Paul Ricoeur, "From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II." Reviewed by (original) (raw)
1992, Philosophy in review
REVIEWS alism or class. Although he stresses that class and regional boundaries are social and conceptual, rather than "essential" or natural, he also implies that the cognitive efficacy of assertions of group identity depend on some precognitive "groupness" that is both conceptual and culturally/economically "real" (224). When he talks about class or ethnic group resistance to domination, he seems to suggest that it involves the articulation of some latent essential group identity that has been silenced by the dominant discourse. For example, he cites the case of a minority language (Bearnais) that has achieved symbolic, official power by being used in the formal public domain from which it had been excluded as a "patois" (68). The problem is that the efficacy of such a symbolic assertion is not entirely predictable, because the whole issue of minority identity is problematic and ambiguous. The Bearnais (or other French minorities like the Bretons or the Corsicans) are not just Bearnais (or Breton, or Corsican); they are also French. Their experience of "Frenchness" is no less authentic or persistent than their experience of "regionalness." Thus the Bearnais crowd that hears a speech in Bearnais may, to use Bourdieu's terms, collude with the dominant and refuse to accept the validity of their language's public use. Bourdieu's theoretical framework perhaps demands that the experiential and social relevance of such categories be examined in particular, situated contexts, rather than be taken for granted. This is in fact consistent with his assertion that the science of classification must be the science of the struggle over classifications. What is missing in Bourdieu's account of this struggle is that there are not always unambiguous wins and losses.
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