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Pierre Bourdieu Quotes

Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist, philosopher and public intellectual.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 the theories of Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Claude Lévi-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 , 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's major contributions to the sociology of education, the theory of sociology, and sociology of aesthetics have achieved wide influence in several related academic fields , popular culture, and the arts.

Bourdieu's best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste . The book was judged the sixth most important sociological work of the twentieth century by the International Sociological Association. In it, Bourdieu argues that judgments of taste are related to social position, or more precisely, are themselves acts of social positioning. His 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, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual . Wikipedia  

✵ 1. August 1930 – 23. January 2002
Pierre Bourdieu photo

Works

The Logic of Practice
The Logic of Practice
Pierre Bourdieu
The Logic of Practice
The Logic of Practice
Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu: 12 quotes8 likes

Famous Pierre Bourdieu Quotes

“The point of my work is to show that culture and education aren't simply hobbies or minor influences.”

Pierre Bourdieu

(2001), "The Intellectual Class Struggle," New York Times, Jan. 6, 2001

“Male domination is so rooted in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it.”

Pierre Bourdieu

(1998), " On male domination http://mondediplo.com/1998/10/10bourdieu" Le Monde Diplomatique, Oct. 10, 1998

“Every established order tends to produce (to very different degrees with different means) the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.”

Pierre Bourdieu

Source: Equisse d'une Théorie de la Pratique (1977), p. 164; as cited in: Jan E. M. Houben (1996) Ideology and Status of Sanskrit, p. 190

“The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need of words, and ask no more than complicitous silence”

Pierre Bourdieu

Source: Equisse d'une Théorie de la Pratique (1977), p. 188

“The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects which is itself but an endless circle of mutually reflecting metaphors.”

Pierre Bourdieu

Source: Equisse d'une Théorie de la Pratique (1977), p. 91

Pierre Bourdieu Quotes

“The practical mastery of the logic or of the imminent necessity of a game — a mastery acquired by experience of the game, and one which works outside conscious control and discourse (in the way that. for instance, techniques of the body do).”

Pierre Bourdieu

(1990), In Other Words p. 60

“I often say that sociology is a martial art, a means of self-defense. Basically, you use it to defend yourself, without having the right to use it for unfair attacks.”

Pierre Bourdieu

(2000), La Sociologie est un sport de combat; cited in: John Horne, Wolfram Manzenreiter (2004), Football Goes East. p. xii

“If the sociologist has a role, it is probably more to furnish weapons than to give lessons.”

Pierre Bourdieu

talk at the Conference of the AFEF, Limoges, October 30, 1977

“Television enjoys a de facto monopoly on what goes into the heads of a significant part of the population and what they think.”

Pierre Bourdieu

(1998: 18); as cited in: Helen Kelly-Holmes (2001) Minority Language Broadcasting: Breton and Irish. p. 8

“By making social hierarchies and the reproduction of these hierarchies appear based upon the hierarchy of ‘gifts’, merits, or skill established and ratified by its sanctions, or, in a word, by converting social hierarchies into academic hierarchies, the educational system fulfils a function of legitimation which is more and more necessary to the perpetuation of the ‘social order’ as the evolution of the power relationship between classes tends more completely to exclude the imposition of a hierarchy based upon the crude and ruthless affirmation of the power relationship.”

Pierre Bourdieu

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1973), p. 84

“Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist, observed that elites in a society typically maintain their power not simply by controlling the means of production (ie money), but by dominating the cultural discourse too (ie a society’s intellectual map). And what is most important in relation to that cognitive map is not what is overtly stated and discussed – but what is left unstated, or ignored.”

Pierre Bourdieu

Gillian Tett " Eliminate financial double-think http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/96810a0e-8d8f-11de-93df-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2TVG2oiL2" Financial Times, August 20, 2009

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