The historical universal: the role of cultural value in the historical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu

Best known for his pioneering study Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, in which the aesthetic attitude of disinterestedness is accounted for as the expression of a class ethos, Bourdieu has become something of an icon of relativism. In thus effecting a Bakhtinian 'discrowning' of official hierarchies of the arts, he is often celebrated for his concern to place all tastes, popular and high, on a similar footing, equally rooted in specific class practices. Only a careless inattention could support such a conclusion. From his early interventions in French cultural policy debates up to and including The Rules of Art and Pascalian Meditations (1996), Bourdieu has consistently repudiated the view that a sociological approach to questions of aesthetic judgment must result in a levelling form of relativism. In exploring why this should be so, this paper considers the issues at stake in the forms of 'historical universalism' that are associated with Bourdieu's account of the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere. It does so with a view to identifying some of the difficulties underlying his understanding of sociology as a historical practice.     

The French in Algeria, Algerians in France: Bourdieu, colonialism, and migration

Bourdieu's early fieldwork which included field observation, statistical analysis, and the use of photography to capture, represent, and analyse Algerian society in its complexity, took place within the unusual context of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). A number of his photographs of Algerian life depict the physical dislocation of Algerian peasantry into shanty towns largely as the result of rapid socio-economic and cultural change introduced by French colonisation and war. Although this fieldwork was to fundamentally shape his subsequent oeuvre, substantive issues which arose out of this research including colonialism, racism, and migration, tended to disappear in his later writings. This paper will argue that Bourdieu's discussion of colonialism in his early work, together with arguments developed by his student and co-author, Abdelmalek Sayad, provide a basis for understanding contemporary processes of ethno-racial domination and migration.     

The origins, early development and status of Bourdieu's concept of 'cultural capital'

The paper examines the context of the first introduction of the concept of 'cultural capital' in the sociology of education analyses undertaken in the early 1960s and published by Bourdieu in collaboration with Jean-Claude Passeron in 'Les etudiants et leurs etudes' (1964a) and Les Heritiers (1964b). It first considers the cultural contexts within which Bourdieu's thinking about culture originated--both in relation to his social origins and in relation to his intellectual training. It then examines the extent to which Bourdieu's early anthropological research in Algeria was influenced by his knowledge of American acculturation theory. It concludes that Bourdieu sought to use acculturation theory in a distinctive way--one which he articulated more confidently as he explored the relationship between agency and structural explanation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The specific educational researches which stimulated the articulation of the concept of 'linguistic' or 'cultural' capital belonged to the period in which Bourdieu was only just beginning to refine his post-structuralist philosophy of social scientific explanation. To use these concepts now involves deploying them reflexively in accordance with Bourdieu's later thinking rather than at face value as they were first developed during the period in which he and Passeron were 'apprentice' researchers.     

The Virgin Mary and Revolution in Saint-Domingue: The Charisma of Romaine-la-Prophétesse

Drawing on historical analyses of the role of religion in the Haitian Revolution and on neo-Weberian discussions of charisma, this article offers new insights into the background of Romaine-la-Prophétesse, a religious leader of slave insurrections in Saint-Domingue whose campaign lasted from the summer of 1791 to March of the following year. Worsley and Bourdieu's interactionist model of charismatic authority is used to orient consideration of the Kongolese religious and ideological influences on Romaine's movement and his radically subversive appropriation of the symbol of the Virgin Mary. The article suggests that Romaine-la-Prophétesse may have himself been native Kongolese, while clearly demonstrating that his message drew heavily on Kongolese thought, in which terms is his charismatic authority to be understood.     

Thinking with Bourdieu Against Bourdieu: A 'Practical' Critique of the Habitus

There are two strands in Bourdieu's sociological writings. On the one hand, Bourdieu argues for a theoretical position one might term his "practical theory" which emphasizes virtuosic interactions between individuals. On the other hand, and most frequently, Bourdieu appeals to the concept of the habitus according to which society consists of objective structures and determined—and isolated—individuals. Although Bourdieu believes that the habitus is compatible with his practical theory and overcomes the impasse of objectivism and subjectivism in social theory, neither claim is the case; the habitus is incompatible with his practical theory, and it retreats quickly into objectivism. However, Bourdieu's practical theory does offer a way out of the impasse of objectivism and subjectivism by focussing on the intersubjective interactions between individuals.     

Sex,gender and money in African teenage conceptions of love in HIV contexts

In much of Africa, teenage sexualities are often understood through the optic of danger, violence and disease without much attention to love within relationship dynamics. There is a strong case to be made for the continued focus on African teenage sexualities within unequal relations of power. However, whilst focusing on the structural factors that expand sexually aggressive masculinities and limit teenage women's sexual agency, the expression of teenage love in the daily battle for power remains neglected. Drawing on an interview study of teenage Africans, aged 16–17 years, in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa, the paper focuses on the micro-dynamics of love, sex and gender. Teenagers account of love highlights changing discourses and include relationships based on care, negotiation and agency showing potential for equality. Such constructions however sit in tension with teenage women's vulnerability in relation to the sexual economy and money, masculine power and gender hierarchies. Intervention programmes that address teenage sexuality must pay careful attention to how love matters in their conceptualisation of relationships and requires consideration of the social and economic context within which they are located. The challenge is to build on equality, address gender hierarchies and ideologies within relationships which create vulnerability.     

In Algeria: Pierre Bourdieu's photographic fieldwork

Today Pierre Bourdieu is well known as one of the most important social scientists of the 20^th century. One of the outstanding qualities of his work has been his innovative combination of different methods and research strategies as well as his analytical skills in interpreting the obtained data (his 'sociological gaze'). In this paper, we attempt to retrace the development of an extraordinary way of doing social research and show the benefit of Bourdieu's visual sociology for his empirical fieldwork and sociological theory. The article particularly stresses the significance of his photographic archive, which has long been ignored within the appreciation of Bourdieu's work. Studying Bourdieu's photography gives access to his œuvre in several new ways: not only can we understand how Bourdieu became an unconventional sociologist practicing his craft in the midst of a colonial war. Bourdieu's visual anthropology also offers an insight into the status nascendi of Bourdieu's sociology in all its elementary forms and contents. Through his photography Boudieu demonstrated the concepts of ' habitat and habitus ', the material and symbolic living conditions of the Algerian population.     

Bread and wine: Bourdieu's photography of colonial Algeria

The photography of Bourdieu, whilst documenting aspects of his sociological work in Algeria, problematizes the relationship between its photographic referents and their history. To grasp this relationship, I will decode the historical signification of three photographs taken by Bourdieu in the mid-1950s when Tillion published L'Algérie en 1957 and Sartre 'Le colonialisme est un système' situating Bourdieu's photographic and sociological work in relation to both Tillion and Sartre. Although the influence of Tillion on Bourdieu is discernable, especially in Sociologie de l'Algérie , their political positions are at variance. Bourdieu's snapshots provide us with a perspective on how to interpret the causes of the vagrancy and famine in colonial times. Despite his avowed hostility to Sartre, Bourdieu concurs with the latter's critique of colonialism. His three photographs together project a political affinity with both Sartre and Barthes. The impoverishment of native Algerian society was not due to the fact that it failed to catch the train of progress, as Tillion intimates; rather it resulted from its systematic despoilment by colonial France.     

Bourdieu's Theory of Cultural Change: Explication, Application, Critique

Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural change is more powerful and comprehensive than other recent theories, which neglect one or another of the important dimensions of cultural markets. Bourdieu's theory conceptualizes both the supply and demand sides of the market, as well as specifying their interaction with external social factors. Two cases from American culture are developed to demonstrate the explanatory power of Bourdieu's theory of cultural change: the demise of tail fins in automobile design and the fall of modernism in architecture. These cases reveal, however, that Bourdieu's theory fails to account for the leveling of cultural hierarchies and the emergence of pluralized cultural fields. The general conditions for such leveling and pluralization are developed from a comparison of the two cases.     

Spiritual Capital: Theorizing Religion with Bourdieu Against Bourdieu

Bourdieu's theory of culture offers a rich conceptual resource for the social‐scientific study of religion. In particular, his analysis of cultural capital as a medium of social relations suggests an economic model of religion alternative to that championed by rational choice theorists. After evaluating Bourdieu's limited writings on religion, this paper draws upon his wider work to craft a new model of "spiritual capital." Distinct from Iannaccone's and Stark and Finke's visions of "religious capital," this Bourdieuian model treats religious knowledge, competencies, and preferences as positional goods within a competitive symbolic economy. The valuation of spiritual capital is the object of continuous struggle and is subject to considerable temporal and subcultural variation. A model of spiritual capital illuminates such phenomena as religious conversion, devotional eclecticism, religious fads, and social mobility. It also suggests some necessary modifications to Bourdieu's theoretical system, particularly his understanding of individual agency, cultural production, and the relative autonomy of fields.     

Portrayal and betrayal: Bourdieu, photography and sociological life

Through an examination of Bourdieu's Algerian fieldwork the article raises general questions regarding the place of photography in sociological research. In the midst of a colonial war Bourdieu used photography to make visual fieldnotes and record the mixed realities of Algeria under colonialism. Bourdieu also used photography to communicate to the Algerians an ethical and political commitment to their cause and plight. It is argued that his photographs do not simply portrayal or communicate the realities of Algeria. They are, paradoxically, at the same time full of information and mysterious and depthless. In order to read them it is necessary to ethnographically situate them in their social and historical context. It is suggested that the photographs can also be read as an inventory of Bourdieu's attentiveness as a researcher, his curiosity and ultimately his sociological imagination. They betray his concerns as a researcher but also can be used to raise ethical and political questions beyond Bourdieu's own attempts at reflexive self-analysis. The article concludes with a discussion of how Bourdieu's sociological life might contribute to the craft of sociology today.     

"The Real is Relational": An Epistemological Analysis of Pierre Bourdieu's Generative Structuralism

An internal reconstruction and an immanent critique of Bourdieu's generative structuralism is presented. Rather than starting with the concept of "habitus," as is usually done, the article tries to systematically reconstruct Bourdieu's theory by an analysis of the relational logic that permeates his whole work. Tracing the debt Bourdieu's approach owes to Bachelard's rationalism and Cassirer's relationalism, the article examines Bourdieu's epistemological writings of the 1960s and 70s. It tries to make the case that Bourdieu's sociological metascience represents a rationalist version of Bhaskar's critical realism, and enjoins Bourdieu to give heed to the realist turn in the philosophy of the natural and the social sciences. The article shows how Bourdieu's epistemological assumptions are reflected in his primary theoretical constructs of "habitus" and "field." To concretize their discussion, it analyzes Bourdieu's reinterpretation of Weber in his theory of the field of religion and of the young Mannheim in his theory of the scientific field.     

Time Warped: The Flexibilization and Maximization of Flight Attendant Working Time*

Le temps de travail a été le sujet de débats et de luttes tout au long de l'histoire du capitalisme industriel, et le contexte actuel de transformation économique et sociale rapide a sur lui de profondes répercussions. Au moyen d'une étude de cas des nouvelles réalités de temps de travail des agentes et agents de bord d'Air Canada, cet article aide à améliorer notre compréhension des répercussions de ces mutations sur les travailleuses et travailleurs dans notre économie de services en pleine croissance. Je veux montrer que le régime de temps de travail de l'aviation commerciale de l'époque de la mondialisation-déréglementation a renforcé la réification de la force de travail des agentes et agents de bord.
Working time has been the subject of debates and struggles throughout the history of industrial capitalism, and the current context of rapid economic and social transformation is having profound repercussions on it. Through a case study of the new working-time realities of flight attendants at Air Canada, this article helps fill the gap in our understanding of the impact of changing temporalities on workers in the ever-expanding service economy. I demonstrate that the globalization/ deregulation-era airline-industry working-time regime has deepened the commodity status of flight attendant labour power.     

Bourdieu and the Logic of Practice: Is All Giving Indian-Giving or is "Generalized Materialism" Not Enough? For the memory of Louis Dumont

I argue here that in the end Bourdieu's theory of practice fails to overcome the problem on which it expressly centers, namely, subject-object dualism. The failure is registered in his avowed materialism, which, though significantly "generalized," remains what it says: a materialism. In order to substantiate my criticism, I examine for their ontological presuppositions three areas of his theoretical framework pertaining to the questions of (1) human agency (as seen through the conceptual glass of the habitus), (2) otherness, and (3) the gift. By scrutinizing Bourdieu's powerful and progressive social theory, with an eye to finding fault, I hope to show the need to take a certain theoretical action, one that is patently out of keeping with the usual self-presentation and self-understanding of social science. The action I have in mind is this: because the problem of subject-object dualism is in the first place a matter of ontology, in order successfully to address it there must take place a direct shift of ontological starting point, from the received starting point in Western thought to one that projects reality in terms of ambiguity that is basic. With this shift the dualism of subject and object dissolves by definition, leaving a social reality that, for reasons of its basic ambiguity, is best approached as a question of ethics before power.     

The post Second World War Canadian society*

Ce texte porte surtout sur ce qui est arrivéà la société canadienne depuis la seconde guerre mondiale. Cependant l'auteur soutient que pour comprendre les changements qui ont eu lieu dans cette société il faut retourner au passé et faire l'étude de la façon dont la société canadienne a évolué au cours des années d'avant la seconde guerre mondiale. On peut parler non seulement d'un « ordre ancien » de la société canadienne française mais aussi d'un ordre ancien de la société canadienne; et de cette façon qualifier de « révolution tranquille» les évènements qui se sont déroulés depuis la guerre tant au Canada français qu'au Canada anglais. The primary concern of this paper is with what has happened to Canadian society since the Second World War. In seeking to understand the changes that have been taking place in this society, however, the author argues that it is necessary to go back and examine the way in which Canadian society developed over the years before the Second World War. One can speak of an ‘old order’ of Canadian society, not simply of an old order of the society of French Canada, and what has happened since the war, in English-speaking as well as French-speaking Canada, can be described as a ‘quiet revolution.’     

The Thai bhikkhuni movement and women's empowerment

This paper discusses the recent emergence of a movement in Thailand that aims to critique and transform patriarchal values supported by the Theravada Buddhist tradition by introducing female ordination (bhikkhuni ordination). The paper argues that there is a relationship between the low status of women in Thai Buddhism and the inferior status of women in Thai society. The introduction of female leadership roles in Thai Buddhism could play a role in balancing the gender hierarchies within the tradition as well as in society more broadly.     

Moments in Laplanche's Theory of Sexuality

This paper is a brief introduction to some of Laplanche's thinking, as well as a commentary on his essay that is published here. Some salient issues in Laplanche's theory are introduced, such as the decentering of the subject and the prioritizing of the other, the postulation of the “reality of the message,” in which gestures from the other both signify and excite/seduce, and an enlarged meaning of seduction. The child's translation of the enigmatic messages conveyed by the adult is a process of being seduced into building interiority and subjectivity. In effect, the present paper proposes not only that “otherness” constitutes the subject, but that an “asymmetrical intersubjectivity” is what enables the transition from instinct to drive and the creation of paradoxical human sexuality. In a meditation that illuminates significant issues in American feminist and psychoanalytic theory, Laplanche's essay analyzes and distinguishes three interrelated terms, gender, sex, and “the sexual” (“le sexual”), or so-called “infantile sexuality”, the latter documenting a Freudian and French emphasis on an additional, counter-realistic, counter-adaptational, and counter-social conception of sexuality. What stands out in this paper no less than “le sexual” is the use of the term “gender” by a French psychoanalyst, who is at once nodding in acknowledgment to contemporary American thinking, and enlisting the concept of gender to reaffirm its “intimate enemy,” infantile sexuality, “le sexual.” Laplanche sees the American-conceived couple sex/gender as a “formidable tool against the Freudian discovery.” Formidableness is what is common to gender and to infantile sexuality, in that both concepts resist and destroy the clear-cut biological/anatomical “destiny” of sex. Both pertain to cultural/acquired/constructed aspects of sexuality; both are phantasmatic and both subvert sexual role divisions. But gender is organized by, hence possibly subordinate to, sex. Laplanche acknowledges gender yet at the same time he makes it dependent on sexuality and thereby “downgrades” it in favor of the inarticulate, perverse, subversive, untameable aspect of human sexuality—“le sexual”, infantile sexuality—which remains outside and in excess of gender.     

The contributions of john money: A personal view

John Money has been a dominant voice in sexology in the last part of the 20th century, breaking new ground in a wide variety of areas. In the process, he has been cantankerous, outspoken, and ever willing to do battle, but also original and thought provoking. This paper begins with an examination of science in general, moves on to psychology and sexology, and then examines Money's contributions to sexology in some detail. The latter are many and varied, including the development of the concept of gender, his theory of gender identity based on his work with intersex individuals, the John‐Joan case, and his importance in establishing transsexualism as a diagnostic category and an academic discipline. Also important are his contributions to the development of the nomenclature of sexology, his importance to the sexology movement as a teacher, his significant research on a large variety of sexual topics, his ability to convince government agencies that sex was deserving of funding, and his association with the Erickson Educational Foundation. He also was a significant figure in the development of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS) and in raising the standard of its journal (The Journal of Sex Research), and therefore it is only fitting that an award be named after him. Though Money remains controversial, he has contributed significantly to the development of sexology as a discipline.     

Gendered Self-Improvement: Autonomous Personhood and the Marriage Predicament of Young Women in Urban China

How does gender shape the experience and imaginaries of self-realisation? This article explores practices of self-improvement among young women in China, namely workshops for interpersonal skills. These practices direct participants to express themselves as autonomous persons, disembedded from social hierarchies and familial responsibilities. Unmarried women who attend workshops conceive of marriage as an unavoidable impediment to their self-realisation. This is due to a prevailing gender inequality in marriage, as well as the ongoing expansion of an ideal of individual autonomy in China through economic reforms. In this article, I do not centre my analysis on a cultural clash between this ideal and local cultural practices. Instead, it is the possibility of this ideal, which is always shaped and restricted by socio-economic imperatives, that induces women’s frustration with their local culture. The fact that this ideal promises universal attainment highlights for women the gender roles that limit their autonomy.