Pierre Bourdieu

Dzieła

• 1970Reprodukcja. Elementy teorii systemu nauczania

  Napisana z Jeanem-Claude’em Passeronem: szkoły nagradzają obycie z językiem i kulturą, które dzieci z rodzin wykształconych wynoszą z domu, i tak zamieniają odziedziczoną przewagę w pozorną indywidualną zasługę – „przemoc symboliczną”, którą jako prawomocną akceptują także ci, którzy na niej tracą.

• 1979Dystynkcja. Społeczna krytyka władzy sądzenia

  Dane ankietowe o francuskich gustach, od muzyki po jedzenie, pokazują, że sądy smaku znaczą i reprodukują klasę – „gust klasyfikuje i klasyfikuje klasyfikującego”; posłowie krytykuje estetykę Kanta.

Stanowisko

Bourdieu set out to overcome the opposition between structuralism, which treats people as bearers of structures, and philosophies of the free subject such as Sartre’s existentialism. His key concept is habitus: a system of durable dispositions – ways of perceiving, judging, speaking and moving – acquired through one’s social position, mostly without awareness, and expressed as a practical “feel for the game”. People act in fields – art, science, politics, the economy – each a space of struggle with its own stakes. In these struggles they use different forms of capital: economic (money), cultural (education, knowledge, taste), social (connections) and symbolic (recognition). Distinction (1979), based on large surveys, showed that taste in music, food or furniture maps onto class: “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.” The cultivated taste of the educated appears natural and superior, which legitimises their position. Schools, as he and Jean-Claude Passeron showed, reward the cultural capital that privileged children bring from home and present the result as individual merit. Bourdieu called such domination, accepted because it is misrecognised, “symbolic violence”, and later applied the idea to the relations between the sexes.

Życie i kontekst

Pierre Bourdieu was born in 1930 in Denguin, a village in the Béarn in south-western France, whose father, from a family of small farmers, worked for the post office. A scholarship pupil, he entered the École normale supérieure in Paris and passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1954. Military service in Algeria during the war of independence turned him into an ethnologist and sociologist: he studied Kabyle society and the upheavals of colonial war and taught at the University of Algiers. Back in France he taught at Lille and from 1964 at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris, where he built up his own research centre. In 1981 he was elected to the chair of sociology at the Collège de France. In the 1990s he became a prominent public critic of neoliberalism. He died in Paris in 2002.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• The Inheritors (with Jean-Claude Passeron, 1964)
• Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972)
• Distinction (1979)
• The Logic of Practice (1980)
• The Weight of the World (ed., 1993)
• Masculine Domination (1998)

Pojawia się w

• Podróż „Jak społeczeństwo stało się możliwe do pomyślenia” · Przystanek 11 z 12
• Debata „Czy zasługujemy na nasz sukces? Merytokracja”