Bourdieu, Pierre (1930–2002)

Abstract

Pierre Bourdieu was born in rural southern France and pursued an educational career that led to his enrolment at the École Normale Supérieure as a philosophy major. He spent his military service in Algeria, at the time a French colony, and engaged in anthropological work on Kabylia. There he examined for the first time the effects of power and stratification in the context of colonialism as it interacted with native cultural practices. From then on, his sociological work on the nature and dimensions of power in culture made him one of the most influential contemporary sociologists. For Bourdieu, culture is a symbolic order that provides the components of social domination and unconscious mechanisms of reproduction of such domination between social classes. Bourdieu was also a sociologist of practices, that is, how symbolic structures are incarnated in the actions of social agents. Whatever topics he engaged – education, cultural practices, or artistic productions – Bourdieu always considered how both culture and practices sustain forms of social domination. This approach was designed to resolve the traditional dilemmas of sociology: objectivism versus subjectivism, structure versus agency, determination versus freedom. For Bourdieu, those dilemmas could only be transcended by taking into account the existence of invisible objective structures and agents’ subjective interpretations of their circumstances.