Sociology as socioanalysis: Tales ofHomo Academicus

Abstract

An unusually imaginative and productive thinker, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has, over the past three decades, produced one of the most ambitious and fertile bodies of sociological work of the postwar era. The sheer range and diversity of his investigations, however, have until recently hampered the efforts of Anglo-American readers to grasp its overarching unity and therefore its full originality. Spanning the anthropology of colonial Algeria, the sociology of language and culture (including education, science, literature and the arts, sports, taste, and religion), the analysis of class and politics, and the dissection of the theoretical and epistemological underpinnings of social science, Bourdieu's writings may, from the outside, seem eccentric and overly dispersed. They scarcely allow for easy entry; on the contrary, their scattered and daunting appearance has often encouraged superficial assimilation. Indeed, a quick survey of their reception in several areas of contemporary theory and research in the United States reveals a distinct pattern of fragmentation, misunderstanding, and selective ignorance. Beyond the intrinsic difficulty of Bourdieu's texts and, until recently, the erratic flow of translations, this laborious and truncated appropriationand, sometimes, outright expropriation-of Bourdieu in American sociology can be traced to a number of factors (Wacquant, 1989). Among them are the institutional and cognitive cleavages that structure the field of U.S. social science and inform the assimilation of foreign intellectual products; an oversight of the collective nature of Bourdieu's enterprise, due to the effect of the stereotype of the French patron and his circle; the relative unfamiliarity of American researchers with the Continental traditions of social