The Work Of Pierre Bourdieu by Derek Robbins

Author:Derek Robbins [Robbins, Derek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Methodology, Sociology, Social Theory
ISBN: 9781000612462
Google: QanODwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-02-04T05:00:06+00:00

8

‘Distinction’

Bourdieu has not revisited his early cultural researches in the same kind of public manner as in the overt reinterpretations of his Algerian work offered in Esquisse and in Outline, but an imposed recapitulation of his previous studies forms a necessary background to the text of La Distinction (1979). This summary autonomizes one field of Bourdieu's activities over a period of 20 years in the same way as his own reviews of his Algerian fieldwork autonomized a field of anthropological enquiry. In both cases, the summaries have to be seen in the context of the autonomization necessarily effected in seeking to represent the progress in the totality of the work of 'Bourdieu' within this historical period.

In his first publication – Sociologie de l'Algérie (1958) – Bourdieu had been perplexed methodologically by the problem of how to avoid imposing a social identity on the object of his analysis – 'Algeria' – where no actual social identity existed. He satisfied himself that the 'diversity' which he perceived was, in part, really a deliberate 'diversification'1 whereby tribes differentiated themselves from others and, at the same time, constructed an over-arching sense of identity or community within which 'differences' could be appreciated and effective. What might appear to be diverse to the objectivist observer – to use Bourdieu's language of the 1970s – was the product of active strategies of differentiation. The feeling of Bourdieu's account of 1958 was that differentiation was a mechanism by which tribes secured their group identities.

In 1958 there was still a philosophical, perhaps Sartrean, nuance which seemed to suggest that differentiation was part of a process of constructing a societal 'self', but, by the time of Travail et travailleurs Bourdieu was already clearly interested in the ways in which differences of life-style functioned in the process of transition from traditional to modern society. In a section entitled 'From the pressure of necessity to the contagion of needs', Bourdieu had sought to show that the process of adapting to a colonially imposed capitalism was different in kind from the process of becoming capitalist as it had been traditionally understood by theorists. The adoption of capitalism was different from the rise of capitalism because Algerians were beginning to imitate the life-styles of capitalism without ever needing to generate for themselves the puritanical ethos which had been traditionally associated with capitalist behaviour. Bourdieu was already arguing that possessions such as houses or furniture fulfilled their functions in the modernizing process because 'needs have their own logic and dynamism'.2 Although the capacity to enter into the needs market is economically determined, the differentiation of groups secured by the possession of luxury goods performs a semi-autonomous function.

In 'Célibat et condition paysanne' (1962), Bourdieu similarly accepted that status differences were already enshrined in the objective structure of peasant societies. In discussing, first, the traditional peasant society of the Béarn, Bourdieu had argued that what seemed like a rigid system of rules of matrimonial exchange was based on 'the principle of differentiation used by the inhabitants of

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