65

Symbolic Violence and the Making ofthe French Agriculturalist: An Enquiryinto Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology1

Loïc J.D. WacquantThe University of Chicago

ABSTRACT

This paper is a discussion of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, withemphasis on his theory of symbolic violence. Using SylvainMaresca’s work on delegation and representation among the Frenchpeasantry as an empirical illustration, I examine Bourdieu’s keyconcepts (capital, field, habitus, symbolic power), his approach tosocial organisation and dynamics (social space, strategies ofconversion and reproduction), and map out the basic structure of hisframework. Several difficulties are discussed: the closure of the

conceptual system, the form of explanations, the oversight of thestate, the underestimate of material determinations, and the lack ofa theory of historical transformation. Having underlined the meta-theoretical grounding of his model, I conclude by arguing thatBourdieu offers the means for a dialectical transcendence of

interpretive and structural sociologies.

If men define situations as real,they are real in their consequences.

William Isaac Thomas

MARESCA AND ’BOURDIEU’S PARADIGM’

This paper is a discussion of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, with specialreference to the work of Sylvain Maresca on the French peasantry. Ratherthan attempting a direct exposition and exegesis of Bourdieu’s work, I

approach it by focusing on a set of analytic issues he himself raises in hisLefion sur la leçon (Bourdieu, 1982a) and recent related publications, andexamine how these have been pursued in Maresca’s research. The rationaleof this discursive strategy is premised on the contention that, in order to gainan adequate appreciation of Bourdieu’s social theories, it is necessary to

study them in linked relation to the empirical investigations they havegenerated.

66

Lemon sur la leqon is the text of the inaugural lecture Bourdieu delivered atthe College de France upon taking up its chair of sociology. In this’ manifesto’of some sixty pages of densely textured arguments, Bourdieu delineates thecore principles of his own brand of sociology and sketches out a challengingepistemological and theoretical enterprise, that of a generalised politicaleconomy of symbolic violence and domination.

This short essay may indeed be construed as the culmination and

programmatic (re)statement of a long preoccupation ofPierre Bourdieu withthe nature and logic of symbolic domination, that is, the wielding ofsymbolicpower. The latter may be defined as the capacity to impose and inculcatemeans of understanding and structuring the world, or symbolic systems,2that contribute to the reproduction of the social order by representingeconomic and political power in disguised forms that endow them withlegitimacy and/or taken for-grantedness - the best warrant for longevity anysocial order might hope for.3

It is worthwhile recalling here the fundamental axiom, again at onceepistemological (pertaining to the nature and possibility of a scientificsociological knowledge) and theoretical (asserting the relative autonomy anddependency of symbolic and material relations), enunciated at the outset ofLa reproduction, for it provides the hub of Bourdieu’s sociology, theAriadne’s thread running through his research on the school, Algerianpeasants, language, politics, and the social determinants ofclass lifestyles (c£Bourdieu, 1966a; 1966b; 1973b; 1977c; 1979a; 1982c; Bourdieu and

Passeron, 1964 and 1970; Bourdieu and Sayad, 1964).Any power of symbolic violence, i.e., any power that succeeds in imposingmeanings and in imposing them as legitimate in disguising the relations ofpower which are at the root of its force, adds its own force, that is a specificallysymbolic force, to those relations of power (Bourdieu and Passeron,1970, 18).

For over twenty years, Bourdieu and his associates at the Centre forEuropean Sociology have put out a body of research whose full theoreticalimport, interrelatedness and cumulativeness are just now beginning tobecome visible. Last in a series of noteworthy books by Grignon (1971),Verdès-Leroux (1978), Suaud (1978) and Boltanski (1982), among others,Maresca’s (1983) volume on French ’peasant leaders’ presents an ideal-typical instance of fruitful normal social science in the perspective of theCentre. In it, the author demonstrates the cognitive productivity, heuristicpower, and limitations of what is increasingly being called the ’Bourdieuparadigm’ by solving a truly quizzical puzzle:4 how do those veryagriculturalists who are least representative of the French peasantry manageto represent them? In other words, what is the logic of the mechanisms ofdelegation that allow peasant leaders to alter the social identity of Frenchpeasants by shaping their social images and public representations?

The value of Les dirigeants paysans resides not so much in its substantive

67

content - the emergence of the modem capitalist agricultural occupationout of the womb of the French peasantry - as in the insights it provides intothe workings of the ’black box’ of delegation (Bourdieu, 1984b, 50), anarchetypal instance of the social uses of symbolic violence. If Maresca’s bookdeserves praise as an exemplar of sociological research, it is because hisanalyses can readily be transferred and applied to other domains of social life.The gist of his contribution lies in having dismantled the institutional andsymbolic machinery that effects the ongoing constitution of a particulargroup, viz. today’s French farmers. Because it focuses on the processeswhereby this group makes itself by making its spokesmen and conversely,Maresca’s monograph has relevance for the study of the formation of all sortsofcollectives, be they social classes, ethnic and regional communities, sexualoutcasts or religious sects; and it dramatically highlights the political efficacythat symbolic representations of social groups assume in given institutionalcircumstances.

Maresca’s analyses are thoroughly contained within the paradigm ofBourdieu. Les dirigeants paysans, in fact, originated in a doctoral dissertationwritten under Bourdieu’s supervision, and was published by the Editions deMinuit, in the series Le sens commun edited by Bourdieu himself Further,Maresca’s conceptual arsenal is replete with notions initially developed bythe latter. More conclusive evidence ofthis containment is that the objectivesof his research are a strict particular application of Bourdieu’s generaldefinition of the aims and focus of sociology. Maresca’s purposes arethreefold: firstly, ’to study the production of representations of the

peasantry, the institutions and the agents which the peasantry deputes torepresent itself; secondly, ’to analyse the social functions of these publicrepresentations with respect to the social group which they help to define, re-define, and thereby transform’; thirdly, to contribute to the debate on theemergence, construction, social position and identity of the middle classes,inasmuch as ’it is impossible to account for the imposition of a legitimatepeasant identity without tackling the larger issue of the social struggles overclassifications which are constitutive of class struggles’ (Maresca, 1983,10).Bourdieu (Bourdieu, 1982a, 13-14), in turn, defines as the focus of

sociologythe struggle for the monopoly over the legitimate representation of the socialworld, this struggle over classifications which is a dimension of any kind ofstruggle between classes, whether classes of age, sexual classes or socialclasses.s

This prolegomenon indicates that my attempt to analyse and evaluatethese two books together is vindicated by their relationship: Bourdieu’sabstract pronouncements in Le~on sur la leson offer the theoretical map onwhich Maresca’s journey through the arcana and backstages of Frenchpeasant power performances can be followed.6 Conversely, the case studymay lead to a better grasp of Bourdieu’s paradigm, which is so wide-ranging

68

and complex as to be difficult to address directly. While it is essential to get afirm grasp of the whole before seeking to understand its parts, no singlepublication sets forth the ‘system’ in toto; its theoretical underpinnings andboundaries are generally left implicit; and the idiolect in which Bourdieucouches his propositions is often dauntingly abstruse. Maresca’s monographis a rare occasion for inquiring into the structure ofBourdieu’s framework byseeing it put to use in concrete fashion.A complete examination of Bourdieu’s theoretical framework would

obviously demand that we take into consideration a substantially larger bodyof research than is done here, so that the links between the paradigmaticmatrix, the puzzle, and the exemplar might be traced in each of theirinstantiations and, more importantly, across specialised fields of sociologicalenquiry. Such a task stands well beyond the scope of this article. Also, nodiscussion is proposed of the convergence of Bourdieu’s central argumentswith contemporary developments in the sociology of culture, in the analysisof class and ideology, as well as in general social theory. These projects willhave to be put aside for the time being. Thus one will not find here asystematic explication of Bourdieu’s thought and of its implications (see DiMaggio, 1979; Collins, 1981; Jenkins, 1982). It is hoped, however, that thispreface to a fuller examination of the ‘Bourdieu school’ of sociology will givea measure of its significance.

SYMBOLIC CAPITAL

Instead of letting him or herself be dragged into the struggle for theconstruction and imposition of legitimate social taxonomies (Bourdieu,1982a, 15), the sociologist, according to Bourdieu, ought to step back andprovide a scientific account of this struggle by studying the strategies of theagents and the functioning of the institutions that partake in it This is an aptcharacterisation of Sylvain Maresca’s concern regarding the French

peasantry. Maresca does not set out to ’decide between those who asseverateand those who deny the existence of [this] class’, but rather ’labours to figureout the specific rationale of this struggle and to analyse the balance of forcesand the mechanisms of its transformation, in order to assess the chances ofthe various contenders’ (Bourdieu, 1982a, 16).8 It turns out that it is themodem (or modernising), professionally-oriented peasant union leaders, theheirs of yesterday’s French landed bourgeoisie, who have proven able to seeto it that their social definition of the peasantry prevails. Maresca’s effortsthus revolve around ’building a true model’ of the ways in which these leadershave managed to ’define the being [of the peasantry] with authority, that iswith the power to make [people] see and believe’ (!faire voir et faire croire;Bourdieu, 1982a, 19), and, finally, to transform reality by shaping the mentalschemes and meanings that guide the behaviour of those who make it up intheir daily practical activities. Depicted in fine-grain detail is the genesis of

69

the collective self-fulfilling prophecy whereby the peasant becomes theagriculturalist, the tiller of the land a competent agri-businessman; andwhereby the symbolic dislocation of the peasant class is effected and thefarming bourgeoisie transmuted into the ’occupational elite’ of the middlepeasantry (Maresca, 1983, 145; 1980, 54-61).

The need to explicate the mechanisms of delegation, the mysterium of thepeasant ministerium, arises from a brutal empirical finding. ’those whoseduty it is to perform the dominant presentation of the farmers are those whoare least consonant with the dominant reality of the farmers’ (Maresca, 1983,49). That the leaders of a group should be systematically recruited from themore privileged part of the total membership is a pattern quite familiar tostudents of stratification and politics.9 The novelty of Maresca’s effort hererests not in having identified this pattern once again, but in explaining why itobtains and simultaneously remains unacknowledged by social actors. Thismisrecognition of the nature and source of the power of peasant leaders is aproduct of their strategies of reconversion.

For Bourdieu, social groups are constantly striving to accumulate, andwhenever possible monopolise, capital (that is, assets, resources, attributesor, more generically, powers) with which they may bolster or enhance theirposition in the society. This ’energy of social physics’ (1972, 242) may be ofthree broad forms. First economic capital, which is implicitly taken in itsMarxian sense. Second cultural capital, or instruments of production andappropriation of cultural products, exist in three states (Bourdieu, 1979b):embodied in their owner (for example, language skills or personal familiaritywith works of art), objectified (in books, paintings, machines, etc.) andcertified, as with diplomas and formal credentials. Social capital isconstituted of the totality of the resources that may be called upon by solevirtue ofbeing one of a network of durable social relations (Bourdieu, 1980c;de Saint Martin, 1980). It is not limited to what is commonsensicallydesignated as ’connections’, but includes the added value which membershipin a solidary (and powerful) group brings to capital already possessed; it iswell known, for instance, that returns on education vary with class origins,that is, among other things, with the volume and type of social assets one canmatch one’s certified cultural capital with. A fourth form, symbolic capital,consists in the prestige and the ’social credit’ conferred by socially acceptedor socially concealed uses of other types of capitaL for instance, the reputeaccruing to those industrialists who ’grant’ funds for professorships orresearch programs (and sometimes entire universities) bearing their name. Itis, as Bourdieu (1980a, 200) phrases it, ’capital denied, recognised aslegitimate, that is, misrecognised as capital’. These species of capital differ intheir specific effects, degree of institutionalisation (in a given social

formation), and in the social visibility and costs of their management,accumulation and bequeathal. They are mutually convertibh at rates

contingent upon the state of the system of instruments of reproduction -laws of inheritance, marriage and labour markets, the schooL In the logic of

70

this model, the social structure is reconceptualised as the objectivedistribution of the different species of capital between the groups or classes(Bourdieu, 1984a); its dynamic is spelled out by the strategies wherebymembers of these groups seek to safeguard or improve their position inconverting the types of capital they hold into other, more accessible or moreprofitable types (Bourdieu, 1971 a; Bourdieu and Boltanski, 1978, esp. 197-8,205-9, 214-15). Bourdieu thus characterises classes of social positions alongthree dimensions: i) volume of capital possessed ii) structure of capital,measured by the relative weight of cultural and economic species andiii) objective social trajectory, past, present, and potential, as indicated bymovements along the two other axes.10

In his first three chapters (Part I, ’Distinction and Representativeness’),Maresca employs Bourdieu’s notion of capital and reports on the propertiesthat set the peasant leader apart from the common farmer. Economicallyspeaking, the former is found to be considerably better-off, he owns a lotmore land, utilises more machines, hires more labour. This allows him toenjoy a fair degree of role-dutance with regard to the necessities of his trade;he generally caters to the managerial functions of farming, which to him ismore an economic concern than a practical way of life. Capitalising oninherited material and technical resources, the farming leader is a leadingfarmer as well: professional excellence, a by-product of his socio-economicadvantage, is one of the bases of his power. But the gap between the leaderand the rank-and-file is not solely economic in nature. Following Bourdieu’s sleads on the multi-dimensionality of the social space, Maresca shows howcrucial it is to pay equal attention to the social and cultural characteristics ofpeasant leaders, and to the recurrent patterns that these characteristics form.We thus learn that peasant leaders come from cultured families and have ahigher educational level than their fellow-farmers; that they generallyattended private Catholic schools where training is at once scholastic andmoral; and that their academic strategies hinged upon the volume of theireconomic capital and the structure of their social capital. Drawing on awealth of biographical data, Maresca then highlights the decisive role ofthese networks of social relations that the families of peasant leadersrelentlessly build and rebuild. Indeed, one can hardly decode the trajectory ofany one leader without a prior grasp of the multifarious influence of his kingroup, for the family is the locus of a progressive accumulation and constantreconversion of public offices and distinctions (1983, 3; 1980, 42-44).

In conclusion, Maresca skilfully displays how these bases of domination,economic, cultural, and social, are dissimulated by the veil of‘the economy ofself sacrifice’ and by ideological representations fostering a sacerdotal viewofpeasant leadership that deceives both the leader and the led. In sketching ‘astructural history of the social spaces where the dispositions that make up&dquo;great men&dquo; are bred and developed’ (Bourdieu, 1982a, 37), the author ’pullsthe discourse of science out of the logic of the trial’ (Maresca, 1983, 18): heexplicates why the charismatic account ofleadership obtains in practice, and

71

how the leaders themselves can be genuinely convinced that they do nothingbut serve the commonwealth of their constituency when they objectivelypursue their personal and class (-fraction) interests. Close scrutiny of theinstitutional ceremonies, academic, family, religious, and professional,which instill a sense of his destiny and duty into the putative peasant leader,discloses that ’self-sacrifice is socially and psychologically constitutive of theposition of wealthy inheritors’ (Maresca, 1983, 89). Delegation, as an act ofsocial magic, has all the more symbolic efficacy when the delegate fullyshares the delegators’s intimate conviction that he stands up for theirinterest: ’belief in the institution is the ordinary condition of its properfunctioning’ (Bourdieu, 1982a, 55; also ’Belief and the Bod~, ch. 4 inBourdieu, 1980a). In retrospect, the fate of peasant leaders may be taken as acase of a more general sociological theorem, which states that ’institutingrites make he whom they institute as king, knight, priest or professor byforging his social image,... by assigning to him a name, a title which define,institute, constitute him, [and which ] summon him to become what he is,that is, what he ought to be’ (Bourdieu, 1982a, 49-SO).liA direct theoretical consequence of Bourdieu’s plea for reconsidering the

functions and effects of institutional rites is that the dichotomous distinctionbetween achievement and ascription simply does not hold water. What issocially accepted as ’achieved’ (the position of leadership in farmers’ union)may in effect be ’ascribed’ (by the condition and position of the leader’sfamily in the social space), and a complex dialectic between these assumedbases of power is attendant on the use of symbolic violence. Marescaconcludes that the representativeness of French peasant leaders remainsunquestioned because they manage to disguise the objective sources of theirdistinctiveness (1983,107-8), which is to say that their power to represent isrooted in symbolic capita~ economic/cultural/social capital unrecognised assuch, ’material’ forms of power whose ’misappreciation is institutionallyorganised and secured’ (Bourdieu, 1980a, 191; 1976b). This conclusionconveys the inappropriateness of the notions of achievement and ascription,which continue to hold currency in social analysis, if in everchangingadornments. Indeed its political upshot is that sociologists partake in thewielding of symbolic violence whenever they make use of suchcommonsensical concepts and contribute to the obfuscation of the real, ifhidden, processes whereby different forms of capital are converted, so thateconomically-based relations of dependency and domination may bedisguised and bolstered by the mask of moral ties, of charisma, or ofmeritocratic symbolism (for example, Bourdieu and de Saint Martin,1978).

THE LOGIC OF DELEGATION

I have outlined Maresca’s analysis of the factors that explain the ability andeagerness ofpeasant leaders to forsake the field and the pigsty for the clamour

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of the union meeting-room and the glamour of the mass media: a given classof social conditions plus a matrix of pre-dispositions, a socially inducedpropensity to seek public offices and to manage the kind of social connectionsrequired legitimately to press one’s claim and ascertain one’s hold over themNow, to return to the central question, to wit the logic of delegation. For themeeting of these factors, conditional and dispositional, and of the position ofpeasant leader does not take place in a social vacuum. The field of farmingorganisations is the setting that frames the process of delegation.A field (champ) may be construed as a partially autonomous, structured

space of positions whose properties are esentially relational and can thus beunderstood independently of the individual characteristics of their

occupants (Bourdieu, 1980b, 113-120). Agents who enter a given field sharea common commitment to compete for the stakes and abide by the rulesspecific to that field. Moreover, they do so only by virtue of a fundamentalmisrecognition (méconnaissance), first of the set of objective relationsbetween positions that form the structure of that field, second of the realrelations between that structure and encompassing structures of economicand political power, and thus of the true principles that guide their strategies(for example, Bourdieu, 1980b, 205-6); Bourdieu and Boltanski, 1976, espec.58--66). The root-image behind the concept is that of the magnetic field, thatis, a space of forces in constant tension and systemic interdependence;another analogy frequently used by Bourdieu is that of the game. Whateverthe metaphor, the fundamental point is that every field is an arena of

permanent struggles and conflicts which, ultimately, involve the structure ofthe field itsel£12

The process of delegation is the social alchemy whereby a collection ofindividuals - ’natural persons’ as Coleman (1974,14) calls them - emergesfrom serial into collective existence. This involves a two-fold movementFirst a group of social agents (G) appoints a body of deputies to staff theofficer-machinery of the organisations (0) devised to promote their specificinterests. This institutional objectification testifies to the existence of thegroup as such: a corporatio is bom out of a collectio personarium plurium.Second, through the institution representative of the group, a spokesperson(S) is nominated to perform public presentations of the collective. But theentitlement to speak for is pregnant with the ability to speak in place of WhatBourdieu (1984b, 52) calls the ’oracle effect’ is precisely this ’legitimatetrickery’, whose possibility is rooted in the very logic of delegation, wherebythe leader passes his words, and thus his world, off as those of the people herepresents, and imposes his own definition of their situation, condition, andinterests. This process may be shown schematically in the followingdiagram: _ -

.

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To understand the social conditions that give the act of publicrepresentation its symbolic efficacy, it is necessary to analyse theinstitutional screen standing between the group and its spokespersons (c£Suaud, 1984). This is done by Maresca in the second part of his book (LocalElites) where he offers a genetic sociology of two forms of the field of peasantorganisations, a quasi-monopolistic one and a competitive one. These casestudies bring into focus the specific mediations by which the generaldeterminants of the transformation of the farmer’s world come to yieldhighly diverse types of regional organisational spaces. The political weight ofeach ’micro’-peasantry, the ’class capacities’ (Wright, 1978, 98) it has

developed locally, its role in the regional political economy, the type of linksits elite entertains with the dominant occupations of the place and with thestate, all these intervening variables explain the degree of relative autonomyenjoyed by each regional (sub)field of farmers’ organisations, and thence itsparticular structure and rules of functioning. Here the progressive politicalmarginalisation of the peasantry and the redistribution of the Church’s ruralactivities have allowed the landed bourgeoisie to beleaguer all the rulingpositions of a monopolistic field, and afforded them control over themanagement of a rural depopulation turned into a systematic selection ofpeasants (Maresca, 1980); there the agricultural field remains under thesway of politics and a fierce competition pits fractions of the class, and theunions which stand for them, against one another, so that diametricallyopposed presentations of the peasantry are continually performed.

Maresca is intent, however, on showing not so much the work ofdelegation proper as the work devoted to the dissimulation of the actualprocesses of delegation Riding on the assumption that ’the mechanisms ofdelegation involve also the delegation ofcontrol over these very mechanisms’(1983, 56), he devotes the remainder of Les dirigeants paysans to an

investigation of the sophisticated strategies ofpresentation which the leadersunfold as they address themselves to different audiences (Part III, ’TheRepresentation of the Peasantry). For their performance to convey

successfully an adequate definition of the social identity of the collective,peasant leaders must have recourse to discrepant images of themselves. As’peasants among peasants’, they reaffirm their bond to the common farmerand lay claim to the goodwill attached to the legacy of the past and to the fadof ecologism; as ’coming agriculturalists’, they signal their readiness toembrace modernity and face up to economic challenges; and it is qua’members of the ruling elite’ that they wish to appear in negotiations withrepresentatives of the state, whose high status they aspire to (Maresca, 1983,197-8). The complexity and contradictions that beset the theatricalisedperformances peasant leaders put out are inescapable: they are a function ofthe objective dispersion of farming practices and of the correspondingdiversity of possible representations of the peasantry (Maresca, 1981; 1984).The ambivalence of the symbolic appeals of the leaders is fundamentallyrooted in the divided structure of the field of peasant organisations and in

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their own contradictory class location. As the dominant fraction of adominated group, the leaders cannot afford to not foster a unitarypresentation of the peasantry, if only because they need to secure thecooperation of the state in order for its work of ’legal consecration’(Maresca,3, 1983, 268ff) to make a real group out ofa metaphysical one.l3 Bymeans of an overcoded idiom geared to attract both the traditional peasants ofyesterday - the dominated, declining fraction of the class - as well as themodem agriculturalists of tomorrow - the dominant, reconverted fraction- they succeed in mobilising both in a regrouping of the peasantry that putsthem forward as the vanguard of an up-and-coming occupation.

Speaking in the name of a collective produced by and for their symbolicactivity, peasant leaders manage to impose, de facto as well as de jure, the(professionalised) definition of the agricultural activity that best suits them.It is no wonder, then, that their selection foreshadows, in miniature, thatwhich is subsequently operative in the class as a whole, and that the type offarmer they are stands as the true prefiguration of what farming is becoming.Says Maresca: ’The unity of the peasantry defined in professional terms isthus a selective unity that is permanently conducive to its own strengthening,by the selection of its members on the basis of their conformity to the normsof the profession’ (1983, 281).

Thus, under given social conditions, ’the symbolic strategies that aim atimposing the partial truth of one group as the truth of the objective relationsbetween groups’ (Bourdieu, 1982a, 23) prove to be a success: to describe is toprescribe (cm Bourdieu, 1981b). A corollary of Maresca’s demonstrationsuggests that Merton’s theorem, according to which ’the self-fulfillingprophecy ... operates only in the absence of deliberate institutional controls’(Merton,1968, 490, my emphasis), is to be reversed as follows: self fulfillingprophecies operate owing to the presence and smooth working of definiteinstitutional arrangements that actively produce and reproduce the belief(illusio) necessary for the field to function and ’make things come true’. Acogent application of this revised dictum may be found in Bourdieu’s own’lecture on the lecture’, in which the freshly installed professor turns theweapons of his theory towards himself and adumbrates a reflexive sociologyof the mechanisms which ’effect the act of delegation whereby the newmaster is authorised to speak with authority and which institute his word aslegitimate discourse, delivered by the proper quarter’ (1982 a, 7). Ifone agreeswith Pierre Bourdieu that ’every proposition set forth by [the science ofsociology] can and ought to apply to the sociologist himself (1982a, 8; 1978),one can hardly conceive of a tighter fit between the theory and the practice ofsociology than that exhibited in his pamphlet

THE ‘MAKEABILITY’ OF SOCIAL FIELDS

Many may prophesy, but few are successful prophets. The miracle ofcharisma - in Marxian terminology, the fetishism of leaders - and the

75

generation of social collectives become intelligible when attention is shiftedfrom either the individual agent (inclined to think and act with a sociallydetermined systematicity) or the social structures (fields) to the relations inwhich they stand. To effect this shift presupposes a two-fold rupture withestablished modes of theoretic activity (Bourdieu, 1980a, 43-50, and ch~ 1 , 2,9). On the one hand, phenomenological approaches (interactionism,ethnomethodology, symbolic anthropology) explicate the primaryexperience of the world, the common sense of reality as natural and taken-for-granted, but fail to interrogate the social conditions which make this veryexperience possible in the first place. On the other hand, objectivist forms ofknowledge (such as structuralism, functionalism, human ecology) solve theinterrogation at the cost ofvoiding this practical perception which is part andparcel of the system of objective relations they seek to construct. ForBourdieu, however,

The anthropologist can neither be contented with recapturing andunderstanding the spontaneous consciousness of the social fact, consciousnessthat by definition cannot be reflected, nor, even less, with apprehending such afact in its objective truth, because of his privileged position of an external

,I observer who renounces the right to &dquo;act the social&dquo; in order to think about it.I He must reconcile the truth of the system of objective relations and the subjective

certainty of those who live them (Bourdieu, 1969, 704, my emphasis).

The solution Bourdieu offers to escape this theoretical dilemma is itselfmeta-theoretical. It consists in developing a ’praxeological form of

knowledge’, that is, ’knowledge not only of the system of objective relations’but also of’the dialectical relationships between these objective structuresand the structured dupositions in which they become a reality and which tendto reproduce them’ (Bourdieu, 1972, 162-3). Thus aiming at a dialecticalAufhebung of subjectivism and objectivism, Bourdieu forcefully rejects thecommonplace and ritual opposition of the individual and the social, ofpersonality and culture, of consciousness and the ‘thing ness’ of social facts.He advocates the use ofrelational reason (c£ Bourdieu,1969;1980a,11 ff ), sothat one forgets substances and focuses instead on the processes that permitthe mutual penetration of the subject-ive and the object-ive realities ofsociety, or, as he puts it, ’the intemalisation of externality and the

externalisationofinternality’ (Bourdieu, 1972,163). This (meta-) theoreticaltranscendence is not attempted by grafting together interpretive sociologyand ’structurology’ and by practicing a subtle eclecticism, but rather byunhinging sociology’s habitual conceptual apparatus and working out anoriginal set of categories purposely designed to grasp the mode of productionof social practices: ’To escape the realism of the structure, which treatssystems of objective relations as substances by converting them into wholesalready constituted outside the history of the individual and the history of thegroup, it is both necessary and sufficient to pass from the opus operatum to themodus operand4 from statistical regularity or from algebraic structure to theprinciple of the production of this observed order’ (Bourdieu, 1973a, 63).

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Against those theories that picture practices as sequences of acts resultingfrom the mere execution of a model or as the rational pursuit of freely chosenend-goals, Bourdieu (1982a, 18) asserts that

the principle of historical action ... lies in the relation between historyobjectivised in things, in the form of institutions, and history incarnate in thebodies, in the form of this matrix of durable dispositions which I callhabitus.

An habitus is a system of lasting and transposable dispositions to perceive,ratiocinate, evaluate and act which is the incorporated product of

socialisation, that is, of one’s integrated social experiences. Each class ofsocial conditions engenders a type ofhabitus which tends to perpetuate theseconditions by functioning as the principle of the generation and structurationof practices and representations. Thus Bourdieu speaks of the habitus as the’product of structures, producer of practices, and reproducer of structures’,the ’unchosen principle of all choices’, the ’durably generated principle ofregulated improvisation’ or the ’generative grammar of practices’.14 In placeofthe deceptively self-evident relation between the individual and the society- the subject and the structure, the actor and the system - he then proposesto substitute the constructed relation between the habitus and the fieldWhence the generative formula explaining social practices reads (Bourdieu,1979 a, 112):

With this formula, we are coming full circle and completing Bourdieu’smodeL As noted in the introductory remarks, this model is closely integrated,so that each concept takes on its full meaning and analytic efficacy only whenplaced within the heuristic ensemble ofwhich it is but a part; more important tthan any one element of the framework is the system of the relations that linkthem. Also apparent at this stage is the enrichment of sociological resourcesresulting from the use of the notions of habitus and field. The habitus is amediating concept, a theoretical operator capable of expressing at once theorganised and the organising properties of social and mental structures, aswell as the recursive processes of their interpenetration and mutualdetermination The notion of field, in turn, prompts a search for invisible,relational properties, as opposed to mere empirical manifestness. Hence thisintellectual tool is instrumental in helping to sidestep the traps of realism andmechanism: the influence of the milieu on the actor cannot be reduced to adirect stimulus-response schema, but rather it is commanded by the totalstructure of the relations between the social positions spanning the space ofthe field and mediated by the actor’s categories of perception, evaluation, andaction

There is, however, no real way to explain in abstracto the innovativenessof Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus. By his own admission concerning thenotion of field (1982a, 38-46), only case studies may properly do the job.

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Maresca’s Les dirigeants paysans is precisely this. It discloses with craft thestructural homologies that connect the fields of peasant presentations, ofpeasant organisations, and of social classes, and that determine the impact ofthe leaders’s symbolic labour. Furthermore, Maresca gives clear indicationof the makeability of social fields; his analyses incontrovertibly supportBourdieu’s contention that ’social fields are fields of forces but also fields ofstruggles for the transformation or the preservation of these fields of forces’(1982a, 46). In short, social structures are not meta-social realities thatexternally constrain behaviour, but historical products whose very making isthe stake of constant objective and subjective, material and symbolic strifes,as each group seeks to carry its vision of society in order to dissemble theobjective underpinnings of its efforts to protect or improve its position. It is inthis sense that the subjective realm has objectivity (Bourdieu, 1979a, 561-4;1980a, ch. 9; Boltanski, 1979), which is to say that social representations haveundisputable reality and power insofar as the symbolic guidance theyprovide may evoke action that affects the material structure of

societyBourdieu’s paradigm implies a strict agreement of theory and research

strategy that is highly conspicuous in Maresca’s research. It is not

coincidental that the latter brings together biographical, historical-

institutional, and statistical analyses. Confronting the life stories and lifehistories (Denzin, 1970) of peasant leaders, and relating them to theinstitutional conditions of their selection, reign and eventual dismissal,allows Maresca to show how rapidly-evolving agricultural structures

produce the agents most likely to propitiate transformations respectful of thesocial distribution of power and privilege in the French peasantry. Abifurcate focus on men and structures (1983, Introduction) is the

methodological translation of a theory of practice predicated on the

conceptual dyad of habitus and field.Likewise, Maresca’s remarks on method (1983, 17-28, 180-1, 231) tie in

directly with Bourdieu’s involuted discussion (1982a, 24-32; 1979c) of theepistemological obstacles that stand in the way of a science of society. Ifsociology strives with moot success ’to become a science like the othe’rs’, thecauses are not logical so much as socio-logicaL For no one, least of all thesociologist, is to be granted (systematic) access to the backstages ofinstitutions, where the spectacle of the props and works of social

presentations reveal the potential fragility and, more importantly, thearbitrariness of the established social order. To be sure: in order to endure,any social hierarchy must have a material grounding, thus the symbolicsystems that reinforce domination are always, to some degree, cum, fundamento in rei Yet they are devoid of the natural necessity they professand ascribe to the material relations they legitimise, the gap between

actuality and necessity being filled by symbolic violence. The urgent need toconstruct - and practice - a sociology of sociology (Bourdieu, 1982a, 9,23;Bourdieu, 1980b, ch. 6) is therefore not a matter of mere ’intellectualo-

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centrism’ ; it flows directly from the requirement to include in scientificanalysis the act of scientific construction itself Only when sociologistscomprehend the social determinants of theoretic activity in general(Bourdieu, 1980a, Book One, ’Critique of Theoretical Reason’), and of thesame applied to the dominant institutions of class societies, may they fullyassess the true limits and value of the knowledge they produce.

CAVEATS

Since the purpose of this paper is to expose the bare-bones features ofMaresca’s work in relation to Bourdieu’s framework so as to map out thebasic contours of the latter, I have emphasised the coherence and the meritsof both A complete review of their shortcomings would require a lengthydiscussion that is not possible here. I will nevertheless mention severalcaveats that might form an ouline for a systematic critique of Bourdieu’stheories.

First, arguments sometimes read as tautologies (for example, Maresca,1983, 236-7) or as circular definitional exercises. No doubt this difficulty ispartly a matter of vocabulary and method of exposition, but it is also due tothe closure of Bourdieu’s conceptual system which makes it hard to turn out ofthe hermeneutic circle of analysis. Once a notion is called in, all the othersseem to be mandated as well and to provide ready-made answers to whateverquestion the researcher may have. This recursivity and closing of theanalytic apparatus induce, on the one hand, much conceptual ambiguity, aswhen species of capital proliferate in a somewhat loose fashion (Di Maggio,1979, 1468), or when the analogy between economic and cultural capitalblurs crucial differences by reducing them to their lowest commontheoretical denominator. On the other hand, and quite paradoxically, theymay arrest enquiry precisely where it should be pursued further by falselyimparting the sense that the problematic has been fully elucidated. Collins(1981,181 ) has noted that’ in constructing an overly closed system, Bourdieuand his colleagues tend to hide the real struggles of organizational interestgroups that make both the content of past history and the key to our owntimes’. Admittedly, there is an ever-present danger, that the explanatorypower of Bourdieu’s theory, if applied uncritically, may have the counter-intuitive effect of generating pseudo-explanations.A second problem has to do with the form of Bourdieu’s explanations and

with his approach to causality. Bourdieu has no use of linear and teleologicalconceptions and misses few opportunities to belabour both empiricists andfunctionalists on the simplicity and falsity of their notion of determination(Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970, esp. ch. 4 of Book 2; Bourdieu, 1980d;1982, 48).

Again and again, he argues that

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&dquo; ~

the structural causality of a network of factors is thoroughly irreducible to thecumulated effects of the ensemble of the linear relations, of different

, explanatory power, ... that are established between the different factors takenone by one and the practice under consideration. Through each of the factors is

. exerted the efficacy of all the others, the multiplicity of determinations leadingnot to undeterminacy, but to overdetermination’ (Bourdieu, 1979a, 119).

Bourdieu’s notion of over determination’, however fertile it has proved at hisown hands, is in serious need of clarification: what precisely differentiates itfrom the teleological and fatalist version of the concept, worked out byAlthusser and his followers, that he so vigorously attacks? How is one toascertain the hierarchy of the variables included in such ’networks ofinterrelated relationships which are present in each of the factors’? In whatways, then, is the social actor more than a mere trdger of an habitus thatregulates even improvisations? How exactly does agency intervene indeterminative sequences and make the perpetuation of structures

problematical? Jon Elster(1983, 69-70,106) faults the French sociologist forsuperimposing ’a strange amalgam of intentional and functional

explanations’ on a ’straightforward causal account’, and for lacking ’amechanism’ for validating what he reads as functional analyses of strategiesofcultural distinction While Elstet’s critique is itselffaulty, since the habitus(that is, the incorporation of objective structures in the form of corporeal andmental schemes) supplies just such a mechanism, it does point to a nest ofepistemological and methodo-logical questions posed by Bourdieu’s

explanatory strategy, the complete resolution of which is still lacking. Such aresolution may well demand that the assumptions under which we areaccustomed to confront these questions - the repression of the philosophicalgrounding of social theory, the ritual separation of the operations of research,the distinction between theory and epistemology on the one hand, betweentheory and method on the other, our accepted typologies of explanations -be themselves called into questionl6

Third, concern should be expressed over the theoretical disregard for therole of the state that characterises Bourdieu’s conception of the social space.The fact that it was not entered in the indexes of his three most importantbooks (Bourdieu, 1972; 1979a; 1980a) indicates that the state is conpicuouslyabsent from Bourdieu’s picture. Recent efforts to remedy this flaw and set thestate at the heart of the theory of symbolic violence have led to its(re)definition as ’the agency which possesses the power oflegitimate naming,Lie., the power enabling official imposition of the legitimate view of the socialworld’ (Bourdieu, 1984,118). To define a concept, however, is not proof omitsanalytic potential, and it remains to be shown how much Bourdieu is able toget out of such a restricted definition, one that may eventually entrap him inexactly the kind of subjectivist position he rejects: the reduction of relationsof domination to sheer relations of signification. The French social theoristwill have to go well beyond issues of nomination and classification if, as Ibelieve, his scheme is to contribute decisively to class analysis. For the state

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does considerably more than assign titles and impose taxonomies: it also

manages a gigantic web of bridges between fields (legal, political, economic,social, cultural) whose boundaries, barriers to entry, and specific stakes it caneasily alter, by force if need be, thereby greatly affecting the structuration ofclasses. The question arises, then, as to whether state power constitutes aspecies of capital sui generis and state institutions a field quintessentiallydifferent from other fields.

Fourth, too exclusive a focus on symbolic relations and activity often leadsto an underestimate of the material determinants of the recombining of socio-economic structures. It is striking that Maresca touches so little upon thecentral transfonnative trends of the rural economy and upon the changingplace of farming in the national economy of France (on the penetration oftechnological and financial capital into agriculture, the emergence of newmarkets, the dissolution of the domestic community, the ’urbanification’ ofthe countryside, and so on. Now, it is true that both Bourdieu and Marescaiterate that the symbolic cannot be severed from the material: the relativeautonomy of systems of meanings refers, in the last analysis, to their relativedependency upon material social relations. Yet the reader unpracticed inBourdieu’s sociology may very well be overcome by the opposite impression,especially if reading Lefon sur la le5on alone without prior knowledge ofBourdieu. The difficulty here is that, having posited that symbolic power’adds’ its own force to more fundamental relations of force, Bourdieu, andMaresca after him, concentrate on the exercise of the former and leave thelatter largely unexamined. And while there is no question that

representations fortify domination inasmuch as they manage to ’deny’ it, onemust realise that material determinations also operate without the mediationof symbolic systems (for example, by setting absolute limits to possiblechanges). In other words, the analysis of the securing of asymmetric relationscannot be equated with that of their obscuring alone.

In fact, Bourdieu’s own discretion to state bluntly the radically materialistfoundation ofhis theory ofpractice may result in numerous misreadings ofit’especially in idealist veins, a la Berger and Luckmann. This makes it all themore necessary to recall his agreement with Marx’s discovery that ’theultimate principle of [the complete system of objective and symbolicrelations] resides evidently in [the economic] mode of production’(Bourdieu, 1972, Foreword). In the concluding paragraph of Distinction(1979a, 564), the French theorist takes pains to emphasise the limits of therelative autonomy enjoyed by symbolic representations:

It is enough to have in mind that the classificatory schemes which underlie thepractical relationship that agents entertain with their condition and therepresentation they may have of it, are themselves the product of thatcondition, in order to see the limits of this autonomy. position in the struggleover classifications depends on position in the class structure.

Bourdieu is a materialist by epistemology, although not a realist (c£Bourdieu et aL, 1973). Indeed his theoretical ambition is to foster the advent

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of a ’generalised materialism’ (1980a, 34) in the social sciences, one thatwould take as its pivotal premise the notion that ’the theory of strictlyeconomic practices is but a particular case of a general theory of practices’,including those which purport to be non-economic, since practices arealways ’aimed at maximising capital, be it material or symbolic’ (1980a, 209;also 1980b, 25ff.).A final defect of Bourdieu’s sociology is the hollowing while it contains a

creative and powerful theory of social reproduction, it falls short of offeringanything close to an equally comprehensive theory of social transformation.To assert bluntly that ’his work becomes a machine for the suppression ofhistory’ (Jenkins, 1982, 279) or that his model ’is an abstract picture ofinvariable domination, without the possibility ofcontradiction or revolution’(Collins, 1981,181) is quite unwarranted, for Bourdieu has written both onthe constitution of history and on the social determination of revolutionaryaction; his studies of the destruction of the Algerian peasantry (Bourdieu andSayad, 1964) and of their contradictory integration within the urbaneconomy (Bourdieu, 1977c) alone suffice to blunt such censures. It is nonethe less true that Bourdieu is but marginally concerned with historicalrupture, and that his scheme is ill-equipped to throw light on what Giddens(1981, 23) calls ’episodes’ - conjunctures and processes of social change ’inwhich definite structural transformations occur’.

In a seminal article entitled ’Death Seizes the Living’ where he examineshow ’the heaviness ofhistory reified and incorporated... tends to reduce thepossible to the probable’, Bourdieu (1980d,13) identifies ’lags’ betweenobjective and subjective structures as the key condition of social breaks. Anddispersed throughout his voluminous writings are the rudiments of a

conception of structural change. Relevant variables would include theintrusion ofexternal forces, divergent patterns ofevolution (reproduction) inthe partially autonomous fields that make up a society, brutal disjunctionbetween the subjective expectations of actors and objective probabilities,growth in the forces of production, and deliberate collective action. Yet thesenever assume more than the status of isolated, negative specifications (howreproduction breaks down), rather than that of elements of a systematicmodel of structural change (how transformation occurs). This residualcharacter of Bourdieu’s perspective on transformation is graphicallyillustrated in his theory of class strategies: the same blanket concept ofreproduction is applied to all classes, irrespective of their position in thesocial order. But surely dominated groups, however much they may colludein their own domination, do not only act in ways that help perpetuate theirsubmission. They also resist, revolt, devise shields against oppression; inJean Comarofl’s (1985,1) apt wording, they ’acquiesce yet protest, reproduceyet seek to transform their predicament’. Here Bourdieu’s one-dimensionalmodel appears insufficiently dialectical to treat adequately what may betermed strategies of subversion.

Despite a noticeable shift of emphasis from reproduction (1970) to

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practice (1972) to strategic improvisation (1980a), Bourdieu’s work remainsinchoate in its analysis of the dynamics of structural transformation. This, inmy opinion, is its chief shortcomin~ the theory of reproduction cries out for acomplementary theory of historical production.When employed in concrete analysis, Bourdieu’s model becomes more

precise and clear in its logical structure, as well as in its limitations. Hisproblematic not only takes its place at the centre-stage of contemporarysocial theory. it challenges many of its time-honoured premisses andcategories. It has demonstrated its imaginativeness in opening up new andconverging avenues in the study of culture, identity, political representationand the making ofsocial groups. It remains for students ofclass, ethnicity andsocial movements to put the scheme to work on their front and realise the

promises it holds for them.It has not been possible to dwell at sufficient length on all the complexities

and implications of Bourdieu’s oeuvre, and of the research it has stimulated.Hopefully, it should be clear that they stand as programmatic harbingers ofan important new current in social analysis: a tertium quid betweeninterpretive approaches and structural sociologies, and one based on aconsistent, if incomplete, epistemological and theoretical overhaul of bothtraditions. The time may be ripe for speaking about the coming of age of anew ’school’ in French sociology.17 If this is so, then it is crucial, both for itand for a critical science of society, that it not remain exclusively Frenchtoo long.

NOTES

1. Portions of this article were presented in the ’Social Theory’ session at the 63 rd Annual SpringInstitute of the Society for Social Research, The University of Chicago, April 4-5, 1986. I amindebted to Gerhard E Lenski for criticisms and comments on an earlier draft; to John LComaroff, Douglas Anderton and Yong-Hak Kim for suggestions and advice in the final revisionof this essay; and to William Julius Wilson for his constant intellectual and moral support of mywork. Needless to say, any (mis)interpretations and judgments are my own. Early editorialassistance from Pete Lauri is gratefully acknowledged All translations from the French aremine. Direct all correspondence to the author, Department of Sociology, The University ofChicago, 1126 East 59th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637 USA.

2. For Bourdieu (1977a), symbolic systems (myths, language, art, science, social taxonomies) arethree-faceted. Structuring structures, they constitute forms by means of which we order andconstruct an understanding of the world (for example, the Sapir-Whorfhypothesis for language).They have this structuring property by virtue of being structured struccures, that is, objects orinstruments of communication whose internal logic can be uncovered through structuralanalysis (Saussure’s conception of language). Lastly, symbolic products are instruments ofdomination (Marx on ideology): matrices of representations that make social agents perceive thesocial order and its structures of power as founded in nature rather than history (Bourdieu,1979a, 549; also Grignon, 1971, Conclusion; Dumont, 1984). A key background reference herewould be Durkheim and Mauss’s (1963) seminal study of primitive forms of classification.

3. The Durkheimian roots of Bourdieu’s perspective come fully into view when one relates thisnotion of ’taken-for-grantedness’ to Durkheims’s ’hidden theory of order’ recently systematisedby David Lockwood (1982). Also, the idea that domination may be exercised by sustaining a tacitagreement to keep certain kinds of countervailing claims from being articulated at all stemsdirectly from Bourdieu’s critical reading of Weber.

4. The italicised terms are borrowed from Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) lexicon and should be read assuch.

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5. Elsewhere:’The subject matter of social science is a reality that encompasses the totality of thestruggles, individual and collective, which aim at preserving or transforming reality, andin particular those struggles in which the object at stake is the imposition ofthe legitimatedefinition of reality and whose specifically symbolic efficacy can contribute to thepreservation or subversion of the established order, that is, of reality itself (Bourdieu,1980a, 244, my emphasis).

6. The use of Goffman’s (1956) terminology here is more than circumstancial: I hold that what

analytical ingeniousness Goffman employed to expose the rules of the presentation of individualselves in social interaction, Maresca devotes to the study of the presentation of collective selves ininstitutional activity.

7. For instance, on culture, c£ Raymond Williams (1973, 47-9; 1982, ch. 2, 3, 7) and Wacquant(1985). On class, see Katznelson’s (1981, 201-9) search for a ’dispositional’ level in class

structuration; Przeworski’s (1985, 93-7) parallel discussion of the links between social relationsand individual behaviour; the conceptual affinities with the neo-Weberian ’closure’ problematicof Parkin (1979). Thompson (1984, 42-72, 130-35) offers a critical appraisal of Bourdieu’scontribution to the theory of ideology; his chapter on ’Symbolic Violence: Language and Powerin the Writings ofPierre Bourdieu’ stands out as one of the best pieces yet written on the Frenchsociologist; see also Godelier (1984, 167-220, esp. 199-205). The similarities, agreements anddisjunctions between Bourdieu’s ’theory of practice’ and Anthony Gidden’s (1979, 1984) ’theoryof structuration’ are so numerous and involved as to demand a study of their own.

Limitations of space also preclude a much-needed situation of Bourdieu within the field ofFrench sociology and its traditions; for this, readers should consult Karady (1982) and Lemert(1981); Bourdieu’s own account of the relevant intellectual lineages is given in Bourdieu andPasseron (1967) and in the long socio-analysis which opens his Le sens pratique (1980a, 7-41). Asto the work inspired by Bourdieu, I give, wherever relevant, references to key publications thatillustrate his concepts and theories, most of which have appeared in Actes de la Recherche enSciences Sociales, the journal Bourdieu founded and edits.

8. Here as elsewhere, quotations are taken from Leçon sur la lecon to have Bourdieu comment uponMaresca’s sociological undertaking (bracketed terms are mine).

9. It is the one Roberto Michels described in his classic study on Political Parties. It was also found,for instance in the United States, in black political groups (such as the NAACP and the UrbanLeague) and the United Auto Workers Union. If this is to be considered the ’normal’ pattern, afruitful line of further research would be to investigate under what conditions (organisationalcrisis, loss of legitimacy, rapid social change, and so on) other patterns eventually emerge andendure (suggested by G.E. Lenski in personal communication).

10. See ’A Three-Dimensional Space’ and the diagrammatic synopsis of the French social space inBourdieu (1979a, 128-144, 140-41). A very compact and lucid statement in English of thesystematic relations between changes in strategies of reproduction and changes in the socialstructure is the ’Epilogue’ (77-97) written by Bourdieu for the translation of Les heritiers(Bourdieu and Passeron, 1964).

11. Bourdieu (1982b) coins the term ’instituting rite’ (in place of rite of passage) to draw attentionfrom the crossing of the line to the consecration and legitimation of the arbitrary limit that theline symbolises, and which separates not so much a ’before’ and and ’after’ as those whom the riteconcerns and those whom it does not (a good case in point would be an academic examination, cf.Bourdieu, 1981c).

12. A field is always ’a field offorces and a field ofstruggles whose goal is to transform the relations offorces conferring this field its structure at a given point in time’ (Bourdieu, 1981 a, 3). An earlytheoretical, yet concrete, articulation of the concept is found in Bourdieu’s (1971 b) study onWeber’s sociology of religion; the historical formation and general properties of the fields ofproduction of cultural goods are set forth systematically in Bourdieu (1971c and 1977b); aparticularly powerful application of the notion is made in the course of a radical critique ofAmerican sociology of science (Bourdieu, 1976a). For further illustrations dealing with the fieldsofcomic strips, French academics, and the management of the elderly respectively, see Boltanski(1975), Bourdieu (1984c), and Lenoir (1979, esp. 61-8).

Bourdieu’s characterisation of the field is, at times, strongly reminiscent of Goffman’sdefinition of the structure of the encounter, with its ’membrane’, ’rules of irrelevance’, ’realisedresources’, and ’transformation rules’ (cf. Goffman, 1961, 19-66). But whereas Goffman’sconcept is inter-individual in focus and emphasises the fluidity of structure as the outcome of

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(largely indeterminate) strategies, Bourdieu’s field concerns institutionalised practices andtreats strategies as precipitates of structural relations. It may be added in passing that, contrary toa common opinion, the author of Distinction is not, as some of his ’more Americanized French

colleagues’ like to picture him (Lemert, 1982, 52), a sort of ’French Goffman’. He is indeedsharply critical ofinteractionism and ethnomethodology as brands ofsubjectivist sociology thattend to reduce relations of domination to mere relations of communication and fail to

acknowledge the political functions that symbolic systems fulfill (see Bourdieu, 1979a, 563;1980a, 98, 235, and240). A detailed critique of Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology from a similartheoretical standpoint is offered by Boltanski (1973).

13. The circular transmutation of social distinctions into political, and whence legal ones(Champagne, 1984; Bourdieu, 1980a, 229) is a key process in the formation of groups and woulddeserve extended comparative research.

14. Definitions of the habitus abound in Bourdieu’s writings. It is more important, however, to seehow the concept works in actual analysis (e.g., Bourdieu, 1972; 1980a, Book 2, ’Practical Logics’,esp. ch. 3; 1982c; 1983; Bourdieu and Delsaut, 1981) and to note that Bourdieu’s centralexplanatory concept is not an abstract habitus but the class habitus (cf 1979a, ch. 3, 5-7).

15. For instance, the perception by students of their objective probability to reach a given academiclevel is one of the real, yet hidden, mechanisms by which the elimination of lower-class childrenproceeds, inasmuch as they develop strategies that tend to exclude striving for degrees fromwhich their class-fellows have hitherto been excluded, thus contributing to their very ownexclusion. Representations mediate the reproduction of structures as the probable becomescausative (Bourdieu, 1974; 1977c, 67-81).

16. A related difficulty lies in Bourdieu’s stance on the assumed continuities and discontinuitiesbetween the social and the natural sciences. On the one hand, he makes heavy use ofmethodological prescriptions borrowed from the latter to thwart a regression into speculativesocial theory (Bourdieu et al., 1973) and urges to consider sociology as ’a science like the others’.On the other hand, his whole work demonstrates incontrovertibly that there is a fundamental riftbetween the study of nature and that of society: faits sociaux, unlike natural facts, have a dualexistence, one material and the other symbolic, and phenomena ofsymbolic violence are specificto the social realm. This makes sociology an inescapably historical and political dsicipline (cf.Bourdieu, 1979c). How these two elements mesh together is not altogether clear.

17. For Bourdieu is equally ’a highly effective entrepreneur of sociology — as teacher, as editor of adistinguished periodical, and as leader of a talented and creative group ofresearch scholars’. Thatthe above quotation should be excerpted from Parson’s (1968, 319) assessment of Durkheim ismeant to invite attention, not to the hagiographic connotations of the personal comparison, butto the slow process of institutional crystallisation that Bourdieu’s scheme is undergoing.

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Ms. accepted 10 April 1986