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Pierre Bourdieu ( August 1 , 1930 – January 23 , 2002 ) was an acclaimed French Sociologist whose work ranged widely from philosophy to anthropology. BIOGRAPHY He was born in Denguin ( Pyrénées-Atlantiques ) in 1930, where his father was a sharecropper and later a postman. He married Marie-Claire Brizard in 1962 and has three sons. Bourdieu studied Philosophy in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure . After getting his Agrégation , he worked as a teacher for a year. During the Algerian War Of Independence in 1958-1962, and while serving in the French Army , he undertook Ethnographic Research , laying the groundwork for his Sociological reputation. From 1964 on, Bourdieu held the position of Director of Studies at the École Des Hautes Études En Sciences Sociales and from 1981 , the Chair of Sociology at the Collège De France (held before him by Raymond Aron , Maurice Halbwachs , and Marcel Mauss ). In 1968 , he founded the Centre De Sociologie Européenne , the research center that he directed until his death. In 1975, he launched the interdisciplinary journal " Actes De La Recherche En Sciences Sociales ," with which he sought to transform the accepted canons of sociological production while buttressing the scientific rigor of sociology. In 1993 he was honored with the " Médaille D'or Du Centre National De La Recherche Scientifique " ( CNRS ). In 1996, he received the Goffman Prize from the University Of California At Berkeley and in 2002 the Huxley Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute . He routinely sought to connect his theoretical ideas with Empirical research, grounded in everyday life, and his work can be seen as Cultural Sociology or as a Theory Of Practice . Bourdieu was both completely empirical and a master theorist, a rare if not unique combination in sociology. His key terms were Habitus , Field , and Symbolic Violence . He extended the idea of Capital to categories such as Social Capital , Cultural Capital , and Symbolic Capital . For Bourdieu an individual occupies a position in their '' Social Space '' and is defined not by Social Class , but by the amount of all kinds of capital they possess, and by the relative amounts symbolic, social, economic and cultural capital account for. He was also known as a politically engaged and active used to talk of ''"la gauche bourdieusienne"'', their enemies on the left. Some examples of his empirical results include:
Pierre Bourdieu's work emphasized how Social Classes , especially the ruling and intellectual classes, reproduce themselves even under the pretence that Society fosters Social Mobility - particularly through education. Bourdieu was an extraordinarily prolific author of hundreds of articles and three dozen books, nearly all of which are now available in English. His style is dense in English translation, but he was considered an elegant and incisive writer both in France and in neighbouring European countries other than England. BOURDIEU'S THEORY OF POWER AND PRACTICE Bourdieu shared Relationship s (e.g. consider the power differential between judges and lawyers). Different fields can be either autonomous or interrelated (e.g. consider the separation of power between judiciary and legislature)and more complex societies have more fields. Bourdieu's influential concept of '' Habitus '' was developed to resolve the paradox of the human sciences: objectifying the subjective. It can be defined as a system of dispositions: lasting, acquired schemes of perception, thought and action. The individual agent develops these dispositions in response to the objective conditions they encounter, but they remain subjective things. In this way Bourdieu theorises the incorporation of objective social structures into the subjective, mental experience of agents. Having thereby absorbed objective social structure into a personal set of dispositions, agents then go on to promote these dispositions as a model for others to emulate, thus reproducing that structure. Thus Bourdieu sees habitus as the key to social reproduction because it is central to generating and regulating the practices that make up social life. Bourdieu sees symbolic capital (e.g. prestige, honour, the right to be listened to) as a crucial source of power. When a holder of symbolic capital uses the power this confers against an agent who holds less, and seeks thereby to alter their actions, they exercise ''symbolic violence''. We might see this when a daughter brings home a boyfriend considered 'unsuitable' by her parents. She is met with disapproving looks and gestures, symbols which serve to convey the message that she will not be permitted this relationship, but which never make this coercive fact explicit. People come to experience symbolic power and Systems Of Meaning (culture) as legitimate. Hence the daughter will often feel a duty to obey her parents' unspoken demand, whether or not her boyfriend is truly objectionable. If he is indeed unobjectionable, she has been made to misunderstand or misrecognise his nature. Moreover, by perceiving her parents' symbolic violence as legitimate, she is complicit in her own subordination. In his theoretical writings, Bourdieu employs some terminology of Economics to analyze the process of Social Reproduction , of how the various forms of capital tend to transfer from one generation to the next. For Bourdieu, education represents the key example of this process. Educational success, according to Bourdieu, entails a whole range of cultural behaviors, extending to ostensibly non-academic features like Gait or accent. Privileged children have learned this behaviour, as have their teachers. Children of unprivileged backgrounds have not. The children of privilege fit into the world of educational expectations with apparent 'ease'. The unprivileged are found to be 'difficult', to present 'challenges'. Yet both behave as their upbringing dictates. Bourdieu regards this 'ease', or 'natural' ability as in fact the product of a great social labour, largely on the part of the parents. It equips their children with the dispositions of manner as well as thought which ensure they are able to succeed within the educational system and can then reproduce their parents' class position in the wider Social System . Cultural capital (e.g. competencies, skills, qualifications) can also be a source of misrecognition and symbolic violence. Therefore Working Class children can come to see the educational success of their Middle-class peers as always legitimate, seeing what is often class-based inequality as instead the result of hard work or even 'natural' ability. A key part of this process is the transformation of people's symbolic or economic inheritance (e.g. accent or property) into cultural capital (e.g. university qualifications)- a process which the logic of the cultural fields impedes but cannot prevent. Bourdieu insists on the importance of a Reflexive sociology in which sociologists must at all times conduct their research with conscious attention to the effects of their own position, their own set of internalized structures, and how these are likely to distort or prejudice their objectivity. Bourdieu's sociology in general can be characterized as an investigation of the pre-reflexive conditions that generate certain beliefs and practices that are generated in capitalist systems. LEGACY In its obituary, ''. His book '' Outline Of A Theory Of Practice '' is among the most cited in the world. '' The Rules Of Art '' has impacted sociology, history, literature and aesthetics. In France, Bourdieu was not seen as an and Jean-Paul Sartre in French public life, and slugging it out with politicians because he thought that was what people like him should do." BIBLIOGRAPHY Selected works:
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