as dangerous, speculative and irresponsible. There is no reference to Black Skin, White Masks (1967 [1952]), which is an exemplary treatment of the symbolic violence of racism. From Fanon we turn to Freire, whose point of departure is quite similar to Bourdieu’s – a deep-seated cultural domination or internalised oppression. But the solution is to develop a distinct pedagogy of the oppressed that liberates them from oppression. Although Freire is not mentioned by name, we can presume that Bourdieu would dismiss him along with other forms of critical pedagogy calling for the transformation of education. Having no confidence in the common sense of the oppressed, Bourdieu would reject a pedagogy that relies on dialogue and focus instead of making the dominant culture accessible to all.
We turn next to Simone de Beauvoir, whose account of masculine domination as symbolic violence predates and surpasses the account Bourdieu offers in his book, Masculine Domination (2001 [1998]), which makes only one reference to Beauvoir. The reference is not to The Second Sex (1989 [1949]), but to Beauvoir as the unknowing victim of Sartre’s symbolic violence. This is a travesty. Beauvoir’s account of masculine domination as symbolic domination is not only superior to Bourdieu’s, but always seeks emancipatory challenges to that domination, although liberation only comes with socialism. I then turn from Beauvoir to C. Wright Mills, whose accounts of methodology and stratification, and their public engagements are astonishingly parallel, especially when one takes into account the differences in historical and national contexts. We can see that Mills is the American Bourdieu or Bourdieu is the French Mills, both borrowing from, but also careful to separate themselves from, Marxism. I end with a conversation between Bourdieu and myself. Instead of speaking through the voices of other Marxists, I speak in my own voice, bringing my interpretations of domination, based on my ethnographic work in capitalism and state socialism, into dialogue with Bourdieu, reconstructing my own understanding of capitalism and state socialism, while questioning the depth of Bourdieu’s symbolic domination.
If Parsons presented the growth of theory as based on consensus, papering over conflicts and emphasising synthesis, and if Bourdieu presented the growth of theory as based on combat, repressing the other, I present the growth of social science as based on dialogue. Here, each side learns about its assumptions and its limits through discussion with others, leading not to some grand synthesis, not to mutual annihilation, but to reconstruction. The growth of Marxism has always relied on an engagement with sociology as its alter ego, and in our era the pre-eminent representative of sociology is Pierre Bourdieu, and so he provides the impetus for the reconstruction of Marxism for the 21st century.
KARL VON HOLDT
Bourdieu in South Africa
What I find so striking when reading Bourdieu in South Africa is how alert his texts are to the textures of social order, how acutely conscious they are of the accumulated weight of centuries of social structure that define ‘the way things are’, and how light that weight seems, embedded as it is in language and embodied in practices that have evolved gradually over time. His analysis is fine-tuned to the intimacies of domination and subordination – to the way they are inscribed in bodies, language and psyches.
Our own social reality appears to be the polar opposite – fractured, contested, disputative, disorderly, violent. In contrast to Bourdieu’s account of profoundly stable domination, reproduced as it is through the social structure of field, habitus and symbolic violence, we have challenge, reversal and constant shifts in meaning. The order of apartheid was ruptured and overthrown by countless initiatives that entailed not only resistance, but the formation of counter-orders. Symbolic violence is ‘a gentle violence, imperceptible and invisible even to its victims’ (Bourdieu, 2001 [1998]: 2); South African violence has been throughout its colonial history, and still is, rough, physical, all too visible in battered, punctured and dying bodies, whether it is police violence against strikers, subaltern violence against foreigners or domestic violence against women.
So why read Bourdieu in South Africa?
It may be that Bourdieu’s very attentiveness to the question of order helps us to think about the limits of order and the contestation over these limits. One of our problems is how to think about resistance, about social fragmentation, about disorder, about pervasive violence – which should necessarily mean paying attention to different kinds of order as well. Local orders that emerge ‘from below’, formed by subaltern communities and activities and not infrequently shaped by elements of pre-colonial culture and practice, as well as by new networks and organisational forms, may support or subvert state orders. All too often, it seems that the master categories of sociology – state and society, bureaucracy and industrialisation, class, development, modernity – struggle to encompass our realities, and instead of illuminating them, impose a grid of concepts that leave us dissatisfied and with the sense that something crucial has been left out; not to speak of the sense such sociology gives us that our society is something less than it ought to be, or that we have not yet arrived at our destination, at a place we can feel is somehow whole and explicable.
Bourdieu clearly finds the master categories of sociology inadequate, and so he reworks sociology, inventing and refashioning concepts so as to explore domination, order and social reproduction. To do this, he draws from his ethnographic studies among the Kabyle in Algeria, conducted using a different disciplinary framework – anthropology. This is interesting: whereas sociology and its master categories evolved in a systematic attempt by social scientists in the West to understand their societies’ transition to modernity, anthropology was designed as its sister discipline, with the purpose of understanding non-Western ‘traditional societies’, and to do this it had to adopt a conceptually more flexible, open-ended approach. It had its master categories to be sure, but decolonisation and the post-colonial world challenged its implicit assumptions profoundly.
When the anthropological gaze is turned back on the West, it sometimes sees things freshly and proves itself able to adopt a conceptual inventiveness in ways that sociology may find difficult to do. The discipline that arose to codify the West’s view of the ‘other’ may provide social scientists with a way to look at the West differently, through different categories, precisely as an other – and may even provide social scientists from the South with the tools for ‘provincialising’ the West and its social science. To some degree, this is what happens with Bourdieu, with his rethinking of the state, for example (1994).
It should also be said that what anthropology lacks – in contrast to sociology – is precisely the firm structure provided by a deep conceptual grid such as the state–society–economy triad. This too is evident as a lack in much of Bourdieu’s work – the focus on discrete fields without a theory of civil society; the silence about the dynamics of economic transformations and their impact on social processes, for example.
Leaving these questions aside, though, Bourdieu’s focus on the mechanisms of order and the concepts he finds it necessary to elaborate in order to explore this – field, habitus, classification, cultural capital, symbolic domination and symbolic violence – may point us towards exactly the sites that must be examined if we are to think about the limits of order. Symbolic violence may help us to think about physical violence; habitus may help us to think about resistance.
It is also possible that the subtlety of Bourdieu’s thinking about domination and order may alert us to the processes of ordering beneath a surface that appears unruly and fragmented, pointing towards deep continuities of domination and racial ordering derived from our colonial and apartheid past, as well as subaltern formations of resistance and counter-order. Many aspects of South African society – from the brutal facts of economic control and the distribution of poverty to the subtle ordering produced in language and symbols – are deeply shaped by this history, but in ways that remain opaque in public discourse precisely as a consequence of symbolic violence.
On the other hand, it may be that Bourdieu’s concepts are rendered useless in our social reality, that they flutter about like moths caught in strong sunlight, out of their element, pointing to the need for other concepts. And
