Bourdieu's Terms Research Articles

Interpretations of Elder Suicide, Stress, and Dependency among Rural Japanese

This article explores ideas expressed by older, rural Japanese to explain suicide among their age peers. It also looks at how older Japanese conceptualize residing with children and grandchildren in terms of dependency and stress. While the multigeneration household often is represented by both young and old in Japan as an ideal living situation for the elderly, many elders also see coresidence as a significant source of stress due to conflicting values held between generations. For many rural elderly, the stress associated with coresidence is viewed as being sufficiently severe to lead some of them to end their lives. Based on conversations held with elders in rural Japan, these themes are contextualized in terms of Japanese concepts of (Japan, suicide, aging, dependency, stress) ********** In the summer of 1998, Satoh Keiko, a woman in her mid-thirties, succinctly expressed a common theme used by people in rural northern Japan to interpret the motivations of elders who kill themselves: Elderly who are living alone do not commit suicide all that often, but those who are living with children and grandchildren often commit suicide. The idea that living with one's children and grandchildren is likely to influence an elder to commit suicide seems at odds with widely held assumptions about the centrality of filial piety in shaping intergenerational relationships in Japan, as well as stereotyped images of later life in Japan in which older people are represented as being happiest living in multigenerational households (e.g., Palmore and Maeda 1985). Using data from Taiwan, Wolf (1972, 1975) argues that suicide can be a form of sanction against young family members, as people, particularly natal kin, raise questions about what drove the deceased to end his or her life. The actual or assumed threat of suicide can be a strategy elders use to manipulate their children (Ikels 2004b:7; Wolf 1972:159-60). This insight may apply to the high rate of elder suicide in rural Japan, for self-aggression in Japan can be interpreted as a sign of resentment against a source of frustration in interpersonal conflicts (Lebra 1984:48). Self-destruction, then, is one possible way for someone in Japan to cope with conflict, particularly where direct confrontation is not valued in interpersonal relationships. For Satoh-san, the multigeneration household does not necessarily insulate an elder from loneliness and isolation. In fact, as will become evident from the data presented here, the multigeneration household in Japan may well represent a context in which suicidal feelings are intensified as a result of stressful relationships with kin. Elder suicide in Japan is interpreted in part in terms of perceptions about multiple and conflicting cultural frames existing within a confined social space. For many Japanese, younger and older generations are perceived as having completely different core values, which leads to considerable stress between those generations (Traphagan 2003). My informants indicated repeatedly that the presence of these conflicting value systems--which can be understood in terms of Bourdieu's (1977) concept of habitus, the cognitive and motivating structures that motivate and limit behavior--contribute to the generation of stress and alienation that may lead an elder to end his or her life, even if it does not specifically represent a form of sanction against younger generations, as Wolf (1972) found for Taiwan. This article explores narratives that elders living in a Japanese city known as Mizusawa express about motivations behind suicide among their age peers. Given the limited ethnographic work related to elder suicide, the data presented here are important for their ethnographic value. However, an examination of elder suicide in Japan also has theoretical implications because the practice can be understood in relation to rapid social change and perceptions of stress associated with competing values held by different generations. …

Package adventure tours: markers in serious leisure careers

The complex experience of kayakers on an adventure tour is explored through the attributes and qualities of Stebbins' concept of serious leisure. Serious leisure is related to Bourdieu's term ‘field’ or, more descriptively, a ‘way of thinking’, which provides a theoretical framework appropriate to understanding adventure tourism experiences. The paper is based on observations of participation, conversations and in‐depth interviews with nine tourists on a 14‐day white‐water kayaking package tour of the South Island of New Zealand, in February 2002. Analysis of the resulting field notes and transcripts of interviews and conversations revealed an interpretation of the participants' experience and their understanding of this experience which, although embedded in the images and language of adventure, is focused on serious leisure attributes of personal challenge, status and safe success. The conclusion of this paper is that the package adventure tour experience can be a significant marker in serious leisure careers.

Change in the field—changing the field: Bourdieu and the methodological practice of educational research

Bourdieu's social theory offers a way of understanding some of the most important features of the field of educational research, while also providing educational researchers with a rich conceptual apparatus for their practice. This article addresses both of these methodological themes and the connections between them. We begin by outlining some key trends in educational research, mainly in Britain, over recent decades in terms of Bourdieu's Field Theory. Special attention is given to the relative positioning of researchers and the formation of an ‘avant‐garde’. We refer to the impact of educational policy and attacks on educational research, with attendant effects on the field, and on the formation and legitimacy of knowledge about educational processes. This analysis is followed by an example taken from a contemporary research project in which principles derived from Bourdieu's approach have been adopted in framing methodology. We give particular attention to the terms of the programme in which the project forms a part, and key aspects of it such as ‘user engagement’. Both methodological justifications and consequences are discussed, as well as tensions with dominant expectations of research processes and outcomes. Finally, we argue that, following Bourdieu's own public strategies of sociopolitical action, educational research methodology that is radically reflexive has the capacity to found a critically effective discourse with practical consequences.

Publishing peccadilloes and idioms of disposition: Views from the habitus of scholarly adolescence

In my personal publication experience, it has not been uncommon for one reviewer to recommend a manuscript for publication, and another, to urge rejection. Because I am interested in the rhetorical criticism of critical objects that are unusual (e. g., Ouija boards), at least when compared to more common objects of criticism (e. g., political discourse), my advisor warned me many years ago that my publication career would be plagued by divided reviews. Twenty rejections later, I confess that he is right. In this essay, my primary goal is to share the larger story that I developed to explain contradictory reviews of my work. Barring poorly constructed or wildly incoherent arguments, the story I tell myself is that the frustrating phenomenon of divided reviews can be traced to competing or incongruent idioms that are expressions of what the French philosopher and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has termed a habitus. A habitus refers to dispositions, including the collective rituals, vocabularies, codes, and values of given fields of social being that each concrete individual subjectively embodies (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 6; for related ideas, see Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; and Polanyi, 1958). (1) Much more than a conceptual or disciplinary vocabulary (fields in Pierre Bourdieu's terms) or a game (in Rorty's version of Wittgenstein's concept), the habitus is a somatic collection of norms, rules, economies of value, and codes of conduct that collectively, and largely unconsciously, structure material engagements with the social world. Further, because it is embodied, one's habitus is visceral, as the sometimes nauseating, stomach-churning event of reading and digesting a rejection letter is apt testament. In a qualified sense, the habitus is a kind of lived language game, a tacit normative, political, and intellectual performativity akin to what the ancient Greek rhetoricians termed doxa, but only insofar as it exists, literally, in bodily movements and practices (e. g., perserveration of any kind, such as riding a bike, holding a spoon, or writing an essay). As I hope the title and opening of this essay demonstrate (the wording of both is deliberately conspicuous), one's dominant critical idiom, inclusive of the use of a technical vocabulary (Bourdieu's), the tone of writing (autoethnographic, expositive), compositional habits (the double-negative in the first sentence) and so on, is tacitly recognized by readers as either congruent or incongruent with their embodied idioms of disposition. Below I argue that the recognition, misrecognition, or rejection of an idiom occurs at multiple levels of social being, however, and is not reducible to adjudication with a set of linguistic codes. Shot Down in Flames: The Politics of Rejection Before I detail the role of habitus in scholarly review, it is important to note that, unlike most of this volume's contributing authors, I have just begun my scholarly career as an assistant professor. Consequently, I have been asked to review only a handful of articles and cannot speak from that kind of experience. In preparation for this essay, I interviewed or held long-distance discussions with a number of colleagues and mentors who have had considerable experience reviewing for journals. (2) What follows is based on my discussions with these scholars and my six years of experience as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota; for these reasons and more to follow, I think I am best described as an scholarly adolescent. I can claim, however, to be wary of trends in scholarship and familiar with the pain of rejection. One of my recent attempts to publish a rhetorical essay highlights the centrality of the habitus, particularly as an embodied thing, and I think sharing this experience helps to better describe the relationship between embodied idiom, visceral reaction, and critical judgment, a subjective knot that is often hidden by the formalism of the publication process in communication journals. …

Polyphony, Polythetic Practice and Intercultural Communication in Greek-Australian Creative Work

In polyethnic countries like Australia, multicultural policies are usually based on concepts of discrete ethnic identities. Such models are increasingly inadequate in either describing or understanding the multiplex and polythetic practices that constitute Australian society and culture. This paper will discuss aspects of Greek-Australian music and dance that negotiate polyphony in what Freud described as the agonistic process of identification. Examples will be drawn mainly from variations within Greek rebetika music and dance, in performance. The polyphonic practices discussed here are not simply aesthetic celebrations of multiculturalism, but offer what Edward Said has termed 'contrapuntal histories' that demonstrate cultural practices as 'polythetic', in Bourdieu's term, literally located in many places. Moreover, performance is not merely spectacle, but a process of intersubjectivity, hence open to a range of interpretations and recognition across difference, in forms of communication that arise from polyphony and the constant interweaving and re-translation of cultural forms, socio-historical context and personal experience.

Re-naming, re-imagining America: multicultural curriculum as classification struggle

This article analyses conflict over multicultural education in the United States as an example of what Pierre Bourdieu terms ‘classification struggle’. By classification struggles, the author means struggles over those symbolic representations of social divisions that help to construct a hierarchical social order. In particular, following Bourdieu, efforts that ‘aim at retrospectively reconstructing a past fitted to the needs of the present’ are emphasised. Consequently, the author focuses particularly on contests over the reconstruction of United States history. To begin, he asks what is at stake in how a nation and its past are symbolically constructed. He then identifies specific ways in which multiculturalism engages in classification struggle and consider the nature of resistance to those efforts. Next, he illustrates limitations in multiculturalism's success in effecting changes in symbolic classification. Finally, he concludes by suggesting the implications of the analysis for answering the question ‘In what sense, can a curriculum be imagined as a national curriculum?’

Notes on a Controversy: The Question Of lay Analysis

The question of lay analysis was one of the most important problems of pre-war psychoanalysis. The controversy began in the late 1910s and ended some 20 years later, in the late 1930s, without being resolved. The 1927 discussion on lay analysis marked the height of the controversy. This discussion also proved to be an important turning point, particularly when two rival attempts were made to settle the dispute. Making a contribution to the history of psychoanalysis, this paper provides a detailed analysis of this controversy in terms of Bourdieu's work on symbolic capital. The author examines why the problem of lay analysis was never resolved, and links an explanation of this question to the inherent discursive dynamics of the debate. Psychoanalytic institutionalization, it is argued, goes hand in hand with an accumulation of symbolic capital, setting in motion processes of formalization of psychoanalytic discourse and of social distancing between speaker and listener.

Including the socially excluded: League tables and Labour’s schools policy

In the autumn before he was elected prime minister, Tony Blair, in a fit of possibly misplaced hubris, announced that his party would have a thousand days to prepare for the next thousand years. In the event it was only 974 days from the election to the millennium, but who could possibly be pedantic when the stakes were that high? Of course Blair was only being rhetorical with the truth, but the message his pronouncement contained, that of hope for the future after eighteen years of Tory misrule, lay at the heart of Labour's electoral appeal. Things, we were promised on that glorious night in May, could only get better. Yet, speaking from the other side of the millennium divide, one thousand days into a Labour administration, we have to ask whether or not they have. Although it is the health service that has arguably received the most attention when considering Labour's record, education is perhaps a better place to start. For education, education, education, as Tony Blair's inelegant use of the Ciceronian triad put it, was the top priority. That and joined-up government, a theme to which we shall return. To be fair, the Labour party did inherit a parlous state of affairs. True, exam results had been steadily rising under the Tories, but everything else had fallen; in particular, teachers' salaries and the overall expenditure on schools. This left Labour with a demoralised profession teaching large classes in crumbling school buildings. Perhaps Labour's biggest challenge, however, was to tackle the legacy of the Conservatives' drive to transform education into a marketplace. The Conservatives' essential premise was that, as with business, competition between schools would drive up standards. The economic indicators of success were to be exam results. For the first time, a stock exchange of school performance, the so-called league tables, were to be published to enable parents to trade their children against a school's future success. In the event it was shrewd investors and schools already rich in cultural capital, to use the sociologist Bourdieu's term, who profited by the system. Stephen Bali's(1) work, along with that of fellow researchers Sharon Gerwirtz and Richard Bowe, did much to expose the means by which the education market privileged those parents who knew how to work the system. More particularly, however, their research demonstrates the way in which it was certain schools who benefited from the market rather than the consuming parent. As schools grew in popularity, so they became oversubscribed, and more often than not this led to selection via the back door, either because the house prices in the catchment area became so prohibitively expensive that only the well-to-do could afford them, or because the schools themselves began to introduce screening devices through entrance tests and interviews, to ensure that only the academically able or socially adjusted gained entrance. Many of these schools became what was known as `grant maintained'. This enabled them to opt out of local authority control and so to control even more tightly their own entrance procedures. Unlike local authority schools, they could, if they chose, refuse to accept pupils with special needs or to take children that had been excluded from other schools. In addition they received preferential funding from a central government quango, rather than being reliant on local authority expenditure. Both these features accelerated the divide between the educational haves and have-nots until the distance between schools looked more like a chasm. Yet the rhetoric insisted that the schools at the top were `good' schools, while those at the bottom were `bad'. No acknowledgement was made of the fact that what these figures most revealed was the level of deprivation of the communities that the schools served. This failure to admit the glaringly obvious is an issue to which we shall return, for it also lies at the heart of Labour's shortcomings. …

Alfred's Verse Preface to the Pastoral Care and the Chain of Authority

The Verse Preface to Alfred the Great's Pastoral Care completes the work of the preceding Prose Preface by appropriating religious language and authority to Alfred. The Prose Preface sets England at the end of a chain of intellectual and religious transmission which starts with the Hebrews and extends through the Greeks and Romans. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's work on legitimate language and symbolic capital, this essay explores how Alfred extends his translatio studii in the Verse Preface. Alfred presents himself as successor to Pope Gregory the Great and his emissary to England, Augustine, and the interpreter of the pope's written commands to all Englishmen, including bishops. Alfred's appropriation of church language helps justify his appropriation of authority and church wealth. Yet Alfred also employs Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition to enact in the preface the cultural translation he describes. By simultaneously demonstrating his knowledge of the prestigious Latin language and his willingness to use vernacular terms and tropes, he uses what Bourdieu terms a "strategy of condescension." Alfred's strategies ultimately assert authority over both lay and religious readers.

Managing managed care: habitus, hysteresis and the end(s) of psychotherapy.

In this paper we examine how clinicians at a community mental health center are responding to the beginnings of changes in the health care delivery system, changes that are designated under the rubric of "managed care." We describe how clinicians' attitudes about good mental health care are embodied in what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls their habitus, i.e., their professional habits and sense of good practice. Viewed in this light, their moral outrage and sense of threat, as well as their strategic attempts to resist or subvert the dictates of managed care agencies, become a function of what Bourdieu terms the hysteresis effect. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted by a team of researchers at the mental health and substance abuse service of a hospital-affiliated, storefront clinic which serves residents of several neighborhoods in a large northeastern city. Data consist primarily of observations of meetings and interviews with staff members. We describe four aspects of the clinicians' professional habitus: a focus on cases as narratives of character and relationship, an imperative of authenticity, a distinctive orientation towards time, and an ethic of ambiguity. We then chronicle practices that have emerged in response to the limits on care imposed by managed care protocols, which are experienced by clinicians as violating the integrity of their work. These are discussed in relation to the concept of hysteresis.

The principled professional

In his new book on the changing structure of television, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1998) explores the vast forces of the 'market' in restructuring the content and delivery of television programmes. Television, he shows, is being 'dumbed down', its content restructured, and its social and educational mission degraded. Occupying a position of some ambivalence in relation to this restructuring project are the professionals--the journalists, interviewers and programme makers. These 'peer groups', as Bourdieu terms them, have the capacity either to blindly administer market commands or to respond in a more micro-political peer group manner. By its very nature, the latter pattern is semi-autonomous. Professional groups, through their practices, cannot be completely integrated. This perhaps explains the absence of support, notably financial, for professional groups initiated by the agencies of global capital over the past decade. Professional peer groups still retain considerable power to 'interfere' in the relationship between corporate businesses and consumers, and the State and its citizens. Looking at education, we can investigate the power to restructure teaching practices and peer group professional activities at a number of levels. Firstly, there is the traditional route of the 'status and resources game' played out in the univer

The Shifting Ground of Race: The role of taste in youth's production of identities

The production of racial identities is situated within the play of history, politics, the economy and culture. For students at Fernwood High School (a pseudonym) in South Africa, 'race' is undergoing a transformation. No longer legally bound by apartheid racial categorisations, the formation of race rotates around new axes. Based on a 1-year ethnographic study of Fernwood, the author argues that students construct race through, in Bourdieu's terms, a discourse of taste. Racial identities are produced through an engagement with both local material forces and the global space of affect. Taste, specifically differences based in global popular culture, is a critical factor in the racial conflict and tension at Fernwood. However, taste's flexible and changing borders also allow for instances of border crossing and hybridity. Educators committed to multiculturalism and progressive change must engage with questions of youth, difference and power through acknowledging and working with this rearticulation of race.

Habitusand Cultural Capital in the Field of Personal Finance

Key concepts drawn from the work of Pierre Bourdieu – in particular, habitus and cultural capital – which have been widely used to analyse the fields of education and the arts, are applied here to the sociologically neglected field of personal finance. The cultural project to promote marketization has not created an informed public of sovereign consumers rich in cultural capital. On the contrary, the development of commodified mass-market financial products and services implies a lowering of the threshold not just of economic but also of cultural capital needed for their acquisition. Financial scandals, such as the widespread misselling of personal pensions in the UK from the mid-1980s, typically involve in Bourdieu's terms an ‘objective complicity’ between a wide variety of stakeholders – including the government, employers, financial service providers, industry regulators, and financial advisers – and private investors whose habitus and lack of cultural capital prepare them for cooperation in their own exploitation.

The visible and invisible crises in Israeli higher education in the 90s

This study focuses on the Israeli experience of developing higher education as part of the expansion of a nation-building economic project. Educational development and the current crises are examined in the context of a particular history and a unique socioeconomic, political, and cultural experience. Nevertheless, the purpose of this research is to allow the drawing of meaningful inferences, so that researchers into other national cases might profit from the insight into the sources, both visible and less visible, for the “break in equilibrium” (Bourdieu's term) in the Israeli academy. At stake is the most characteristic feature of the old Israeli academic model, namely the conflation of the missions of teaching and research. To discover the present state of the research-teaching nexus, we examined faculty perceptions as reflected in a recent (1993) survey. This survey was part of the first Carnegie International Survey of the Academic Profession, and its international scope allowed us to undertake some comparative analyses. The Israeli case-study, as well as the analysis of the International survey, shows that devotion to research and meeting teaching obligations, collaboration on research with others, obtaining funds for research, and scholarly publication have strong disciplinary relevance in the day-to-day shaping of academic life in all post-industrialized countries, Israel among them.

Skaldinnans rörelser på fältet

The poet Elsa Grave had lier public breakthrough with the collection Bortförklaring 194<S. This arlicle interprets her success in terms of Bourdieu s sociology of culture. His concept "synibolic capital" is proved usefnl for women studies. It helps in analysing how different vallies are applied to men and women. The concept of habitus is also found useful as it concentrates on the body as a social construction. The field-concept, however, might - wrongly used - easily t um into a trap. It focuses onlv public life and can thereby serve to hide vvomens reality and practice. It has to be used carefully. Grave is not a typical actor in the literary fteld. She manages to get into the avant garde position twice with a couple of years in between. She had a good symbolic capital in her university education, but in the long run she could better use her experience as a mother. Grave broke the tradition of pathetic women poets when she turnd into a grotesque style of writing. In her public image she represented the selfsufficient mother rather than the inspired muse. With her new and different habitus she introduced and broke new ways for women poets that followed.

Deconstructing Memory: On Representing the Past and Theorizing Culture in France since the Revolution

Memory is a theory machine. And theories are memory machines. In this essay I want to argue that there is a special intertwining between the problem of memory as we have experienced it since the French Revolution, and the forms and generation of cultural theory itself. And I want to make a simple claim: that like most of the mechanisms which determine the materiality of contemporary life-the memory and the theory machines geared up in the nineteenth century. Their output, like that of so many instruments which our society has devised to produce and sustain its forms, has been rising ever since. Calling theory a memory machine foregrounds important elements in the manner in which theories work. Theories organize what we notice, and thereby what we recall. They model representation and determine its field of referentiality-even those theories most reluctant to credit a relationship between discourse and its referents. The organization a theory thus prescribes is never innocent; it is, as the French say, orientedconsonant with certain values and interests, with certain structures for distributing what Pierre Bourdieu terms a culture's symbolic capital [Theory of Practice 171-83]. Necessarily, then, a theory remembers its own organization by such interestsultimately by a politics in the broadest sense. Even the sign, the individual word, carries a palimpsest memory of its long production within a network of cultural struggle. Cognition thus cannot be divorced from the re/cognition of memory. A theory functions like our memory of what we know and what we want to know. But the analogy can be pushed further. Sometimes we remember forgetting. We become conscious, in other words, of how our practice upon the data of the world transforms it. The question would be, is there a parallel metaconsciousness of the memory function in the theoretical realm? Thus we might ask whether theories have the capacity to conceive the process by which they process the material to which they attend. We could go on to wonder whether, in conceiving such processing, theories conceive the particular

The Politics of Middle-Class Success in an Inner-City Public School

Recent ethnography of minority and working-class schooling has shown how wider structural factors like class stratification, poverty, and racism influence observable patterns of failure and under achievement in the classroom. In contrast, ethnography in middle-class schools and classrooms has not seriously probed similar structural bases of middle-class children's success, instead attributing this success to a presumed equivalence between the “middle-class culture” of the children's homes and the culture of the school and its staff. This study traces the history and effects of middle-class involvement in the public elementary school of a gentrifying inner-city neighborhood in New York City. Segregated into their special classrooms with distinctive curriculum and organization, the school's middle-class children were more successful than their poor and working-class peers. Their success was not the result, in Bourdieu's terms, of the “cultural capital” afforded by their middle-class upbringing. The school staff, in fact, disapproved of many elements of the children's class culture. Rather, the children's successful standing within the school had been the object, and achievement, of their parents' long-standing political struggles against the school's staff and other parents. This case illustrates that school success is as much an active social construction—both inside and outside the school—as school failure has been shown to be.

The field as 'habitus': reflections on inner and outer dialogue

While Clifford (1997) regards fieldwork as a key marker of the discipline of anthropology itself, notions concerning fieldwork have undergone considerable change over the last decades. This paper elaborates on Clifford’s suggestion that fieldwork practice constitutes what Bourdieu terms as habitus and examines some of the key elements of what that practice might be. The discussion interweaves a theoretical analysis with descriptions of my own thought processes prior to fieldwork and of what happened once I entered the field. The paper also seeks to be self-reflexive and examines some of the internal dialogue that takes place as a result of fieldwork.