Full Description
This is the first of five volumes that will be based on lectures given by Pierre Bourdieu at the Collège de France in the early 1980s under the title 'General Sociology'. In these lectures, Bourdieu sets out to define and defend sociology as an intellectual discipline, giving it his own distinctive twist. In doing so he introduces and clarifies all the key concepts for which he has become so well-known, such as field, capital and habitus, concepts that continue to shape the way that sociology is practiced today.
In this first volume, Bourdieu focuses on the fundamental social processes of naming and classifying the world, the ways that social actors use words to construct social objects and the struggles that arise from this. The sociologist encounters a world that is already named, already classified, where objects and social realities are marked by signs that have already been assigned to them. In order to avoid the naiveté and confusion that stem from taking for granted a world that has been socially constituted, sociologists must examine the part played by words in the construction of social things - or, to put it differently, the contribution that classification struggles, a dimension of all class struggles, play in the constitution of classes, including classes of age, sex, race and social class.
An ideal introduction to some of Bourdieu's most important concepts and ideas, this volume will be of great interest to the many students and scholars who study and use Bourdieu's work across the social sciences and humanities, and to general readers who want to know more about the work of one of the most important sociologists and social thinkers of the 20th century.
Contents
Acknowledgements ix Lecture of 28 April 1982 1
Teaching research
The logic of research and the logic of exposition
What is classification?
Classifying the classifying subject
Constructed divisions and real divisions
The insult
Lecture of 5 May 1982 15
The act of institution
The insult as magical behaviour
Coding individuals
Dividing reality
The example of socio-occupational categories
Lecture of 12 May 1982 30
Objective classification and objectivity
Objective indicators and strategies of self-representation
Parenthesis on monumental history
The ruses of sociological reason
An objective definition of objective indicators?
The objectivist moment
The geometrical point of convergence of all perspectives
The problem of sampling
Lecture of 19 May 1982 48
The legitimate definition of the principle of definition
Operations of research as acts of constitution
Classification as an object of conflict
Objectifying objectivism
Good classification and scholastic bias
Theoretical classification and practical classification
Lecture of 26 May 1982 64
Moving beyond the alternatives
Reality and representations of reality
The autonomy of the social and the problem of self-awareness
The law, a special case of theory effect
Words as common sense
Lecture of 2 June 1982 80
The act of consecration
The symbolic struggle over classification
Symbolic capital
The manipulation of boundaries between groups
Defending one's capital
Lecture of 9 June 1982 101
The accumulation of symbolic capital
Names and titles as forms of objectification
Making public
The institutionalization of symbolic capital
The two bodies
Consensual imaginanes
Lecture of 16 June 1982 118
Acting 'in the name of...'
On delegation
The state and perspectivism
The problem of the truth of the social world
Validation by consensus or objective evidence
Situating the Course on General Sociology in the work of Pierre Bourdieu Patrick Champagne Julien Duval 134
Appendix Summary of lectures, published in the Annuaire du Collège de France 155
Notes 158
Index 176
