Bourdieu, Pierre (1930–2002)

Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist and anthropologist whose substantial and influential body of work traversed disciplines and international boundaries. Born in a remote village in southwestern France and influenced by his experiences in military service in Algeria, Bourdieu's early anthropological works focused on the conflict between tradition and modernization. Breaking with the subjectivism of theorists such as Jean-Paul Sartre but also critiquing the determinist assumptions of structuralism, these studies reveal the beginnings of an approach to social theory focused on practice and reflexivity for which he would later be known. They also demonstrate Bourdieu's desire to investigate the sociopolitical issues of the day, a focus that continued throughout his life and made him a prolific and varied author. In addition to ethnologies of Algeria and France, Bourdieu's work includes the sociology of education, art, photography, sports, television, academia, and language, as well as discussions of class and gender and critiques of the economy and the state.

Bourdieu paid particular attention to the sociology of culture and the consumption and production of symbolic goods. Among these studies is his most famous book in the English-speaking world: Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1984). In this vast ethnography of French cultural consumption, Bourdieu refutes Kantian aesthetics that suggest that high cultural forms have intrinsic qualities and that the more gratifying response to them is “disinterested” contemplation. Instead, he exposes the social patterning of taste and argues that aesthetic judgments relate to upbringing and education.

To do this, Bourdieu first maps the “spaces of social position.” Building on previous studies of the education system, such as The Inheritors: Students[Page 109]and Their Culture (1979), Bourdieu suggests that the exposure to and internalization of social conditions influence the way individuals act in the world (habitus). This allows them to accumulate different levels and types of cultural resources (capitals). He identifies four types of capital: economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital, which function differently according to their context, or in what Bourdieu (1984) calls “semi-autonomous social fields.” In Distinction, Bourdieu suggests that the volume and composition of economic capital (wealth) and cultural capital (knowledge and demeanor) position individuals in social space.

After mapping the spaces of social positions, Bourdieu goes on to outline the space of lifestyles and, using multiple correspondence analysis, observes a correlation between class position and consumption practices. In 1960s France, Bourdieu finds that the bourgeoisie are predisposed toward goods that reflect distance from economic necessity and are more inclined toward cultural experimentation. For example, he (1984, 186) finds that those people high in cultural and economic capital are likely to eat foods that are rare or experimental. In contrast, and partly because of this difference, he suggests that the working class has a “taste for necessity” that is a consequence of economic constraint and limited knowledge of other tastes. For example, he finds that manual workers are more likely to eat strongly flavored, cheap, and filling foods, such as casseroles and bread. In between these two groups are the petite bourgeoisie, who recognize and aspire to standards of good taste but do not know how to consume cultural products in the appropriate manner.

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