Overcoming the dualism between “society and space”, with and beyond Bourdieu

Abstract

Pierre Bourdieu is one of the most important social scientists of the twentieth century. However, the intersections between his work and geography largely remain to be investigated. This paper explores the place of spatiality in Bourdieu’s models of the social world. It first offers a critical analysis of the ternary model elaborated in his article entitled “Site-Effects,” in which “physical space” is theoretically central (a model that Bourdieu later seemed to retreat from). It then builds upon another triad, developed in “The Three States of Cultural Capital,” to submit a model in which the three “states” can be extended to the social world at large and correspond to three modes of “crystallizationc” of social relations, which all have a spatial dimension. The generalization of the triad leads to a consistent theorization of the intrinsic spatial dimension of the social world, thus overcoming the misleading dualism between society and space.