides you with life experiences that become part of your embodied experience – you don’t have to think about how to behave, you just do stuff. And because this seems completely normal to you, you are stunned when someone else seems completely incapable of doing what you do ‘naturally’. Like finish university or get to work on time or know the difference between dis- and uninterested. And these embodied habits become part of our tastes – that is, literally physical reactions to things that fall within the life expectations of our social classes. So that I physically cringe when my ex-sister-in-law says ‘bought’ when she means ‘brought’, and I do this not as a joke or something I can control. It is an ingrained, bodily response. We are each of us as constrained and captive to our social habitus as is everyone else. We can point and laugh at others, but it is much harder to see our own faults. By forcing us to acknowledge that fact, by holding up the mirror in an attempt to avoid our hearts being turned to stone by the endless Medusas around us, Bourdieu offers us the only means available for defending ourselves against our own social habitus.

Like I said, this is a particularly good place to start if you are thinking of reading some Bourdieu. Go on, it'll do you good.

[Hussam Nabil · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is mainly an anthology of interviews with Bourdieu and some questions he answered in lectures given to a general audience.
I have always loved Bourdieu's gift for articulation, his caution, his ability to draw minor distinctions, and his anticipating misrepresentations of his thoughts and guarding against them in advance.
This book is just him doing that while speaking plainly; without his infamous long, complex sentences that readers of his main body of work are certainly aware of.

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of interviews and lectures that serves as a fine introduction to Bourdieu's work. This book should be read by anyone considering graduate school, regardless of field (and what Bourdieu has to say about "fields" should be kept firmly in mind as one progresses through his or her academic career). Considered among the great critical theorists of the latter half of the 20th century, Bourdieu is by far the best: nuanced, subtle, and "methodically" brilliant.

[Christoph · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of speeches and interviews the book is an introduction to Bourdieu's work that is actually enjoyable to read.