Cultural Analysis and Bourdieu's Legacy

Settling Accounts and Developing Alternatives

Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415534147
• eBook ISBN: 9781134005840
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Cultural Analysis and Bourdieu's Legacy explores the achievements and limitations of a Bourdieusian approach to cultural analysis through original contributions from distinguished international scholars.

This edited collection offers sustained critical engagement, substantiated by new empirical work. It presents concrete evidence of different approaches to the interpretation of culture in Britain, France and the USA. Discussions are situated in relation to current debates about cultural analysis, in particular the vibrant and extensive disputes concerning the applicability of Bourdieu's concepts and methods. Subsequently, implications for the future of research work in cultural analysis, including into theory and methods, are drawn. The contributing authors offer key interpretations of the work of Bordieu, arguments for alternative approaches to cultural analysis, and critical applications of his concepts in empirical analysis.

This book is essential reading for graduate students of sociology, cultural studies, social anthropology or cultural geography, providing great insight into the work of one of the most eminent contemporary scholars in the field of cultural analysis.

1
The importance of Bourdieu

Elizabeth Silva and Alan Warde

Pierre Bourdieu was probably the most eminent sociologist, of the final quarter of the twentieth century, in the world. He was also probably the most controversial. He had long aroused fierce passions within French sociological circles. There he had become increasingly well-known from the 1960s, and his eminent position in the French sociological field was marked by his election to the most prestigious of professorships in sociology at the Collège de France in 1981.¹ The personalized tensions and oppositions that typically fracture the intellectual field in France, which result in clan-like solidarities, stoke the fires of hostility and controversy. No account of his impact in France would be adequate without some understanding of the personalized bases of intellectual alignments and allegiances, with Alain Touraine and Raymond Boudon providing Bourdieu’s main competitors and antagonists (Robbins, 2000; Grenfell, 2004b; Fuller, 2006). As a prominent figure in the French intellectual field, he personally inspired mixed emotional reactions, with some very negative judgements expressed by his adversaries, as for example captured in a recent biography by Marie-Anne Lescourret (2008), which accuses him of being arrogant and dismissive. His undoubted self-confidence irritated fellow sociologists unsympathetic to his work. Bernard Lahire (1999: 11), a sociologist who engaged closely and critically with Bourdieu’s work, took the view that Bourdieu ‘like many other researchers in social sciences refuses to recognize his adversaries and remains deaf to all refutation’. Natalie Heinich (2002: 45), a former student of Bourdieu’s, described the situation as one where ‘the real enemies are not those with whom one debates but those with whom we no longer speak’. As Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus (1988 [1984]) makes clear, the French academic world is a competitive one where strategic manoeuvring for reputation and rewards are the norm, with the ensuing rivalry within the field sometimes becoming bitter and acrimonious.

However, while Bourdieu divided the French sociological community on personal and intellectual grounds, he had limited impact internationally until the 1990s, when arguably he came to be acknowledged as the world’s most eminent sociological theorist. Before then, outside France, aside from widespread acclaim for Distinction (1984 [1979]) and a niche in the sociology of education, he was not very highly regarded in the international social scientific community. Critics variously pronounced his already extensive works obscure, inconsistent, limited and derivative (e.g. Jenkins, 1992). More recently, Bourdieu has appealed very widely across the social sciences and humanities, inspiring work in anthropology, sociology, geography, literature, feminist studies and cultural studies. It is worth reflecting on what changed on the international scene.

Most obviously, there was the publication of some new substantial works. Alongside the battles for territory, resources and reputation came an outpouring of substantive studies of the highest quality including The Rules of Art (1996a [1992]), Homo Academicus (1988 [1984]) and The State Nobility (1996b [1989]). That these were accompanied by an extensive programme of translation into English was by no means coincidental. Bourdieu benefited from the good offices of Polity Press which rapidly (and more or less comprehensively) published not only his theoretical books but also his empirical studies of French institutions in English. At the same time he also produced some more accessible and popular essays and interviews, of varied provenance by date, in collections like Practical Reason (1998b [1994]), The Field of Cultural Production (1993c) and In Other Words (1990c). Now entering the final phase of his career, from about 1990 onwards, he devoted a good deal more attention to public affairs, being well recognized as a public intellectual opposed particularly to the excesses of neo-liberal economic management. This did not stop him from producing major sociological works, and one – The Weight of the World (1999c), which examined contemporary sources of distress, misery and disappointment as captured in personal biographies – became a popular bestseller.

More exposure for his major sociological works was accompanied by a rapid growth of increasingly positive secondary commentary which all helped bring him widespread acclaim. Among these was a book of essays edited by Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma and Moishe Postone (1993) which explored Bourdieu’s work in cultural anthropology, linguistics, media studies, ethnomethodology, philosophy and feminism, centred on explorations about the notion of ‘reflexivity’, ‘systems of classification’ and the relations between practical knowledge and universal structures. David Swartz (1997) produced a very sophisticated, clear and balanced account of his sociological work particularly as it related to power and culture. This served to systematize Bourdieu’s position and to present sympathetically his approach to a series of longstanding major sociological dilemmas. Richard Shusterman’s edited collection (1999) assessed Bourdieu’s philosophical theories, revealing dimensions of his thought relevant for philosophy of today. It suggests that limits to his theory may be overcome in alliance with discussions in social sciences. Bridget Fowler (2000) compiled a collection of essays centred on debates in the humanities to consider Bourdieu’s theory of practice through his work as an ethnographer and cultural theorist, philosopher and sociologist assessing theoretically his theories as working tools.

Meanwhile scholars from many places beyond the borders of France were making attempts to apply his concepts – often not very authentically – to their own empirical problems. Jeffrey Sallaz and Jane Zavisca (2007), in a crisp analysis of the impact of Bourdieu on American sociology, indicate the increasing diffusion of his work over the last 25 years, with accelerating application of his concepts in new empirical research. Calling it, after Imre Lakatos (1978), a progressive research programme, they identify many works, and some key and highly regarded studies, which indicate inventive modes of appropriation, of which Bourdieu would probably have approved (for he said theories were to be used, not debated), with key concepts being applied to problems of political, economic and cultural sociology. They show a leap in the citation of works by Bourdieu in the leading American sociological journals during the 1990s. Something similar happens in the UK, where Halsey (2004: 173) reports Bourdieu as the second-most cited author in the three major British sociological journals in 2000, having not been in the top ten in 1990. Probably data for other European countries would indicate the same.

Bourdieu’s growing impact within sociology may have arisen from something of a change of strategy on his part. Unusually for a very successful and prominent sociologist, he eschewed purely theoretical work and made his contribution to the building up of concepts and methods through empirical studies of modern French society. In his sociological phase he had insisted on theory and theoretical concepts being subordinate to substantive sociological analysis. Derek Robbins (2000) makes the case well. Robbins sees Bourdieu’s work as an outgrowth of his trajectory within the French academy, a matter of dispositions changing as a result of competition and struggle in the intellectual field. Bourdieu’s career had three separate stages, as cultural anthropologist, scientific sociologist and public intellectual, each exhibiting different preoccupations, intellectual developments being a matter of pragmatic and strategic response to changes in position with concepts devised for immediate application rather than formalization. However, towards the end of the 1980s, Bourdieu seemed to begin to present his work as a systematic corpus. Perhaps encouraged by Loïc Wacquant, the four most prominent key concepts that frame all his work – habitus, capitals, field and practice – concepts which had been used often in diverse ways, were consciously brought together, giving shape to and making more accessible a conceptual and theoretical core. Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992) was a major step in systematising concepts previously employed in a more ad hoc manner. Invitation to Reflexive Sociology nevertheless still proclaimed that ‘“Theories” are research programs that call not for “theoretical debate” but for a practical utilization that either refutes or generalizes them’ (ibid.: 77). The utility, validity and applicability of these four key concepts have been one of the most controversial aspects of debates about Bourdieu’s work, and – unsurprisingly – some of the chapters in this collection engage closely with them.

Perhaps more important though in the elevation of Bourdieu’s reputation was the changing external environment of the social sciences. The promotion of interdisciplinarity and internationalization had significant implications.

For a good deal of his career Bourdieu devoted himself specifically to promoting sociology, defending its intellectual autonomy and the distinctiveness of its methods (Robbins, 2006: 6–9). His concern with the craft of sociology, and with the central issues of sociological debate never left him. Pascalian Meditations (Bourdieu, 2000d [1997]) is one fine example of his late re-working of older debates central to the discipline. Nevertheless, with a general turn to interdisciplinarity, Bourdieu’s work became of increasing interest to a wide range of scholars. In the field of consumption, for example, his work – particularly Distinction – uniquely provided common ground across anthropology, geography, marketing, media studies and sociology (see Miller, 1995). His extensive empirical research in the fields of art, literature and photography also positioned him well in relation to ‘the cultural turn’. So despite having only a short-lived interest in cultural studies and having no time for postmodern thought, his substantive contributions to the analysis of cultural production drew his work into the field of the fine arts, and indeed also into some of the more popular arts (e.g. Brown and Szeman, 2000). Emergence from the sociological ghetto was as good for his reputation as was his increased exposure as a public intellectual (see Swartz, Chapter 4 of this volume).

At the same time, sociology itself was in the process of becoming more broadly internationalized. During the twentieth century it was possible to analyse sociology in terms of largely exclusive national traditions of thought. The reduction of language barriers as English increased its dominance in social scientific communication, the challenge to the view that ‘society’, understood as coterminous with the nation-state, should be the primary object of sociology, and greater international academic association and co-operation (not to mention globalization, migration and tourism) dismantled an older sociological parochialism. Besides translation of all his major works into English, trans-Atlantic mobility brought young scholars to study at the Centre de Sociologie Européenne (including contributors in this volume: Rick Fantasia, Michael Grenfell and Michèle Lamont). They, and others like them, in turn spread Bourdieu’s influence, particularly in the sociology of culture in the United States (see Bennett, et al., 2009; Lamont, Chapter 10 this volume; Sallaz and Zavisca, 2007).

Of course, none of these factors would have been of the remotest importance without the existence of a corpus of work of the highest intellectual quality and relevance. The range of Bourdieu’s work, as the essays in this book testify, was prodigious. He wrote about most of the substantive domains of sociological focus – from schooling to art, stratification to housing, masculinity to élite formation. He made significant contributions also to the philosophy of method, social and sociological theory, methodology and empirical analysis. The future will no doubt hold substantial intellectual biographies seeking to evaluate the originality and coherence of his work. But for now we seek, in a more modest way, to determine what the legacy is for sociology and for cultural analysis in particular. How are social scientists currently making use of Bourdieu? Which elements of his work are proving fruitful, how might they contribute to the shaping of cultural analysis, and what parts are being dismissed?

We are far from being the first to address these questions. Since his death in 2002 several volumes have been devoted to evaluating Bourdieu’s contribution, including a number of high-profile engagements. David Swartz and Vera Zolberg’s (2004) collection of essays, drawn in large part from a special edition of Theory and Society published a year earlier, offers many insights into Bourdieu’s work on religion, economic models, educational research, French literature and politics. The volume offers a deeper understanding of the work of Bourdieu, mainly sympathetic and focusing on theoretical and conceptual matters. A special edition of Cultural Studies (2003) reviewed his impact on cultural studies in America especially, with a focus on the use of his key concepts and on the role of intellectuals. Another significant contribution is the volume edited by Lisa Adkins and Beverly Skeggs (2004) exploring the ways in which Bourdieu’s social theory opens up rich possibilities for engagement by contemporary feminism. Contributions focus on Bourdieu’s concepts of symbolic violence and habitus to creatively focus on discussions about gender, the body, affect, sexuality, as well as class and social change. Robbins (2006: 1), when introducing a special edition of the journal Theory, Culture & Society (TCS), noted the publication of several other volumes in the manner of Festschriften honouring the man and his works and appealed for more creative uses of Bourdieu’s legacy. The TCS collection explored the origins of Bourdieu’s thought across different disciplines particularly in relation to philosophy and science studies. Meanwhile, however, many journal articles were published taking inspiration from and applying Bourdieu’s concepts. Whether it is necessary to take on all of Bourdieu’s concepts in order to fruitfully apply his insights is disputed (see, for example, the reflection of Swartz (2008) on the programme of research on organizations espoused by Mustafa Emirbayer and Victoria Johnson (2008)). Manifestly, concepts of capital, habitus and field have had inspired applications from scholars who are not faithful subscribers to the Bourdieusian schema (see Sallaz and Zavisca, 2007, for some instances; also Crossley, 2001; Ferguson, 2004; Lawler, 2008; Lizardo, 2005; Savage, et al., 2005).

The contributions in this book are informed by the preceding discussions on the application, implications and limitations of Bourdieu’s work to social theory and cultural analyses. We seek to add to this body of literature by bringing together some distinguished sociologists whose work has been influenced in one way or another by Bourdieu. The essays in this book come from a symposium held in 2006 to review some of the implications of an empirical study of cultural taste, knowledge and participation in the UK which was nearing completion. Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion (CCSE) engaged closely with Bourdieu’s theoretical and methodological perspectives on the understanding of culture and social divisions in contemporary society while asking similar questions to those of Distinction.² The analysis of the empirical material, perhaps typically and instructively for such ventures, indicated that while Bourdieu can be a source of great inspiration, it is not possible to simply adopt his concepts or straightforwardly endorse his substantive findings (see Bennett, et al., 2009). Because of the origins of this book in relation to the CCSE project, reference to Bourdieu’s work on culture, and to the central notion of cultural capital, is a strong, though this is not an exclusive focus of the ensuing chapters.

The book presents different approaches to cultural analysis using the work of Bourdieu as an anchor point. Culture, cultural change and methodological engagements to capture the relations of the cultural within other spheres are given prominence in the essays. While concerned with Bourdieusian approaches to cultural analysis, ‘culture’ is here understood as a theoretical category that serves to deal with questions of how cultural differences are patterned and bounded in space and time. For the contributing authors, culture is understood to entail a wide range of life involvements. They span culture as a category of social life in which learned behaviour is implicated; as an institutional sphere, or field, where meaning-making is produced; as practice, both in the sense of performativity and repertoire for action; and as a partially coherent landscape with shifting but bounded procedures and schemes applied to social life. Engagement with Bourdieu’s work implies that, while using a notion of culture to get at meaningful human action, a particular conception of the relationality of the social is addressed, including cultural repertoires involving banal activities but also going beyond the description of everyday conduct of ordinary people, involving a topological approach.

Contested relations to a legacy

Bourdieu remains a highly controversial figure. The contributions to this book take one of four different positions. First, some offer a defence of his legacy and expanded claims for his authority, a position taken (broadly speaking) by Michael Grenfell, Rick Fantasia and David Swartz. It is clearly possible to work with his concepts and organizing principles in order to conduct vibrant, powerful and persuasive pieces of social analysis. A second response might be described as a partial appropriation, where some parts of the theoretical or methodological corpus are accepted and then applied, along with other concepts or approaches, to offer empirically based explanations. The chapter by Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva and Alan Warde, and that by Diane Reay are instances of this kind of engagement. Arguably Bo...

Table of contents

• Culture, Economy and the Social
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The importance of Bourdieu
• 2 Working with habitus and field
• 3 ‘Cooking the books’ of the French gastronomic field
• 4 Pierre Bourdieu’s political sociology and public sociology
• 5 Dis-identification and class identity
• 6 From the theory of practice to the practice of theory
• 7 Bourdieu, ethics and practice
• 8 Culture, power, knowledge
• 9 The price of the people
• 10 Looking back at Bourdieu
• 11 Bourdieu in a multi-dimensional perspective
• 12 Habitus and classifications
• 13 Epilogue
• References
• Index