Debating the Social: A Symposium on, and with, Pierre Bourdieu

Abstract

L'appe'tit vient en mangeant (The more you eat, the more you want). Less than two years ago only seven (!) of Pierre Bourdieu's books were available in English (Wacquant 1989, p. 31). The publication by Stanford University Press in 1990 alone of four more, under review here, the promise of others (Bourdieu et al. 1991), not to speak of works about Bourdieu's contributions already out (Harker, Mahar, and Wilkes 1990), will soon ensure that the monolingual American reader to whom Judith Balfe refers in her essay no longer has to confront the language barrier. But the linguistic provincialism of Americans, narrowly speaking, is not the only barrier to communication, and the material difficulties and time lags that hamper the translation and publication of foreign scholarly literature are not the only obstacles to transnational communication in sociology. This symposium, organized at the invitation of Ida Harper Simpson, then editor of Contemporary Sociology, is contribution to the goal, shared by sociologists from several countries, of engaging in what Bourdieu has described as a collective reflection on the institutional conditions of rational communication in the social sciences. As he puts it, rather than founder on an isolationism that promotes intolerance, sociologists from both sides of the Atlantic should unite to promote fair communication and more open confrontation of ideas, theories, and paradigms (Wacquant, p. 52). Uniquely on this occasion, Contemporary Sociology goes beyond the usual format of considering disembodied works; instead, the reviewers of Bourdieu's most recent translations are here confronted by the author himself. This interchange is promising step toward the creation of the world to which many of us aspire. At the same time, however, it provides evidence that even with the best will in the world, the possibilities of mis-readings, common enough within the same intellectual tradition, may be compounded when scholars have been formed in different educational molds. David Swartz, Judith Balfe, Suzanne Vromen, and Scott Lash have read Bourdieu's writings in ways that cast new light on the works, but the rays, it seems, at times distort rather than clarify. A principal reason for this, as previously observed (Brubaker 1985, 1989; Wacquant 1989), is that Bourdieu's approach does not lend itself to simple summary or to disaggregation of its elements. His empirical research-whether dealing with education, the arts, religion, politics, bodybuilding, or cooking-is intricately entwined with complex theoretical armature based in an epistemological foundation that relatively few American sociologists have experienced or, if they have, may not see as central to their own projects. As they read more deeply in his works, including especially The Craft of Sociology (1991), they will have the opportunity for rethinking the discipline, or at least certain of its aspects. It is no caricature of American sociology to note that, in its division of labor, theorists and those involved primarily in empirical study have tended to see themselves and be seen as having little in common, this in spite of Merton's classic essays calling for recognition of the interdependence of their scholarly pursuits ([1949] 1968). Second, in conceptualizing research questions, Bourdieu sees the scientific project of sociology as one that should refuse simplistic positivist formulations. He calls for constructivist approach that transcends essentialism and the taken for granted as natural and therefore legitimate. Brubaker has suggested that one of Bourdieu's central metatheoretical organizing themes is that the objective and the subjective are fundamentally intertwined (Brubaker 1985, p. 750). An implication of this principle is that such divisions as the micro/ macro, structure/agency, individual/social are