Pierre Bourdieu as a Post-cultural Theorist

Abstract

Pierre Bourdieu is without doubt one of the main figures in the sociological study of culture today. Yet, for a theorist so central to the subject matter of cultural studies, it is clear that there is no coherent account of Bourdieu stance in relation to the ‘concept of culture’ among current commentators. More importantly, in the sister-discipline of anthropology, Bourdieu is thought of as a central figure precisely because he helped move contemporary anthropological theory away from the centrality of the culture concept. This paper reviews this peculiar double reception of Bourdieu’s anthropological and sociological work, closely examining these unacknowledged strands of Bourdieu’s thinking on culture. The basic argument is that the anthropological reception of Bourdieu’s work is more faithful to the outlines of his late-career intellectual development while the sociological portrayal — Bourdieu as a Sausserean culture theorist with a ‘Weberian power twist’— is fundamentally misleading. I close by outlining how Bourdieu’s work points towards a yet-to-be developed ‘post-cultural’ stance — one that takes cognition, experience and the body seriously — in the sociological study of culture.