Description
The interest aroused by such of Pierre Bourdieu's work as is already known in English has underscored the need for a translation of his major theoretical text on the foundations of anthropology and sociology, Outline of a Theory of Practice, which has already been recognized in France as a landmark in the progress of the social sciences.
Bourdieu's subtle and complex argument aims to develop an adequate theory of practice, necessarily embracing an adequate theory of scientific practice. With his central concept of the habitus, Bourdieu breaks out of the false oppositions which, for a generation, have shaped theoretical thinking about the social world: objectivism/subjectivism; structure/history; culture/personality; synchrony/diachrony; model/performance; langue parole; determinism/freedom; rule/improvisation; system/event.
Drawing extensively on his fieldwork in Kabylia (Algeria), with detailed study of matrimonial strategies and the role of rite and myth, but working towards a general theory of practice, Professor Bourdieu analyses the dialectical process of the "incorporation of structures" and the objectification of habitus, whereby through practices guided by a practical logic, in pursuit of objective interests social formations tend to reproduce themselves.
A rigorous, consistent materialist approach lays the foundations for a theory of symbolic capital and, through analysis of the different modes of domination, a theory of symbolic power.
This book which promises "to disconcert both those who reflect on the human sciences without practising them and those who practise them without reflecting on them" is of key significance to anthropologists and sociologists, but its iconoclastic arguments will also be of great importance to all those working in other intellectual fields who have encountered the structuralist "theoreticism" which Professor Bourdieu's theory combats.
