[Bilimsel Haber] Book review: Locating Bourdieu

Tue, 21 Feb 2006 16:32:42 +0200

Deborah Reed-Danahay. Locating Bourdieu. New Anthropologies of Europe 
Series.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. xii + 208 pp. Appendices, 
notes,
bibliographies, index. $21.95 (paper), ISBN 0-253-21732-6.

Reviewed by: Allen F. Roberts, Department of World Arts and Cultures and 
African
Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles..

Published by: H-AfrArts (July, 2005)

There and Back Again Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) was an astoundingly 
prolific
writer, and although his Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) and 
perhaps his
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1984) may be 
well known
to Anglophone scholars, a great many other books, articles, and 
interviews (and
especially those that have not been translated from the French) are 
unlikely to
be familiar to the casual intellectual. Instead, as Deborah Reed-Danahay 
herself
admits, although one may have "'stumbled on' Bourdieu's work at various 
points"
(p. 5) and know of the key concepts of his writing such as "habitus," 
"cultural
capital," and "symbolic violence" (p. 46), the man's oeuvre and, indeed, 
the man
himself, remain little-known to most of us. Retrospections such as Locating
Bourdieu are helpful then, especially when they review his work but also 
provide
Bourdieu's biography, his own bibliography (although Reed-Danahay's is not
definitive), and suggestions of pertinent overviews by other authors.

As Reed-Danahay informs us in her very first sentence, "Bourdieu was, as a
writer, a provocateur" (p. 1). He loved to argue, and "he viewed the 
academic
field &#8230; as a game in which conflict and struggle over symbolic capital
were de rigueur" (p. 1). Significant contemporaries such as Clifford 
Geertz were
his adversaries. One of the topoi of Bourdieu's writing was social 
class, and
his own feeling of being "out of place" as a person of very humble rural 
origins
who nonetheless found himself soaring in the highest flights of French 
academe.
Indeed, many aspects of Bourdieu's concept of habitus ("inculcated 
dispositions
and cultural capital--including values, beliefs, tastes, etc." [p.11]) were
derived from the "there" of his upbringing. Bourdieu was exceptional in 
his own
estimation as well as that of his peers, for having done so well to 
"rupture"
(p. 47) and therefore transcend whatever limitations may be implied by 
his own
rustic habitus as understood within urbane French culture. However, Bourdieu
returned to this originary "place" over and over to seek a measure of 
security
while emphasizing his accomplishments, but also as a vantage point from 
which to
turn his baleful eye upon those born to privilege, and especially those who
benefit most from the French elitist education that made him so acutely
uncomfortable. Such an idiosyncratic positioning underscored how "Bourdieu
seemed to prefer being in a position of marginality, adopting the stance 
of the
'professional stranger'" (p. 3, citing Michael Agar). The same topos helps
explain the odd, almost stultifying determinism of "habitus," as Bourdieu
developed the concept from the foundation of Durkheim's sense of "collective
consciousness" (p. 42). Indeed, habitus seems to imply a nearly inescapable
"there and back again" circularity with regard to social and intellectual
topographies.

As these assertions already suggest, Reed-Danahay stresses that Bourdieu's
writing was "to a large extent a form of autoethnography" (p. 4), but 
she also
uses her exploration of this much-admired savant's corpus as an occasion to
present her own autoethnography as a student of French education and rural
culture (she presently teaches anthropology at the University of Texas at
Arlington). Reed-Danahay has had close encounters with many great French
scholars including Bourdieu himself, and her account of the chess-like 
game of a
foreign graduate student's introduction from one scholar to another is quite
fascinating. That she follows these stories with a first glance of 
Bourdieu's
concept of "point of view" as "a form of 'position-taking' in a social 
field"
(p. 13) suggests how readers may approach the subjectivities of 
Reed-Danahay's
own account of Bourdieu.

Two particular research sites preoccupied Bourdieu: the rural southwestern
France of his childhood, and the rural Algeria of the Berber peoples 
glossed as
Kabylia. Over the years, Bourdieu compared and contrasted these two 
societies in
many productive ways, but as Reed-Danahay points out, his "silences" on 
aspects
of life on the ground could be astonishing. Religion did not engage him in
either case, despite the strong place of Roman Catholicism in rural 
France and
of Islam in all of Algeria (p. 18). Similarly, French education may have 
been of
signal importance to Bourdieu, for "if you want to understand systems of 
power
in modern societies you must look to the educational system" (p. 38). 
Indeed,
according to Bourdieu (writing with Jean-Claude Passeron), the educational
system selects those "meant" to succeed while teaching other children 
"to fail
in school and internalize those failures as having been caused by their own
shortcomings"; and this is the "symbolic violence" of the system against 
which
Bourdieu struggled his entire life (p. 49). Yet despite how central such 
anguish
was to his sense of himself and to his professional life, Bourdieu virtually
ignored the effects of education in his Algerian studies through what
Reed-Danahay suggests was his sense of "French notions of center and margin
(with Algeria positioned as more 'traditional' and pristine)" (p. 39).

Among Bourdieu's passions were the arts, and his considerations of 
photography
have been especially influential. The "rigid, full-frontal posture and 
solemn
expression among those posing in rural photographs" in France suggested to
Bourdieu that here was a "society that holds up the sentiment of honor, of
dignity and responsibility" (p. 88). Similarly, "among the Kabyles, a man of
honor is he who faces you, who holds his head high, who looks others 
straight in
the face, unmasking his own face" (ibid). In such circumstances, "class 
habitus
determined what an amateur photographer would consider an appropriate 
subject
for a photograph, as well as the bodily postures the subject of a photograph
would take" (p. 106). In turn, analysis of such photographs might reveal the
"bodily habitus and embodied dispositions" that Bourdieu also termed "bodily
hexis (gestures and postures)" (pp. 90, 92). As Reed-Danahay makes clear
throughout her text, one should not look to Bourdieu for recognition, 
let alone
an exaltation of human agency! Instead, Bourdieu sought to explore "the 
tension
between structure and agency" and "the 'myth' of individualism" (p. 92).

These and other rather gloomy perspectives ("love and domination," say, or
"habitus and emotion") are well elucidated by Reed-Danahay, and her 
"location"
of Bourdieu will be useful to those who wish to gain more of a sense of the
man's work than their past "stumbling on" texts and buzzwords has 
allowed. At
the same time, one wonders what Bourdieu's legacy will be, since his tilting
against the "-isms" of his day can read as quite dépassé in our 
post-post times.
Reed-Danahay writes with admirably accessible prose, and Bourdieu's 
complex and
daunting ideas are presented with as little jargon as possible. The book 
has a
repetitive feel to it, however, and it is not easy to determine to what 
degree
this is because Bourdieu came around and around to the same sorts of ideas
throughout his career, or because Reed-Denahay stresses a few themes 
over-much.
That this reviewer was sent a copy of Locating Bourdieu that is missing 
pages 51
through 82 did not help his evaluation, and leaves him to wonder what value
Indiana University Press places on reviews of its books.

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