Pierre Bourdieu was one of the greatest thinkers of the human sciences of the 20th century. Philosopher by training, he developed important works in ethnology, in the field of anthropology, and concepts of profound relevance in the field of sociology, such as habitus, field and social capital. His work is extensive and comprehensive, contributing to several areas of knowledge, especially in education and culture.
Read too: What is sociology for?
Biography of Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Felix Bourdieu was born on August 1, 1930, in Béarn, southwestern France.. Bourdieu was from a humble family. Son of a postal worker, he attended basic education in his city, with children of small merchants, peasants and workers. In high school, he studied in Pau, a neighboring city, where he excelled in studies and in sports, playing rugby and Basque pelota. in youth moved to Paris to study Philosophy at École Normale Supérieure. He completed his graduation in 1954.
In 1955 he went to teach philosophy in a central French town, however
he was called up by the army to serve at Versailles. He had a rebellious behavior and was punished with the summons to go to Algeria, until then a French colony, to participate in the military service of pacification in a context of struggles for national liberation.During this period it was assistant professor at the University of Algiers, between 1958 and 1960, and came closer to anthropology when he became interested in studying the society Algeria, more specifically the clash between colonial capitalism and the desire for independence. In 1960 he had to leave in a hurry because the Algerian group had taken power and the French considered liberals were under threat of death.
When he returned to Paris, Bourdieu worked at the University of Lille. At the Sorbonne he systematically read and prepared seminars on the authors of classical sociology, Durkheim, Marx and weber. In 1962, he founded the European Center for Sociology and became director of studies at the School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences. His intense intellectual production and his ethnological research carried out in the 1960s and 1970s had a profound impact on sociology.
Your observation and analysis of cultural habits, especially of the French, led him to the conclusion that tastes and lifestyles were conditioned by the social experience of each group: working class, middle class and bourgeoisie. His most important work is The Distinction: Social Criticism of the Judgment, released in 1979.
In 1981, when he was already on the way to international recognition, assumed the chair of Sociology at the Collège de France. He has also taught at renowned universities around the world, such as the Max Planck Institute, in Germany, and the universities of Harvard and Chicago, in the USA. Received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa the Free University of Berlin (1989), the Johann Wolfgang-Goethe University of Frankfurt (1996) and the University of Athens (1996).
Was one of the most important intellectuals of the 20th century, his work became a reference in anthropology and sociology and encompassed a wide range of themes, such as education, communication, politics, culture, linguistics, arts, literature, among others.
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Bourdieu's intellectual brand was the defense of interdisciplinarity in human and social sciences and the constant search for intellectual independence. He read authors from different theoretical streams to form his thinking. He stood out for editorially strengthening young writers and for supporting workers' strikes, even being nicknamed the “people's sociologist”. He died in Paris on January 23, 2002, victim of cancer.
See too: Zygmunt Bauman – sociologist who studied the liquidity of human relations
Pierre Bourdieu's Theory
For Bourdieu, the social structure is a hierarchical system in which the various interdependent arrangements of material and symbolic power determine the social position occupied by each group. O power has multiple sources, therefore, the influence that a certain group exerts on the others is the result of the articulation between them:
- financial power
- cultural power
- social power
- symbolic power
Each of these, Bourdieu calls capital, because represent the capitalization of an important asset to have a prominent position in a given society and historical context. The unequal distribution of these powers, which we can also call resources, consolidates and reproduces the social hierarchy over time.
Bourdieu divides powers into four types of capital:
- Economic capital: covers material resources, income and possessions.
- Cultural capital: agglutinates the knowledge formal, that is, knowledge socially recognized through diplomas.
- Share capital: refers to social relationships that can be capitalized on, that is, the network of relationships that provides some kind of of gain, which can be prestige, a good job, salary increase, political influence, space in the world cultural; in short, it represents benefits in any of the other forms of power.
- Symbolic capital: it is what confers status, honor and prestige, differential treatment, social privileges. The sum or absence of these inherited or acquired resources of power will determine the place occupied by groups and individuals in the hierarchical structure of societies and will condition their lifestyle and opportunities for rise.
When researching the leisure and cultural consumption practices of French society, Bourdieu came to the conclusion that the variety of tastes and habits was deeply marked by the social trajectory of individuals, that is, by the socialization experience in which they were integrated, by the education they received. The taste for a certain type of artistic expression is not an innate or exclusive result of individual sensibility, but a consequence of an educational process led by the family and the school.
Bourdieu questioned the idea that the cultural taste and lifestyle habits are personal and intimate inclinations. This brilliant sociologist showed that, on the contrary, the repertoire of cultural tastes and competences is the result of power relations between the mentioned capitals operated in institutions responsible for cultural transmission in modern capitalist society, namely, the family and the school.
Pierre Bourdieu's Concepts
Pierre Bourdieu's work is extremely dense and its reading is difficult to understand. Contrary to popular belief, the author had a simple and provincial education in the first years of his life, and when he entered the Escola Superior to study Philosophy in his youth he struggled in the face of the fluid and far-fetched language of young bourgeois from the best schools in Paris. This difficulty in producing an easy language accompanied him throughout his life, both in his written work and in the conferences and lectures he held.
From its wide and imposing intellectual production,there are three main concepts of it: field, habitus and capital, developed in their research during the 1960s and 1970s on the cultural life of French society. These three concepts, as emphasized by the author himself, should be studied in their connection and interdependence, and not as separate ideas. The concept of capital was discussed in the previous topic; here we will work with the concepts of habitus and field.
Habitus
O habitus it is a repertoire system of ways of thinking, tastes, behaviors, lifestyles, inherited from the family and reinforced at school. It is the articulation of economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital that gives certain groups a high position in the social hierarchy.
O habitus is simultaneously individual and social. Bourdieu considered it as a mediation mechanism between society and individual. O habitus belongs to the collective domain of a group or class, but it is also subjectively internalized by the individuals that make up this class and gives them a range of actions from which they will choose and exercise those they deem most appropriate in their relationships. social.
O habitus it is an incorporated capital, an acquired knowledge that combines with the creative and volitional capacity of the social agent. There we see that Bourdieu was no longer inclined to the rigidity of the structuralism preponderant over individual action, neither was he inclined to an individualistic philosophy that delegated the monopoly of action exclusively to the individual.
There is a dynamics between the objective social structure and the social agent, whose path of individual actions is based on these structured conditions, but is capable of modifying them. Bourdieu defined the habitus as a "system of durable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures"|1|.
Field
The field, in turn, is the common space of competition between social agents who have different interests. They are located in pre-fixed places due to the hierarchical and unequal distribution of resources, which generates different positions in the social structure. The field concept refers to all spaces where power relations develop. It is applicable to all areas of social life:
- political
- economic
- literary
- legal
- scientific etc.
Each field is configured through the unequal distribution of power in that niche of interest, therefore, it is constituted by the hierarchies resulting from this dispute in which those with the greatest amount of social capital in that niche achieve the best positions. The field is structured, reproduced or modified as the confrontation between dominants and dominated.
The dominant pole intends to maintain the configuration of the field as it is, therefore, it has a conservative and orthodox action, while the dominated pole intends to change its position in the correlation of forces, has reformist or revolutionary and heterodox behavior, tending to discredit the legitimacy of the current holders of the social capital of that field.
Also access: Social class - socioeconomic division of the world in a capitalist system
Pierre Bourdieu and education
Pierre Bourdieu points out that the two main socializing institutions they are the family and the school. For this author, educational relationships in capitalist societies are essentially communication relationships. This means that understanding what is communicated depends on a prior knowledge repertoire., which we can see, for example, in the appreciation of the high arts.
The hierarchy of society and the inequality in the distribution of material and symbolic resources make some families have cultural background to identify and assimilate school teaching codes, and that others don't. Therefore, students from wealthy families already start their school trajectory with an advantage over the students from poor families, as they have already received at home elements that will help them to decode the contents presented at school.
School culture, for Bourdieu, is similar to the culture of social groups holding the four types of capital, which are hegemonic and dominant over the others. These groups at the top of the social hierarchy accumulate, for generations, the knowledge taught in schools, and these, in turn, legitimize their cultural predominance.
In a context of rigid hierarchy and inequality between groups, equal treatment in the school environment ends up incurring distortions and injustices, in Bourdieu's vision. When the school demands from everyone the familiarity with the high culture that only a few have, without taking into account the differences of social origin and their implications for the socialization of knowledge, it reinforces inequalities preexisting
Bourdieu detected a mismatch between the cultural competences required by the school and the cultural competences developed in families at the base of the social pyramid. For him, the school system evades its role of offering democratic access to knowledge to all when it elects as superior a cultural competence identified with the small. group holding the cultural capital necessary to practice it, which reinforces the distinctions between groups, relegating popular segments to inadequacy or the stigma of incompetence.
That restriction of access to knowledge it is not only harmful to students, it is also a waste of talent. To this process of the school requirement of prior cultural knowledge to receive the transmission of teaching, which implies the denial of other forms of culture than the erudite, Bourdieu he named symbolic violence.
![Bourdieu was a great 20th century sociologist. His contribution encompasses sociology and sociological practice itself. [1]](/f/6a22cf283de7fa7d5c971f213d2918e6.jpg)
Works by Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu has a vast body of work. Among his most important books are:
- the distinction
- the symbolic power
- male domination
- Practical reasons for the theory of action
- The profession of sociologist
We will highlight here his works that were published in Brazil:
- economic field
- Counterfires: tactics to face the neoliberal invasion
- Counterfire 2: for a European social movement
- Invitation to reflective sociology
- the disenchantment of the world
- male domination
- Economy of language exchanges
- The economy of symbolic exchanges
- education writings
- things said
- Liber 1
- Lesson Lessons
- Free trade: dialogues between science and art
- pascalian meditations
- the misery of the world
- Martin Heidegger's Political Ontology
- Pierre Bourdieu
- the symbolic power
- The profession of sociologist
- sociology issues
- Practical reasons for the theory of action
- the rules of art
- Reproduction: elements for a theory of the education system
- about television
- The love of art: art museums in Europe and their audience
- The social structures of the economy
- practical sense
- The heirs: students and culture
Read too: Jürgen Habermas – sociologist who developed the theory of communicative action
Phrases by Pierre Bourdieu
"There is no effective democracy without a real critic."
"In addition to allowing the elite to justify itself for what it is, the ideology of the gift, key to the school system and the social system, contributes to closing the members of the disadvantaged classes in the fate that society assigns to them, leading them to perceive as natural inadequacies what is but the effect of a condition inferior, and persuading them that they owe their social destiny (increasingly linked to their educational destiny) to their individual nature and their lack of Sun."
"In fact, in order for the most favored and the most disadvantaged to be favored, it is necessary and sufficient that the school ignores, in the context of teaching contents, transmission methods and techniques and assessment criteria, cultural inequalities between children of different classes social. In other words, treating all students, however unequal they may actually be, as equals in rights and duties, the school system is led to sanction the initial inequalities in the face of culture."
"The job of the dominators is to divide the dominated."
"The resentment linked to failure only makes those who experience it more lucid in relation to the social world, blinding them at the same time in relation to the very principle of that lucidity."
"The artistic field is a place of partial revolutions that change the structure of the field without questioning the field as such and the game played on it."
"People who want to be on the sidelines, outside the social space, are situated in the social world, like everyone else."
“Class ethos (not to say 'class ethics') means an implicit value system that people have internalized since childhood and from which they engender responses to extremely many different."
"Every established order tends to produce (to very different degrees, with different means) the naturalization of its own arbitrariness."
"Nothing is better than the exam to inspire recognition of school verdicts and the social hierarchies they legitimize."
Note
|1| BOURDIEUapud ORTIZ, R. Pierre Bourdieu. São Paulo: Attica, 1994. p.15.
Image credit
[1] Ciramor 1992 / commons
By Milka de Oliveira Rezende
Professor of Sociology
