Standards of Probability Sampling for Legal Evidence

Brief recognition is given to bicentennials of the death of James Stirling (1692–1770) and birth of Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler (1770–1843); to sesquicentennials of the publication of the 3rd definitive edition of Laplace's Théorie analytique des probabilités, and of the births of William Chauvenet (1820–1870) and Isaac Todhunter (1820–1884); to centennials of the births of Louis Bachelier (1870–1946) and Jean Perrin (1870–1942); and to the semicentennial of the initial publication (1920) of Metron, an International Review of Statistics.     

Relationality and social interaction1

This paper explores Bourdieu's account of a relational social space, and his relative neglect of social interaction within this framework. Bourdieu includes social capital as one of the key relational elements of his social space, but says much less about it than economic or cultural capital, and levels of social capital are rarely measured in his work. Bourdieu is reluctant to focus on the content of social networks as part of his rejection of substantialist thinking. The neglect of substantive networks creates problems for Bourdieu's framework, because many of Bourdieu's core concepts rest upon assumptions about their interactional properties (in particular, the prevalence of homophilous differential association) which are left unexamined. It is argued here that Bourdieu's neglect of the substance of social networks is related to the criticisms that Bourdieu's framework often encounters, and that this neglect bears re‐examination, since it is helpful to think of the ways in which differentiated social networks contribute to the development of habitus, help form fields, and so constitute the intersubjective social relations within which sociality, and practice more generally, occur.     

习性·快思·场——社会学视野中的民生新闻

民生新闻作为传统新闻的进化形式,以电视为载体实现了崭新维度的生成.将民生新闻置身于社会学视野当中,以更广阔更立体的视域分析其如何运用自身的原始性结构缺失成功实现突围,力求深层次地对电视新闻的出路加以思考,真正实现对社会公共话语空间的构建.     

Challenging hegemonic masculinity by performance of ethnic habitus

The aim of this article is to examine the effect of ethnic habitus, in a specific setting, on the construction of alternative dominant masculinity and the challenge of hegemonic masculinity. Based on Bourdieu's notion of habitus, the article will show that in a specific ethno‐cultural setting, characterized by ethnic habitus, marginalized groups construct and perform situated dominant masculinity. The study is based on the military, which is a central organization for the construction of masculine identities, and will focus specifically on combat soldiers, who constitute the most significant model of idealized masculinity. Based on semi‐structured interviews, this micro‐level study demonstrates the part of self‐performance in the construction of masculinity and the challenge of hegemonic masculinity. Furthermore, illustrating the performance of worthy dominant masculinity by inferior ethnic groups in effect exposes the separation between the social status and the masculine status. Separation between social status and masculine status gives emphasis to masculinity as relational and contextual social practice and enables alternative dominant masculinities to be detected that challenge hegemonic masculinity within different settings.     

The Subjectivity of Habitus

Departing from Bourdieu's collective habitus, this essay develops a theory of the subjectivity of habitus, meaning the social‐psychological processes comprising the agent and fueling deliberation. By incorporating George Ainslie's theory of the will and deliberation as the intertemporal bargaining of a population of interests, I theorize the “saturated agent” composed of an economy of interests, analogous to Bourdieu's “economy of practices” invested and saturated with cultural capital. Here culturally saturated interests negotiate strategically within the agent, with the ending balance constituting the habitus. Additionally, reflexivity becomes amenable to habitus as “desaturation” or suspending the commitment to a set of culturally saturated interests as a result of a crisis, followed by “resaturation”, the restructuring of the economy of interests.     

Bourdieu and psychoanalysis: an empirical and textual study of a pas de deux

This paper aims to elucidate some of the similarities between the Bourdieusian and a psychoanalytical approach to understand the individual and the social, and to describe Bourdieu's relation to psychoanalysis. The paper begins by reflecting upon the way a research on anorexia was received and perceived by some psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. Such a case study puts into light several analogies between Bourdieu's theoretical position, his epistemological style and psychoanalysis. Then, some texts by Bourdieu, especially a discussion with the psychoanalyst and sociologist Jacques Maître, are analysed in order to further explore Bourdieu's position vis‐à‐vis psychoanalysis and to assess the influence of psychoanalysis on his conception of the individual habitus. Finally, the paper discusses the possible contradictions arising between these borrowings and the principles of Bourdieusian epistemology. The paper thus suggests that the Bourdieusian approach is better analysed as a ‘sociologization'of psychoanalysis rather than as an approach complementing or integrating psychoanalysis.     

Class and cuisine in contemporary Britain: the social space,the space of food and their homology

Thirty‐five years ago Pierre Bourdieu asserted that food preferences, as much as any other element of culture, are distributed within a space of difference more or less homologous with the social space of class positions. Plumbing data on annual spends on all manner of food items, he detected two key oppositions – a taste for the light versus a taste for the heavy on the one hand and a taste for rich foods versus a taste for healthy and exotic foods on the other – and located their generative principles in differences of volume of capital and composition of capital respectively. Deploying a correspondence analysis of similar data using the 2010 Living Costs and Food Survey, supplemented by data from the 2008 British Social Attitudes survey and the 2003 Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion Survey, we seek to examine whether comparable differences in expenditure and preferences are observable in contemporary Britain and, consequently, to illuminate the current structure of the food space and its homology with class. Ultimately, we conclude that Bourdieu's general model is essentially transposable from 1960s France to the UK at the dawn of the 21st century, though we put additional emphasis on the ethical dimension of food consumption, and reflect on the prevalent instances of symbolic violence it underpins.     

李渔与高乃伊的戏剧功用论比较

李渔和高乃伊是17世纪中西戏剧界的艺术巨匠,在剧本创作和理论建设方面都有突出的贡献。二人戏剧功用论的内涵都很丰富,然而就此作比较研究是迄今学界注意不多的内容。李渔和高乃伊对娱乐的理解虽不尽一致,但都持娱乐和教化归一的观点,认为戏剧要通过娱乐而发挥教育、风化作用,使观众在娱乐中受到教益。就如何实现寓教于乐的问题,李渔和高乃伊的观点也呈趋同之势。李渔和高乃伊的戏剧功用论是各自社会文化和艺术传统的产物,都带有自己民族、时代的鲜明烙印,但仍体现出共同的文心。     

Reproduction revisited: comprehending complex educational trajectories

Pierre Bourdieu's famous theory of educational reproduction is often depicted by critics in simplistic terms: individuals either have plenty of cultural capital, and thus symbolic mastery and school success, or they do not and develop practical mastery and vocational interests instead. Social mobility, deviant trajectories and resistance, on the other hand, are seemingly impossible. The nature of Bourdieu's writing fuelled this perception, but implicit in his early work, and elaborated in his later writings, is the idea that class and capital possession are fully relational, gradational and refracted by family dynamics, thereby suggesting the existence of all manner of possible shades of difference between the two poles of reproduction. This paper, whilst acknowledging that reproduction is still the major feature of the education system in the UK, thus revisits Bourdieu's thesis and sketches some of the manifestations of this intermediate zone of educational performance, namely social space travel, the Icarus effect, recovered trajectories and pathways born of dispersed family fields. In so doing it draws on a qualitative research project examining the life histories of adults from a variety of class positions in Bristol.