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Antropología Económica. Curso En El Collège De France (1992-1993)
Anthropologie économique La révolution qui conduit de l’économie du don caractéristique de la plupart des sociétés précapitalistes à l’économie du donnant-donnant des sociétés modernes s’est-elle étendue à tous les domaines de l’existence, comme le supposent tacitement ceux qui prétendent appliquer à toutes les pratiques le modèle de l’arbitrage entre coûts et intérêts ? Et s’est-elle réalisée complètement au sein même de la sphère la plus strictement fondée sur la tautologie constituante « business is business » ?
Dégageant les présupposés de l’anthropologie imaginaire propre à la théorie économique dans sa définition dominante, Pierre Bourdieu pose ici l’exigence d’une autre théorie, qui rompt avec l’idée de choix individuels libres de toute contrainte et substitue à la notion de marché pur et parfait celle de champ économique structuré par des rapports de force et des luttes symboliques.
Il montre ainsi que, sans faire appel à la conscience calculatrice parfaitement lucide de l’ homo œconomicus , ou à la logique de la « rationalité limitée », l’on peut rendre compte du caractère « raisonnable » de la majorité des conduites économiques par l’ajustement des espérances subjectives aux chances objectives. Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) Professeur au Collège de France, il a écrit de nombreux ouvrages qui ont une influence majeure dans les sciences sociales aujourd'hui.
Dégageant les présupposés de l’anthropologie imaginaire propre à la théorie économique dans sa définition dominante, Pierre Bourdieu pose ici l’exigence d’une autre théorie, qui rompt avec l’idée de choix individuels libres de toute contrainte et substitue à la notion de marché pur et parfait celle de champ économique structuré par des rapports de force et des luttes symboliques.
Il montre ainsi que, sans faire appel à la conscience calculatrice parfaitement lucide de l’ homo œconomicus , ou à la logique de la « rationalité limitée », l’on peut rendre compte du caractère « raisonnable » de la majorité des conduites économiques par l’ajustement des espérances subjectives aux chances objectives. Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) Professeur au Collège de France, il a écrit de nombreux ouvrages qui ont une influence majeure dans les sciences sociales aujourd'hui.
271 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2023
About the author
Pierre Bourdieu
339 books1,512 followersBourdieu 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).
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).
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July 9, 2026
This is a seriously interesting book, and unlike other series of lectures I’ve read by Bourdieu, this one is really quite readable. The central idea sounds much harder than it is. Economics rests on a series of ideas that are taken to be axiomatic, and these ideas are then used to build a system that defines the world, or at least human interactions in the world, in a very particular way. In fact, some economists, such as Becker (discussed repeatedly in this) and the authors of books like Freakonomics essentially say that if you truly want to understand the world, then using the ideas and methods of economics is essential.
Bourdieu wants to show that the axioms of economics – particularly that of homo economicus – are not nearly as universal as economists claim them to be. Now, you might have read some books by behavioural economists and think that you know this already. For example, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow discusses this at length by criticising the idea of homo economicus from the perspective of psychology. Kahneman is mentioned towards the end of this book, not terribly flatteringly. We’ll get to that, I think. The other thing that Bourdieu mentions, that I really didn’t know, was that although economists might often say that the market is a particularly useful concept when seeking to understand how the economy works, they rarely, if ever, define it and when they do, they tend to be so vague that their definition is next to useless in helping you to understand what it is they are talking about.
The title might not be as much of a give-away as Bourdieu might have thought – you might be wondering what anthropology has got to do with any of this. His point is that, like anything else, economics isn’t a set a fixed laws, but rather something that has a distinct history and in seeking to understand that history we can gain a better understanding of the subject itself and its limitations. This had me thinking of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – something he doesn’t quote, but felt like he was about to numerous times during this. Kuhn was a historian of science who essentially said that one of the reasons why scientists think their current theories are purely objective and potentially final explanations of how the world works is because they don’t have any background in the history of science other than a vague kind of idea that knowledge accretes, getting bigger and bigger, with more and more facts added. Kuhn says this building around a core of truth isn’t what is interesting about science, but rather that science is a history of paradigms that only get overturned once too many facts are no longer able to fit nicely into the jigsaw puzzle. Then, we need a new paradigm, a new way of organising the facts, a new theory to make sense of the world – and that is called a scientific revolution.
Bourdieu is interested in anthropology because the first economic exchanges were not exchanges in the way we think of exchange. He talks about his own research with the Algerian Kabyle using ideas he got from Marcel Mauss and Levi-Strauss. You’ll know Mauss if you’ve read Graeber’s Debt: the first 5000 years. He wrote a book I really should read again and review this time called The Gift. Gift giving was the first form of economic exchange – except it was only an ‘exchange’ in a very loose sense. Bourdieu says that we tend to stress the ‘exchange’ aspect of gift giving because we collapse what happens down so that there is no time interval between the giving and the repaying of gifts. He points out that if you receive a gift and immediately repay it with an equal gift, this would be taken as an insult. The time lag is essential. And the giver of the gift does so with no expectation of return – the only way that it can be understood as a gift. We struggle to see this because we are convinced that the person giving the gift must know that it will eventually be reciprocated and, therefore, we read the exchange as just that. But for people living in such a society, this is anything but the modern tit-for-tat exchange we are familiar with. This difference between gift societies and tit-for-tat societies, such as ours, is the central idea of probably the first half of this book. Our tit-for-tat economy – where the exchange is immediate and paid for with something of equal value, generally money, is not at all universal. Bourdieu makes the point that even in our most seemingly economic of exchanges, the logic of the gift still applies.
The gift helps to create a series of obligations between people. And societies would struggle to sustain themselves without these mutual obligations. Bourdieu also stresses that even in our tit-for-tat economy the market itself is unthinkable outside of a state that regulates these exchanges.
But what he is particularly interested in here is the role of habitus in structuring the economic field. There is a nice bit in this where he explains why he decided to use the words habitus and field, rather than, say, habits and markets – which he admits might have made things easier for people to follow. He says that habits and markets are words that might be easier to understand, but that they also come with lots of baggage. We ‘already know’ what these words mean – or, at least, we think we do. That means that we would find it very difficult to think about them in the ways he is trying to force us to think about them.
For example, we think of the market as if it is a place where different people enter into more or less free exchanges with other people. The only basis of that exchange is that both have something the other wants and both are trying to maximise their utility – the definition of homo economicus. They each have all of the information they need and make their exchange on the basis of a rational calculation of the utility of the things being exchanged. In discussing this, Bourdieu uses one of his favourite quotes from Marx – that we often confuse the logic of things with the things of logic. That is, because we can see all of the calculations that might make this exchange worthwhile between these two self-maximisers, we believe that they must have done these calculations themselves to justify this exchange. Bourdieu’s point is that we virtually never do this – even if we are the most neoliberal of economists ourselves. Rather, our habits and dispositions provide a kind of inertia (a force that continues to operate unless another force acts upon it) and it is our habits and dispositions that make the decisions for us, rather than rational calculation.
The example he gives is of us deciding if we should cross the road when we notice that there is a car approaching us. We could, presumably, be able to work out the speed with which the car is approaching us, say 60km per hour, and how fast we are able to walk, say 3km per hour, and how far away it is, run the calculation and then decide whether to walk, run or wait. But we don’t do any of this at all – no matter how good we are at mathematics. Rather, we have a lifetime of experience with crossing the road and we rely on our habitus based on that lifetime of experience to make the decision for us.
And this is why he also says that markets – even single markets, like the housing or car market – are not really singular. Rather, they are fields of competition which we respond to in much the same way that we respond to deciding to cross the road – that is, by bringing to bear the full weight of our habitus, our lifetime’s accumulation of habits and dispositions. When I enter the market for a new car, I don’t make a ‘rational’ choice as such, but one that is based upon my position in a field based upon my prior life-experience. When a new company starts up, it also responds to the field that already exists and does not start by producing cars to address the needs of the market as a whole, but rather a particular segment of that market addressing the assumed needs and wants of people whose habitus will be met by the car they are thinking of producing. We overstress the rational calculations that are made here. The logic of things gets overwritten by the things of logic. But the calculation that can be done after the event to justify the decision made is a calculation that is rarely, if ever, made. And this is a true for a Freakonomics expert as it is for the average Joe.
There is so much more to this book. As an introduction to Bourdieu, I think it would be hard to surpass. As an explanation of why homo economicus is an abstraction that doesn’t really work and hides more than it illuminates, I think it does a much better job than behavioural economics. I would only suggest that, for a fuller understanding of the problems of exchange and why utility maximisation has limited explanatory power, you also read a book like Pure Excess: Capitalism and the Commodity. The other book to read is Symbolic Exchange and Death. This one, in particular, explains why the Marxist idea that the workers should understand that they are exploited and that this will inevitably lead to revolution misses the point that the ‘gift’ of a job – even one where you are clearly being exploited – still creates a kind of obligation that feels impossible to repay. The idea of a gift as a fundamental aspect of exchange isn’t something that died with pre-capitalist societies, but continues to structure much of what occurs today – even if this is hidden by our concepts of rational actors seeking to maximise advantage in tit-for-tat exchanges.
Bourdieu wants to show that the axioms of economics – particularly that of homo economicus – are not nearly as universal as economists claim them to be. Now, you might have read some books by behavioural economists and think that you know this already. For example, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow discusses this at length by criticising the idea of homo economicus from the perspective of psychology. Kahneman is mentioned towards the end of this book, not terribly flatteringly. We’ll get to that, I think. The other thing that Bourdieu mentions, that I really didn’t know, was that although economists might often say that the market is a particularly useful concept when seeking to understand how the economy works, they rarely, if ever, define it and when they do, they tend to be so vague that their definition is next to useless in helping you to understand what it is they are talking about.
The title might not be as much of a give-away as Bourdieu might have thought – you might be wondering what anthropology has got to do with any of this. His point is that, like anything else, economics isn’t a set a fixed laws, but rather something that has a distinct history and in seeking to understand that history we can gain a better understanding of the subject itself and its limitations. This had me thinking of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – something he doesn’t quote, but felt like he was about to numerous times during this. Kuhn was a historian of science who essentially said that one of the reasons why scientists think their current theories are purely objective and potentially final explanations of how the world works is because they don’t have any background in the history of science other than a vague kind of idea that knowledge accretes, getting bigger and bigger, with more and more facts added. Kuhn says this building around a core of truth isn’t what is interesting about science, but rather that science is a history of paradigms that only get overturned once too many facts are no longer able to fit nicely into the jigsaw puzzle. Then, we need a new paradigm, a new way of organising the facts, a new theory to make sense of the world – and that is called a scientific revolution.
Bourdieu is interested in anthropology because the first economic exchanges were not exchanges in the way we think of exchange. He talks about his own research with the Algerian Kabyle using ideas he got from Marcel Mauss and Levi-Strauss. You’ll know Mauss if you’ve read Graeber’s Debt: the first 5000 years. He wrote a book I really should read again and review this time called The Gift. Gift giving was the first form of economic exchange – except it was only an ‘exchange’ in a very loose sense. Bourdieu says that we tend to stress the ‘exchange’ aspect of gift giving because we collapse what happens down so that there is no time interval between the giving and the repaying of gifts. He points out that if you receive a gift and immediately repay it with an equal gift, this would be taken as an insult. The time lag is essential. And the giver of the gift does so with no expectation of return – the only way that it can be understood as a gift. We struggle to see this because we are convinced that the person giving the gift must know that it will eventually be reciprocated and, therefore, we read the exchange as just that. But for people living in such a society, this is anything but the modern tit-for-tat exchange we are familiar with. This difference between gift societies and tit-for-tat societies, such as ours, is the central idea of probably the first half of this book. Our tit-for-tat economy – where the exchange is immediate and paid for with something of equal value, generally money, is not at all universal. Bourdieu makes the point that even in our most seemingly economic of exchanges, the logic of the gift still applies.
The gift helps to create a series of obligations between people. And societies would struggle to sustain themselves without these mutual obligations. Bourdieu also stresses that even in our tit-for-tat economy the market itself is unthinkable outside of a state that regulates these exchanges.
But what he is particularly interested in here is the role of habitus in structuring the economic field. There is a nice bit in this where he explains why he decided to use the words habitus and field, rather than, say, habits and markets – which he admits might have made things easier for people to follow. He says that habits and markets are words that might be easier to understand, but that they also come with lots of baggage. We ‘already know’ what these words mean – or, at least, we think we do. That means that we would find it very difficult to think about them in the ways he is trying to force us to think about them.
For example, we think of the market as if it is a place where different people enter into more or less free exchanges with other people. The only basis of that exchange is that both have something the other wants and both are trying to maximise their utility – the definition of homo economicus. They each have all of the information they need and make their exchange on the basis of a rational calculation of the utility of the things being exchanged. In discussing this, Bourdieu uses one of his favourite quotes from Marx – that we often confuse the logic of things with the things of logic. That is, because we can see all of the calculations that might make this exchange worthwhile between these two self-maximisers, we believe that they must have done these calculations themselves to justify this exchange. Bourdieu’s point is that we virtually never do this – even if we are the most neoliberal of economists ourselves. Rather, our habits and dispositions provide a kind of inertia (a force that continues to operate unless another force acts upon it) and it is our habits and dispositions that make the decisions for us, rather than rational calculation.
The example he gives is of us deciding if we should cross the road when we notice that there is a car approaching us. We could, presumably, be able to work out the speed with which the car is approaching us, say 60km per hour, and how fast we are able to walk, say 3km per hour, and how far away it is, run the calculation and then decide whether to walk, run or wait. But we don’t do any of this at all – no matter how good we are at mathematics. Rather, we have a lifetime of experience with crossing the road and we rely on our habitus based on that lifetime of experience to make the decision for us.
And this is why he also says that markets – even single markets, like the housing or car market – are not really singular. Rather, they are fields of competition which we respond to in much the same way that we respond to deciding to cross the road – that is, by bringing to bear the full weight of our habitus, our lifetime’s accumulation of habits and dispositions. When I enter the market for a new car, I don’t make a ‘rational’ choice as such, but one that is based upon my position in a field based upon my prior life-experience. When a new company starts up, it also responds to the field that already exists and does not start by producing cars to address the needs of the market as a whole, but rather a particular segment of that market addressing the assumed needs and wants of people whose habitus will be met by the car they are thinking of producing. We overstress the rational calculations that are made here. The logic of things gets overwritten by the things of logic. But the calculation that can be done after the event to justify the decision made is a calculation that is rarely, if ever, made. And this is a true for a Freakonomics expert as it is for the average Joe.
There is so much more to this book. As an introduction to Bourdieu, I think it would be hard to surpass. As an explanation of why homo economicus is an abstraction that doesn’t really work and hides more than it illuminates, I think it does a much better job than behavioural economics. I would only suggest that, for a fuller understanding of the problems of exchange and why utility maximisation has limited explanatory power, you also read a book like Pure Excess: Capitalism and the Commodity. The other book to read is Symbolic Exchange and Death. This one, in particular, explains why the Marxist idea that the workers should understand that they are exploited and that this will inevitably lead to revolution misses the point that the ‘gift’ of a job – even one where you are clearly being exploited – still creates a kind of obligation that feels impossible to repay. The idea of a gift as a fundamental aspect of exchange isn’t something that died with pre-capitalist societies, but continues to structure much of what occurs today – even if this is hidden by our concepts of rational actors seeking to maximise advantage in tit-for-tat exchanges.
September 23, 2024
Bourdieu a tout compris
June 12, 2024
Tiene cosas guapísimas, como por ejemplo poner en cuestión que "el mercado" existe o relativizar la individualidad del individuo.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews