Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1998 14:41:51 +0000
From: R.J.R.Cook-AT-reading.ac.uk (Roger Cook)
Subject: Re: abstraction or sociology ?


Dear Karl and Carsten and all,
        These quotes from Bourdieu's 'Conclusion:Conclusion: For a
Sociogenetic Understanding' would seem relevant to your discussion:


In fact, as I have said hundreds of times, I have always been immersed in
empirical research projects, and the theoretical instruments I
was able to produce in the course of these endeavors were intended not for
theoretical commentary and exegesis, but to be put to use in
new research, be it mine or that of others. It is this comprehension
through use  that is most rarely granted to me, especially abroad -
although more and and more often I receive works that, instead of endlessly
repeating commentaries and somewaht monotonous
criticisms on habitus or some other concept of my making, are making use of
a modus operandi closely related to mind.
.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .
.        .    .        .    .    .    .        .            .    .    .
.    ...one cannot grasp the
most profound logic of the social world unless one becomes immersed in the
specificity of an empirical reality, historically situated
and dated, but only in order to construct it as an instance (cas de figure)
in a finite universe of possible configurations.
Pierre Bourdieu ;Conclusion: For a Sociogenetic Understanding' 271-2

Also this on ontology:

I would not, however, speak of an ontology, unless one is ready to acept
the (truly oxymoronic ) notion of an *historicist ontology*. As I
demonstrated in an old article entitled "The dead seizes the living," being
- that is to say, history - exists in the embodied state as habitus and in
the objectified state as fields. Habitus being linked to the field within
which it functions (and within which, as is most often the case, it was
formed) by a relationship of ontological complicity, the action of the
"practical sense" amounts to an immediate encounter of history with itself,
through which time is engendered. Ibid:273-4


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