From the Margins to the Mainstream The Curious Convergence of Pierre Bourdieu and US Sociology

Abstract

xThe late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is a prominent figure in the field of sociology in the United States today. Practically all of his major empirical monographs have been translated into English. His writings are regularly cited in articles appearing in the discipline’s main journals. Several books about his life and work have been published by major American university presses. And, perhaps most tellingly, many of his major concepts have entered the general sociological lexicon in the United States. One need not be a specialist in culture or education to understand the significance of “cultural capital” for reproducing inequality across generations. No longer a philosophical or social psychological oddity, the idea of the “habitus” informs research across a variety of subfields. And few are the sociologists in the US today who are not familiar with Bourdieu’s use of the “field” concept to describe various meso-social orders. The extent to which the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu have been integrated into and become integral to the practice of sociology in the US today can be considering surprising for a number of reasons. His work is highly theoretical and integrates ideas from a variety of fields; while US sociology has long been characterized as an empirical and relatively insular discipline [Ross 1991; Gulbenkian Commission 1996]. Indeed, US sociology has proved relatively impermeable to several other Francophonic traditions (the early canonization of Emile Durkheim notwithstanding), for the most