From: S.Pines-Martin-AT-iaea.org
Subject: RE: Field
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1998 15:32:42 +0200


>-----Original Message-----
>From:	Mitchell D. Wilson [SMTP:lobster-AT-mail.utexas.edu]
>Sent:	Sunday, 27. September 1998 21:28
>To:	bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>Subject:	RE: Field
>
>Hi, Sergio. I'm trying to distinguish between Bourdieu's theories and other
>people's interpretations of them? Like when you wrote:
>
>" I guess that "society in itself" *is* already "in the abstract" (the term
>itself a historical contingency), that "field" is a tool for relationally
>constructing adequate explanations of social *phenomena*, and that it
>involves an understanding of "historical contingencies" and of the logic of
>practices. Is this right? "
>
>Sergio
>
>Is this your thinking or Bourdieu's, especially the part about _historical
>contingency_? Could you please elaborate?
>
>Thanks,
>Mitch
>
>
>Hello Mitch, I'm sorry that I can't help you all that much with Bourdieu's
>theories, because I haven't yet gone beyond the stage of interpretation. What
>I wrote was just an interpretation, *especially* the part about "historical
>contingency". However, it does seem to me that what I said concerning the
>danger of reifying concepts like "field" and "habitus" is something that
>Bourdieu himself warns us of (Carsten Sestoft answered that Bourdieu does say
>something like this in the introduction to Homo Academicus, which I haven't
>read, and in other places - which I can't remember). I will try to
>elaborate...
>
>What I said about "historical contingency" was influenced by other things I
>have read, and I guess I shouldn't have said it - something just came to my
>mind when I read that concept in your first posting. I study anthropology,
>and was reminded of debates concerning the concept of "society". Some authors
>analyse the specifically Western construction of that term, which entails a
>mixture of "folk" and "savant" theory that has a cultural history of its own.
>They often criticise the ways in which we tend to think "the social",
>especially when we use it as a universal category and fail to see in which
>ways it entails a projection of world views that have a whole history behind
>them (our ways of classifying individual/social, whole/part, nature/culture,
>etc.). These debates run off into relativist/universalist problems which I
>think are not worth the bother.
>
>In any case, I was reminded that Bourdieu often calls to our attention that
>many categories used in social science are not sufficiently reflected in what
>concerns their sociohistoric biases, and that this can induce scientific
>errors (for example when some social phenomenon is taken as an empirical
>data, where it in fact entails a sociohistorically determined act of
>construction which must be taken into account, for example "professional", or
>"class", etc.). Hence (so I thought) even "society" requires a reflection
>into how this concept may come to be understood. Against the unreflected
>reification of everything social, which includes such categories as "society"
>(or "person", or "individual", etc.), it seems to me that Bourdieu
>constructs, with careful reflection, analytical tools for explaining social
>phenomena. So "field" and "habitus" are not in themselves social realities,
>but ways of reflecting and explaining social phenomena in empirically
>adequate ways --ways that can account for the greatest number of particular
>cases. They are neither pure ideations of an abstracted thought nor immediate
>realities, "givens", which thought passively reproduces. I am thinking
>especially of Bachelard's philosophy of science, from which Bourdieu draws a
>good part of his intellectual orientation - for Bachelard, a constructed
>phenomena always has greater explanative potential than a natural one;
>adequate scientific construction  offsets natural habits and resistances
>(substantialism, for example), effects a series of "breaks" with ingrained
>prejudices. Hence against our immediate apprehensions of social reality, we
>have a scientific process of *realisation*, explanation. For example, in our
>ordinary apprehension of social phenomena, we tend to categorise groups of
>people, or activities, or whatever, in ways that ascribe something like a
>social substance to them -- against this, the sociological analytic tries to
>reveal systems of relations, which, de-substantialised, explain the social
>phenomena that we apprehend in our usual ways, yet it does so *against* those
>usual ways. (And I believe that its "liberating" potential arises at the
>point where reflection, bridging our spontaneous perceptions and
>understandings of the social world, and our ratio-empirically mediated
>knowledge of its invisible determinations, optimises or re-orients the
>habituations that prop our conscious dealings with that world by an increased
>awareness of its structural dynamics and hence of possibilities for thought
>and action that were previously narrowed by our dispositions -- these
>dispositions, which are both, and inextricably, mental (the concepts we use)
>and embodied (the practices in which they are meaningfully embedded), are so
>hard to become aware of because they are so transparent, so immediate, so
>near to us, that it is hard to even suspect that they are there and hence to
>even think that they (we) could change. Bourdieu's "reflexive" sociology
>helps us then to rethink the categories of thought through which we actually
>think, to become aware of the practical bodily dispositions through which we
>are aware ... which is very difficult of course!) In this sense, society or
>person, as we usually understand these terms, are different from field or
>habitus although, in a last instance, they will inevitably recouple in our
>understanding. Again: that's how *I* understand this whole thing and how it
>is motivated.
>
>Sergio
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