Date: Tue, 05 Dec 1995 00:57:42 -0600 (CST)
From: KERRY <MACDONAK-AT-Meena.CC.URegina.CA>
Subject: Re: "BODY"/practice/social agents


Vicki Carrington <Vicki.Carrington-AT-jcu.edu.au> queried:
::From my reading of Bourdieu it is my understanding of class that it should
::be seen as a transitory theoretical category which could be applied to any
::number of characteristics, rather than to purely economic ones.  This
::leaves the way open for application of Bourdieu's sociology to
::characteristics such as gender, race and ethnicity -- these and other
::characteristics have the potential to form the basis of class
::classifications rather than a purely economic positioning within particular
::fields.


IMO "class" in Bourdieu's framework would be highly dependent upon which field
one was interested in studying as fields essentially identify "areas of
struggle".  Thus "class" would be a concept which would describe the objective
(given Bourdieu's provisos on  epsitimology) connections between people arising
out of the four forms of capital available to them within that field and the
practices that constituted the dynamics of the field. 

Secondary writings on Bourdieu do "accuse" him of havinng a "model of classes
and class relations ... at best, taken for granted and at worst untheorised:
classes are 'just there'." (Jenkins, PIERRE BOURDIEU, 1992: 117).  Which
ironically I believe he would actually concur with (given his purchance of 
negating the concept of "theory" in favour of "thinking tools" which are
constructed by one's research).  

Class becomes a term dependent upon it's context, not a term with a particular
definition (in the sense of what is the foundation of an asymtrical group
relationship as opposed to the idea that such formations exist arising out of
power relations).

kerry