The Bachelors' Ball: The Crisis of Peasant Society in Béarn

by Pierre Bourdieu, Richard Nice (Translator)

Over the past four decades, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory of the postwar era. When he died in 2002, he was considered to be the most influential sociologist in the world and a thinker on a par with Foucault and Lévi-Strauss—a public intellectual as important to his generation as Sartre was to his.

 


Bourdieu’s final book, The Bachelors’ Ball , sees him return to Béarn, the region where he grew up, to examine the gender dynamics of rural France. This personal connection adds poignancy to Bourdieu’s ethnographic account of the way the influence of urban values has precipitated a crisis for male peasants. Tied to the land through inheritance, these bachelors find themselves with little to offer the women of Béarn who, like the young Bourdieu himself, abandon the country for the city in droves.

Genres: Nonfiction, France, Anthropology, Ethnography

216 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

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

[Tara · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a good description of cultural change and cultural identity and how the dominated classes come to see themselves in the images of those who dominate them.

[Sencer Turunç · Rating 4 out of 5]

Modern öncesi köylülük mefhumunun evlilik müessesesi üzerinden soykütüksel bir çalışması ortaya konulmuş... Değişen sosyal, ekonomik ve kültürel şablon içerisinde köylülük metni ile bekarlık metni arasındaki ilişki irdeleniyor... Pierre Bourdieu bir harika...