Class, property, and structural endogamy: Visualizing networked histories

Abstract

Class, property, and structural endogamy: Visualizing networked histories LILYAN A. BRUDNER and DOUGLAS R. WHITE University of California, Irvine The problem central to this study, of delineating the properties that qualify individuals as members of a class, was opened by Bourdieu: 1 The individuals grouped in a class that is constructed in a particular respect [such as a socio-occupational category taken as an indicator of position in the relations of production governing economic practices] ... bring along with them ... secondary properties which may function as the real principles of selection and exclusion. Bourdieu goes on to identify several ways this problem poses a dilemma for the sociologist who attempts to de¢ne class objectively, on the basis of similarities and diierences in ``class situation.'' First, speci¢c eco- nomic criteria are commonly grounded in processes whereby selection and exclusion in the social ¢eld may also operate to govern quali¢cation and practices. Second, ``objective'' classi¢cations can themselves be classi¢ed as objects, possibly revealing how social analysts diier in what they take to be the primary de¢ning criteria 2 of such class group- ings. Third, diierences in the criteria for class indicators ^ even down to formal and o¤cial quali¢cations for achievements ^ may mask hidden criteria (caught up, for example, in the very struggles between social groups or classes). For Bourdieu, 3 The division into classes performed by sociology leads to the common root of the classi¢able practices which agents produce and of classi¢able judgments they make of other agents' practices and their own. The habitus is both the generative principle of objectively classi¢able judgments and the system of classi¢cations ... of these practices. Bourdieu's problematic is the generation of life-styles of ``classi¢ed and classifying practices'' by diierent internalized cultural dispositions or habitus 4 (``structured and structuring structures'') located in a class of conditionings (``objectively classi¢able conditions of existence'') and a Theory and Society 26 : 161^208, 1997. s 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.