Will Atkinson. Beyond Bourdieu. From Genetic Structuralism to Relational Phenomenology. Polity, Cambridge [etc.] 2016. vi, 175 pp. £64.95. (Paper: £22.95.) (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu's Habitus
Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 2004
This paper aims to balance the conceptual reception of Bourdieu's sociology in the United States through a conceptual re-examination of the concept of Habitus. I retrace the intellectual lineage of the Habitus idea, showing it to have roots in Claude Levi-Strauss structural anthropology and in the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, especially the latter's generalization of the idea of operations from mathematics to the study of practical, bodily-mediated cognition. One important payoff of this exercise is that the common misinterpretation of the Habitus as an objectivist and reductionist element in Bourdieu's thought is dispelled. The Habitus is shown to be instead a useful and flexible way to conceptualize agency and the ability to transform social structure. Thus ultimately one of Bourdieu's major contributions to social theory consists of his development of a new radical form of cognitive sociology, along with an innovative variety of multilevel sociological explanation in which the interplay of different structural orders is highlighted.
Trails for critical developments of Bourdieu's Sociology
2002
Pierre Bourdieu died in Paris on the 23 of January 2002. He left some 40 book-length essays and over 200 articles. Unpublished texts are being brought out en masse, and much more is to come. Even before his death, sociology textbooks presented his genetic structuralism (which he sometimes also called structuralist constructivism in opposition to Bloor’s or Latour’s relativist constructivism ) as “one of the most significant [sociologies] to appear in France after the war.” 2 Despite the fact that textbooks and sociology courses cannot avoid mentioning Bourdieu, and that the public at large is in general favourably inclined towards him, the scientific community is increasingly divided. On one hand, his faithful French-speaking followers maintain that his theory is a genuine “symbolic revolution, a new way to perceive the social world.” 3 On the other hand, we have those he used to call his most “fervent enemies.” J. Verdes-Leroux, one of his earliest followers, contends today that Pi...
From habitus to pragma: a phenomenological critique of Bourdieu's habitus
Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 2019
. Others have criticized the concept as either a variant of rational action theory or as a theory of structural determination that entirely abolishes individual agency . Some have argued that misinterpretations of Bourdieu's concept of habitus are indicative of the fact that critics read Bourdieu without awareness of the phenomenological backdrop to his sociology. Some of these readers not only highlight the influence of phenomenology on Bourdieu's sociology, but argue their continuing complementarities. In this article, I take a more radical step in arguing that Bourdieu's conceptual efforts fall short of existing phenomenological solutions to the problem of social action. I do so by highlighting the problems with Bourdieu's concept of habitus when deployed analytically to account for social action. Turning to the work of Alfred Schutz, I show that the social phenomenological theory of action, when read as a theoretical effort to confront the insuperable gap between subjective experience and the objectivated realities of the social world, elucidates many aspects of embodied agency that Bourdieu's habitus obscures. 2 This article proceeds in the following way. In the second section, the article highlights the influence of phenomenology in Bourdieu's construction of the concept of habitus. The section points out criticisms of the analytical limitations of the concept made by critics who otherwise agree with Bourdieu on the theoretical importance in sociology of embodied knowledge and agency. The third section outlines Schutz's critique of Weber's theory of social action and the terms of his phenomenological reconstruction of Weber's sociology. The section also develops an interpretation of Schutz's concept of pragma and contrasts its understanding of embodied agency and relationship to sociality from that in Bourdieu's habitus. The fourth section discusses Schutz's differentiation of embodied agency in his concepts of skills, useful knowledge, and recipes, and the relationship between embodied practical agency and socially objectivated knowledge. The final section concludes with calls for sociologists to reassess and resituate Schutz's theoretical contributions in light of Bourdieu's critical sociology and other present theoretical concerns.
Language & Communication, 2020
The prolific and varied body of work produced by Pierre Bourdieu is coming once again to be appreciated after two decades of an "ebb tide" that typically follows the attainment of a world reputation in the social and behavioural sciences. In Bourdieu's case the ebb has been increased by resentments and misunderstandings that can be traced to the historical and political context in which he conducted his research and analysis: a context dominated by a doctrinaire Marxism which Bourdieu, who refused to take the easy route to scholarly acceptance, contested. This led to readings of his work that are seriously out of line with what he actually wrote, and contemporary scholars continue in large part to accept these unsustainable characterisations of his views based on secondhand information and selective reading rather than on a thorough understanding of his work. Bourdieu's unparalleled contribution to solving, or at least dealing with, the perennial paradox of agency versus social determinism, is possibly more relevant now than it was during the years in which he was active, yet to make use of it requires a thorough, unprejudiced examination of his key concepts-habitus, field, and symbolic capital, power and violence-within the context of struggle amongst proponents of Marxism, phenomenology and structuralism in which they were produced. Marcel Mauss once said to us, "I call sociology all science that has been done well". Georges Dumézil (1988), p. 11 just to a doctrine but, especially in the 1960s and 70s, to a political party, and toeing a party line is what mavericks refuse to do. The question of whether they cannot, or they will not, is an instance of the fundamental problem of predisposition and the choices people make-and that is Bourdieu's key question. His impact has been wide-ranging, but certain concepts in particular have had significant resonance: the symbolic capital which particular forms of a language bring to their speakers, whilst other forms do not, the symbolic power and violence through which the social norms of acceptable language are reproduced, sometimes with the complicity of the speakers who are led to conform, the habitus, which embodies (literally) the tension between individual agency and social forces, and occupies a position in a field with other habitus, each defined by their difference from the others. Agency and social forces: that is where will bumps into can. The embodiment is literal because my habitus is the social forces, the external world, as represented within me (the nature of the representation being another key question). "The body is in the social world but the social world is also in the body" (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 190). The crux of debate in sociology since its founding as an academic discipline has been the relationship between individual and society, in terms both of how the more abstract concept of society is to be understood, and whether its operation in individuals is best revealed through analysis of an internal, psychological kind, or external observation with statistical or ethnographic-interpretative analysis: emic or etic, to use terms that originated within linguistics. Again, however, Bourdieu's writings do not fall so much within the tradition of sociology as of theory-and-practice, the terms of which were set by Marxist thought, which he dared to challenge head-on at a time when doing so risked academic marginalisation. "And since Marx went to such lengths to claim the title of scientist, the only fitting homage to pay him is to use what he did, and what others have done with what he did, so as to surpass what he thought he did" (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 49). But neither is it easy to situate Bourdieu's work with respect to
In this article we discuss what Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus can add to psychologically informed debates around social class. We argue that habitus offers a way of coming to terms with the complexity and different dimensions of social class. For Bourdieu, habitus conceptualises the internalisation of social structures, how the “outer” becomes the “inner.” This distinct psychological question is critical for Bourdieu’s “psychoanalysis of the social.” We argue that Bourdieu’s habitus ties in with psychologically informed views on classed existence, but can also function as a tool to further psychological studies by suggesting a broader focus and pointing to aspects that tend to be underrepresented in mainstream psychological research, and that are also difficult to dissect from a psychological vantage point. In particular, questions of structural (power) inequalities and their reproduction on a communal as well as on an individual level are at the core of Bourdieu’s habitus concept, but these are often absent from contemporary class analysis. Finally, we argue that for all its complexity, the habitus concept can inform research on a practical level by enabling exploration of the complexity and messiness of the classed nature of everyday experience.
The “Ontological Complicity” of Habitus and Field: Bourdieu as an Externalist
Pritchard, D. et al. (2018), Socially Extended Epistemology (pp. 220-252). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice advances a view of social reproduction as a cognitive phenomenon, predicated upon acts of acknowledgment--primarily embodied and unconscious ones--among a diversity of social agents. Accordingly Bourdieu would appear to have much to offer to debates about the nature of knowledge and mind. Given his tendency to address these matters only obliquely, however, as corollaries to his more prominent sociological concerns, it is not surprising that the bearing of his work on questions of the cognitive has gone relatively unexplored. Our aim is to contribute to the greater appreciation of Bourdieu’s work within debates on embodied, extended and distributed cognition, in particular concerning cognitive externalism in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and its recent uptake within epistemology. We argue that the concepts that form Bourdieu’s central dyad, habitus and field, are remarkably consonant with externalist views: habitus as a form of knowledge that is not only embodied but fundamentally environment-dependent, and field as a distributed network of cognitively active positions that serves not only as a repository of social knowledge but also as an external template for individual schemes of perception and action. Our goal is not so much to “prove” that Bourdieu’s concepts fit the bill of what now travels under the banner of externalism, but to promote Bourdieu’s own theoretical apparatus as a way of refining and advancing externalist accounts of culture and society, two areas that are significantly underexplored within mainstream analytic debates.
This work focuses on the approach to and analysis of the concept of habitus, and on tracing its relationship to the concept of practice within the framework of Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘theory of practice’. Based on these determinants, we attempted a thorough approach to the concept of habitus. Within the context of epistemological clarification we considered it essential to draw attention to its genealogy and the course of its development. Bearing in mind too the large number of discussions the controversial concept of habitus has provoked in the field of social sciences, we attempted to make reference to the most important relevant critical approaches. In the article’s concluding observations, the concept’s indisputable contribution to and influence on the field of social sciences is demonstrated, as is the notion that Pierre Bourdieu’s constructed concept of habitus attempts to put an end to fundamental divisions in sociology such as: objectivism-subjectivism, individual-society, conscious-unconscious.
Social Sciences, 2014
This work focuses on the approach to and analysis of the concept of habitus, and on tracing its relationship to the concept of practice within the framework of Pierre Bourdieu's 'theory of practice'. Based on these determinants, we attempted a thorough approach to the concept of habitus. Within the context of epistemological clarification we considered it essential to draw attention to its genealogy and the course of its development. Bearing in mind too the large number of discussions the controversial concept of habitus has provoked in the field of social sciences, we attempted to make reference to the most important relevant critical approaches. In the article's concluding observations, the concept's indisputable contribution to and influence on the field of social sciences is demonstrated, as is the notion that Pierre Bourdieu's constructed concept of habitus attempts to put an end to fundamental divisions in sociology such as: objectivism-subjectivism, individual-society, conscious-unconscious.