The Field Of Cultural Production Pdf

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Duringthe last two decades, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has become a dominant force in cultural activity ranging from taste in music and art to choices in food and lifestyles. The Field of Cultural Production brings together Bourdieu's major essays on art and literature and provides the first introduction to Bourdieu's writings and theory of a cultural field that situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. Bourdieu develops a highly original approach to the study of literary and artistic works, addressing many of the key issues that have preoccupied literary art and cultural criticism in the last twentieth century: aesthetic value and canonicity, intertextuality, the institutional frameworks of cultural practice, the social role of intellectuals and artists, and structures of literary and artistic authority. Bourdieu elaborates a theory of the cultural field which situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. He examines the individuals and institutions involved in making cultural products what they are: not only the writers and artists, but also the publishers, critics, dealers, galleries, and academies. He analyzes the structure of the cultural field itself as well as its position within the broader social structures of power. The essays in his volume examine such diverse topics as Flaubert's point of view, Manet's aesthetic revolution, the historical creation of the pure gaze, and the relationship between art and power. The Field of Cultural Porduction will be of interest to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines: sociology and social theory, literature, art, and cultural studies.

Bourdieu's work was primarily concerned with the dynamics of power in society, especially the diverse and subtle ways in which power is transferred and social order is maintained within and across generations. In conscious opposition to the idealist tradition of much of Western philosophy, his work often emphasized the corporeal nature of social life and stressed the role of practice and embodiment in social dynamics. Building upon and criticizing the theories of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, mile Durkheim, Claude Lvi-Strauss, Erwin Panofsky and Marcel Mauss among others, his research pioneered novel investigative frameworks and methods, and introduced such influential concepts as cultural, social, and symbolic forms of capital (as opposed to traditional economic forms of capital), the cultural reproduction, the habitus, the field or location, and symbolic violence. Another notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations.

Bourdieu was a prolific author, producing hundreds of articles and three dozen books, nearly all of which are now available in English. His best-known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979), in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position, or more precisely, are themselves acts of social positioning. The argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from quantitative surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. In the process, Bourdieu attempts to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual.[i] The book was named "the sixth most important sociological work of the twentieth century" by the International Sociological Association (ISA).[6]

Pierre Bourdieu's work emphasized how social classes, especially the ruling and intellectual classes, preserve their social privileges across generations despite the myth that contemporary post-industrial society boasts equality of opportunity and high social mobility, achieved through formal education.

Pierre Bourdieu was born in Denguin (Pyrnes-Atlantiques), in southern France, to a postal worker and his wife. The household spoke Barnese, a Gascon dialect. In 1962, Bourdieu married Marie-Claire Brizard, and the couple would go on to have three sons, Jrme, Emmanuel, and Laurent.

Bourdieu was educated at the Lyce Louis-Barthou in Pau before moving to the Lyce Louis-le-Grand in Paris. From there he gained entrance to the cole Normale Suprieure (ENS), also in Paris, where he studied philosophy alongside Louis Althusser. After getting his agrgation, Bourdieu worked as a lyce teacher at Moulins for a year before his conscription into the French Army in 1955.[citation needed]

His biographers write that he chose not to enter the Reserve Officer's College like many of his fellow ENS graduates as he wished to stay with people from his own modest social background.[7] Deployed to Algeria in October 1955 during its war of independence from France, Bourdieu served in a unit guarding military installations before being transferred to clerical work.[7]

Bourdieu routinely sought to connect theoretical ideas with empirical research and his work can be seen as sociology of culture or, as he described it, a "Theory of Practice". His contributions to sociology were both evidential and theoretical (i.e., calculated through both systems). His key terms would be habitus, capital, and field.

He extended the idea of capital to categories such as social capital, cultural capital, financial capital, and symbolic capital. For Bourdieu each individual occupies a position in a multidimensional social space; a person is not defined only by social class membership, but by every single kind of capital he can articulate through social relations. That capital includes the value of social networks, which Bourdieu showed could be used to produce or reproduce inequality.

In 1960, Bourdieu returned to the University of Paris before gaining a teaching position at the University of Lille, where he remained until 1964. From 1964 onwards Bourdieu held the position of Professor (Directeur d'tudes) in the VIe section of the cole Pratique des Hautes tudes (the future cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales), and from 1981 the Chair of Sociology at the Collge de France (held before him by Raymond Aron and Maurice Halbwachs). In 1968, Bourdieu took over the Centre de Sociologie Europenne, founded by Aron, which he directed until his death.

In 1975, with the research group he had formed at the Centre de Sociologie Europenne, he launched the interdisciplinary journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, with which he sought to transform the accepted canons of sociological production while buttressing the scientific rigor of sociology. In 1993 he was honored with the "Mdaille d'or du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique" (CNRS). In 1996 he received the Goffman Prize from the University of California, Berkeley and in 2001 the Huxley Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.[9] Bourdieu died of cancer at the age of 71.[8]

Much of Bourdieu's work observes the role of educational and cultural resources in the expression of agency. Bourdieu was in practice both influenced by and sympathetic to the Marxist identification of economic command as a principal component of power and agency within capitalist society.[ii]

Bourdieu's anthropological work was dominated by social hierarchy reproduction analysis. Bourdieu criticized the importance given to economic factors in the analysis of social order and change. He stressed, instead, that the capacity of actors to impose their cultural reproductions and symbolic systems plays an essential role in the reproduction of dominant social structures. Symbolic violence is the self-interested capacity to ensure that the arbitrariness of the social order is either ignored, or argued as natural, thereby justifying the legitimacy of existing social structures. This concept plays an essential part in his sociological analysis, which emphasizes the importance of practices in the social world. Bourdieu was opposed to the intellectualist tradition and stressed that social domination and cultural reproduction were primarily focused on bodily know-how and competent practices in the society. Bourdieu fiercely opposed Rational Choice Theory because he believed it was a misunderstanding of how social agents operate.

Bourdieu's work is influenced by much of traditional anthropology and sociology which he undertook to synthesize into his own theory. From Max Weber he retained an emphasis on the dominance of symbolic systems in social life, as well as the idea of social orders which would ultimately be transformed by Bourdieu from a sociology of religion into a theory of fields.[10]

From mile Durkheim, through Marcel Mauss and Claude Lvi-Strauss, Bourdieu inherited a certain structuralist interpretation of the tendency of social structures to reproduce themselves, based on the analysis of symbolic structures and forms of classification. However, Bourdieu critically diverged from Durkheim in emphasizing the role of the social agent in enacting, through the embodiment of social structures, symbolic orders. He furthermore emphasized that the reproduction of social structures does not operate according to a functionalist logic.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, through him, the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl played an essential part in the formulation of Bourdieu's focus on the body, action, and practical dispositions (which found their primary manifestation in Bourdieu's theory of habitus).[13]

Bourdieu was also influenced by Wittgenstein (especially with regard to his work on rule-following) stating that "Wittgenstein is probably the philosopher who has helped me most at moments of difficulty. He's a kind of saviour for times of great intellectual distress".[14] Bourdieu's work is built upon an attempt to transcend a series of oppositions which he thought characterized the social sciences (subjectivism/objectivism, micro/macro, freedom/determinism) of his time. His concepts of habitus, capital, and field were conceived with the intention of overcoming such oppositions.[15]

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