assailants. Whereas Parsons specialised in grand theory, at home with rarefied abstractions, far removed from the concrete, everyday world, Bourdieu rarely wrote without empirical reference. For all its difficulty – its long and winding sentences that continually double back and qualify themselves – Bourdieu’s theorising is deeply engaged with lived experience and follows rich research agendas. Where Parsons’s architectonic scheme disappeared without so much as a whimper once its founder passed away, its brittle foundations having lost touch with the world, Bourdieu’s ideas outlive their author and are far more flexible in their wrestling with an ever-changing reality.
Unlike Parsons – and more like Marx, Weber and Durkheim – Bourdieu was steeped in the history of philosophy and, like them, his works are relentlessly empirical, ranging from the study of photography, painting, literature and sport to the analysis of contemporary stratification, education, the state and language. His writings straddle sociology and anthropology, including studies of peasant family strategies in the villages of the Béarn, where he was born, as well as his books on Algeria that dwelt on the social order of the Kabyle, written during the period of anti-colonial struggles and marking the beginning of his research career. His methods range from sophisticated statistical analysis to in-depth interviewing and participant observation. His meta-theoretical innovations, relentlessly applied to different historical contexts and different spheres of society, revolve around his notions of field, capital and habitus. Even though Parsons was well versed in anthropology, economics and psychology as well as sociology, in the end even he cannot compete with Bourdieu’s originality or scope, nor with his influence across such a range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities.
Parsons was like a vacuum cleaner, sucking in everything that came into his sphere of influence, whereas Bourdieu was more like a mop, pushing backwards and forwards in all directions. The imagery of the one was consensus building; the imagery of the other was combat; their divergence was reflected in the social theories they developed. Let me turn to that link between sociology as a combat sport and the substance of Bourdieu’s social theory.
UNMASKING DOMINATION
Symbolic domination is at the centre of Bourdieu’s sociology. It is a domination that is not recognised as such, either because it is taken for granted (naturalised) or because it is misrecognised – i.e. recognised as something other than domination. For Bourdieu, the prototype of symbolic domination is masculine domination that is not generally perceived as such, so deeply is it inscribed in the habitus of both men and women. He defines habitus – a central concept in his thinking – as a ‘durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations’, producing ‘practices which tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the objective conditions of the production of their generative principle’ (Bourdieu, 1977 [1972]: 78). We are thus like fish swimming in water, unaware of the symbolic domination that pervades our lives, except that the water is not just outside us, but also inside us. Drawing on his fieldwork among the Kabyle, Bourdieu (2001 [1998]) describes the way gender domination is inscribed in daily practices, in the architecture of houses and in the division of labour, so that it appears as natural as the weather.
In modern society, education provides one of Bourdieu’s most important examples of symbolic domination (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977 [1970]; 1979 [1964]). The school appears as a relatively autonomous institution following universal rules and eliciting the active participation of teachers and students in the acquisition of labour market credentials. This meritocratic order obscures the bias of the school, whose pedagogy favours those middle- and upper-class students endowed with cultural capital, i.e. those already equipped with the capacity to appropriate mental and abstract teaching – the symbolic goods on offer. The school advantages the dominant classes and reproduces their domination through the participation of the dominated, a participation that holds out the possibility of upward mobility, thereby misrecognising the class domination that it reproduces as its basis.
More generally, the dominant classes obscure their domination behind the distinction they display in the cultural sphere (Bourdieu 1984 [1979]). Their familiarity with high culture – what Bourdieu calls legitimate culture – is not viewed as an attribute of their class, but a gift of the individual. The dominated are ashamed of their inadequate appreciation of legitimate culture, sometimes pretending to claim knowledge of it that they don’t have and endowing it with a prestige that obscures its basis in class-determined cultural capital. Dominated cultures are just that – dominated by material necessity, on the one hand, and by the distinction of legitimate culture, on the other.
We will have reason to interrogate these claims in later conversations, but for now I am concerned with the implications of symbolic domination for Bourdieu’s conception of sociology as a combat sport. If society is held together by symbolic domination that misrecognises the grounds of class domination or gives it false legitimacy, then the task of the sociologist is to unmask the true function of the symbolic world and reveal the domination it hides. This, however, proves to be a most difficult task – symbolic domination is rooted in the habitus, i.e. in dispositions that lie deep in the unconscious, inculcated from childhood onwards. Even leaving aside the question of habitus, Bourdieu maintained that the dominant classes have no interest in unmasking domination, whereas the dominated do not have the capacity – the instruments of sociological knowledge – to see through domination:
The sociologist’s misfortune is that, most of the time, the people who have the technical means of appropriating what he says have no wish to appropriate it, no interest in appropriating it, and even have powerful interests in refusing it (so that some people who are very competent in other respects may reveal themselves to be quite obtuse as regards sociology), whereas those who would have an interest in appropriating it do not have the instruments for appropriation (theoretical culture etc.). Sociological discourse arouses resistances that are quite analogous in their logic and their manifestations to those encountered by psychoanalytical discourse (Bourdieu, 1993 [1984]: 23).
From a theoretical point of view, therefore, dislodging symbolic power would seem to be virtually impossible, requiring ‘a thoroughgoing process of countertraining, involving repeated exercises’ (Bourdieu, 2000 [1997]: 172), but this never deterred Bourdieu from combatting it wherever and whenever he could.
COMBAT IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE
From early on, Bourdieu’s scholarly career went hand in hand with public engagement. Formative of his outlook on sociology and politics was his immersion from 1955 to 1960 in the Algerian war, first enlisted in the army and then as an assistant professor at the University of Algiers. It was here that he turned from philosophy that seemed so remote from the Algerian experience to ethnology, or what we might call a sociology of everyday life. His earliest writings displayed a fascination with the diverse traditions of the Algerian people, but it was not long before he broached the question of the day – the question of liberation – and how colonialism was creating struggles that were transforming the cultural and political aspirations of the colonised.
On his return to France, he would write blistering articles on the violence of colonialism. Soon, however, his sociological research led him away from brutal colonial violence to an analysis of symbolic violence, in particular the way education reproduced class domination. His two books on education, both written with Jean-Claude Passeron, especially the second and better known, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1977 [1970]), became controversial for their uncompromising refusal to entertain the view that education can transform society. In the 1970s, rather than write of burgeoning social movements from below, as other sociologists, such as Alain Touraine, were doing, Bourdieu examined the way language and political science conspired to dispossess the dominated, effectively making them voiceless in the political arena. Opinion polls, with their artificial construction of public opinion, served as an archetypal instrument of disempowerment. For Bourdieu, democracy hid the struggle within the field of power among elites whose appeal for popular support was driven not so much by a concern for the dominated, but by manoeuvres within this field of the
