Date: Sun, 07 Jan 2001 15:25:26 -0800
Subject: Re: NYTimes.com Article: Social Status Tends to Seal One's


thanks for this. much appreciated. s. fuller.
iAt 02:11 AM 1/7/01 -0500, you wrote:
>This article from NYTimes.com 
>has been sent to you by Antariksa (milis address) milismilis-AT-indonet.com.
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>Social Status Tends to Seal One's Fate, Says France's Master Thinker
>http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/06/arts/06BOUR.html
>
>January 6, 2001
>
>By EMILY EAKIN
>
>PARIS   By almost any measure, Pierre Bourdieu is France's most
>influential intellectual. A professor of sociology at the Collge
>de France, an exclusive government- supported think tank for the
>academic A- list, he also holds an appointment at the prestigious
>cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales, edits a leading
>sociology journal and oversees a popular imprint of works of social
>criticism.
>
> Mr. Bourdieu's name appears in the French press almost weekly.
>Important literary journals have dedicated entire issues to his
>work. His last three books have been best sellers. When he speaks
>out against free-market economics or anti-immigration legislation,
>it is national news. Last month, a two-and-a-half-hour documentary
>about Mr. Bourdieu titled "Sociology Is a Combat Sport," had its
>premiere. 
>
> Nor is his influence limited to France. The International
>Sociological Association named his "Distinction: A Social Critique
>of the Judgment of Taste" one of the 20th century's 10 most
>important works of sociology. And in American universities, his
>work is enjoying a vogue of the sort not seen since the ideas of
>the last big French theorist, Jacques Derrida, hit American shores
>in the 1970's. 
>
> Mr. Bourdieu, in short, has "symbolic capital" in spades. The
>term, one of several for which he is known, means, roughly, social
>status, and in the grand theoretical schemes he has elaborated over
>the last four decades, it is all-important. Human society, in Mr.
>Bourdieu's view, resembles nothing so much as a fiercely
>competitive contest in which status is the ultimate prize. To do
>well, it helps to have economic capital (financial assets), social
>capital (networks of connections, a good Rolodex) and cultural
>capital (specialized skills and knowledge, an Ivy League diploma).
>
> Of course, except for the wealthiest and best-educated, most
>people have little capital of any kind at their disposal. And, Mr.
>Bourdieu says, most stand little chance of obtaining any. In many
>ways Mr. Bourdieu's is a dark vision featuring perpetual class
>conflict, largely futile struggles for power and prestige and a
>society divided between the dominators and the dominated. 
>
> "The point of my work is to show that culture and education aren't
>simply hobbies or minor influences," Mr. Bourdieu said in French
>during a recent interview in his office, a modest but elegant room
>at the Collge de France in Paris's Latin Quarter. "They are hugely
>important in the affirmation of differences between groups and
>social classes and in the reproduction of those differences." 
>
> At 70, Mr. Bourdieu is a soft-spoken, gray- haired man with a
>gravelly chuckle and a kindly smile. He is surprisingly unassuming
>for someone whom many French regard as possibly their last great
>matre penseur or "master thinker"   a title previously awarded to
>such sweeping philosophers of social existence as Sartre and
>Foucault. 
>
> Everyone, he argues, comes into adult life with a predisposition
>to succeed or fail, what he calls "habitus": a set of deeply
>ingrained experiences that in important ways limit one's
>performance. 
>
> A basketball player's ability to sink a shot during a
>high-pressure game, for example, is not only a function of natural
>athletic skill but also of habitus: the number of hours he has
>practiced, the encouragement from his coach, his psychological
>expectation of success. At a social level, habitus describes the
>way people internalize class distinctions and how that makes
>movement up the ladder difficult. "Habitus is not fatal," said Mr.
>Bourdieu. "But unfortunately it can move only within very limited
>parameters. It's like a little computer program that guides one's
>choices."
>
> Unlike other grand systematizers to whom he is indebted   Foucault
>and Marx prominent among them   Mr. Bourdieu has tested his ideas
>through detailed field work. 
>
> In more than two dozen volumes dense with charts, statistics and
>often impenetrable academic prose, he has taken on one aspect of
>French culture after another, from the state-subsidized
>universities to the pundits who regularly turn up on the evening
>news to that most celebrated if ephemeral of national attributes:
>taste. In each case, he has sought to demonstrate how social
>conventions and institutions, even in a democracy officially
>dedicated to equal opportunity, mostly serve to maintain the status
>quo with its widespread inequalities. 
>
> Admission to France's elite "grandes ecoles" (the equivalent of
>Ivy League schools), for example, is determined purely on the basis
>of performance on a national exam. But when Mr. Bourdieu analyzed
>several classes of admitted students, he found that the
>overwhelming majority were children of the upper classes. They were
>both more likely to take the exam in the first place and to use the
>kind of cultivated language and analytic reasoning apt to be judged
>favorably by examiners.
>
> "The French school system appears to be meritocratic but in fact
>it's very conservative," Mr. Bourdieu said. "Education, which is
>always presented as an instrument of liberation and universality,
>is really a privilege." 
>
> Partly because of his emphasis on cultural rather than economic
>factors, Mr. Bourdieu's work on education initially had few
>enthusiasts in the United States. 
>
> "Many of us," said David Swartz, a sociologist at Boston
>University and the author of "Culture & Power: The Sociology of
>Pierre Bourdieu" (University of Chicago Press, 1997), "thought that
>money   the ability to pay tuition or purchase a house in a
>neighborhood with a good public school   was what explained unequal
>attainment and performance in school.
>
> "What Bourdieu contributed was to say cultural socialization was
>the explanation. He was writing in a country where education was
>tuition-free and one still found enormous class differences in
>attainment and performance.' 
>
> Similarly, when "Distinction," Mr. Bourdieu's book on taste,
>appeared in English in 1984, the reaction was lukewarm. His
>exhaustive analysis of the class implications of everything from
>potluck dinners and table etiquette to book and newspaper
>preferences encountered resistance from American sociologists. 
>
> This resulted partly from a conviction that, as Douglas Holt, a
>professor of marketing at the Harvard Business School, put it,
>"we're not a class-based society and that status works in a crasser
>way here: it's driven by money, not culture." Moreover, even
>researchers interested in class had found that consumption habits
>did not tend to reveal very much about class affiliation: you
>cannot distinguish rich from poor on the basis of who shops at the
>Gap or listens to Eminem. 
>
> Lately, however, "Distinction" has found more sympathetic readers.
>"People were taking Bourdieu too literally," said Mr. Holt, who has
>applied some of Mr. Bourdieu's theory in his own work. "Distinction
>can happen through objects, but that's not Bourdieu's theory.
>That's a simple theory of status goods. His idea is that if you own
>certain pieces of difficult modern art or enjoy difficult pieces of
>Bach, you have developed the cultural apparatus to enjoy these
>things. You have to study how people consume rather than what they
>consume."
>
> In Mr. Bourdieu's analysis, perhaps no group comes off as badly as
>intellectuals. Because they tend to be people with prestigious jobs
>and educational credentials, writers, pundits and academic experts
>reinforce the idea that knowledge is the exclusive possession of
>the social elite, he argues.
>
> His most withering attacks are directed at what he calls "total
>intellectuals," charismatic self-promoters who abuse their special
>social status and the public trust by speaking out on issues   from
>the war in Bosnia to peace in the Middle East   on which they have
>no real expertise. 
>
> In his best-selling 1996 polemic, "On Television," Mr. Bourdieu
>denounced talk-show commentators as "fast thinkers" who substitute
>"cultural fast food"   politically sanitized sound bites and clich
>s   for substantive argument. And he has not hesitated to name
>names. 
>
> Which is why, in Mr. Bourdieu's own estimation, in addition to
>being France's most visible thinker, he may be its most villified
>as well. "I have a lot of enemies," he said. 
>
> Some detractors charge him with oversimplifying social reality.
>"He sees life as a zero-sum-game, in which we're all struggling to
>maximize our social position," said Michele Lamont, a sociologist
>at Princeton and the author of "The Dignity of Working Men:
>Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class and Immigration"
>(Harvard University Press, 2000). "In my work, I found that rank is
>not based on social position alone. Morality is also very important
>and may act as a deterrent in the pursuit of social advantage." 
>
> Others accuse him of trying to create universal concepts out of
>conditions peculiar to France. In the United States, for example,
>some critics point out, intellectuals tend to have nowhere near the
>same kind of public visibility or clout. Others dismiss his work as
>a "sociology of the obvious." Is it news to anyone that the
>education system isn't really meritocratic?, these critics ask. 
>
> But by far the most frequent complaint is that Mr. Bourdieu is a
>hypocrite: How can France's most successful academic-intellectual
>expect to be taken seriously as a critic of academic and
>intellectual life? 
>
> As Alain Finkielkraut, a well-known political commentator and
>target of Mr. Bourdieu's attacks, put it in a recent essay, unlike
>everyone else, "when he speaks, apparently it's the truth talking."
>Jeannine Verds-Leroux, a historian, gathered her objections into
>an emotionally charged book titled "The Wise Man and Politics: An
>Essay on the Sociological Terrorism of Pierre Bourdieu."
>
> There is no question that Mr. Bourdieu is an exemplary product of
>the social system he attacks. "He's the ultimate scholarship boy,"
>said Robert Darnton, a historian at Princeton who describes Mr.
>Bourdieu's work as an "inexhaustible source of insight" for his own
>research on 18th-century France. "He's won every scholarship, every
>prize. He began from very humble roots and now dominates the summit
>of French intellectual life." 
>
> It is hard not to see in Mr. Bourdieu's own career a glaring
>exception to his sociological rules. Born into a poor family in a
>tiny village in rural southwestern France, he spoke Gascon, now a
>moribund regional dialect, until he started elementary school. His
>father was an itinerant sharecropper turned postman who never
>finished high school. All in all, not circumstances conducive to an
>auspicious habitus, especially for an aspiring master thinker. 
>
> Mr. Bourdieu's father was determined that his son should succeed,
>and he enrolled him at the region's best high school. Eventually he
>won admission to the cole Normale Superieure, the traditional alma
>mater of French intellectuals. But he denies that his own story
>contradicts his thesis, contending that by letting in a token
>number of students from the lower classes, the system maintains the
>illusion of meritocracy. 
>
> Though Mr. Bourdieu graduated at the top of his class, he was
>repulsed by the Parisian intellectual milieu. "A lot of what I've
>done has been in reaction to the cole Normale," he said. "I think
>if I hadn't become a sociologist, I would have become very
>anti-intellectual. I was horrified by that world." 
>
> A stint as a teacher in Algiers during Algeria's war for
>independence led him to abandon philosophy for social science. His
>first several books, ethnographies about the plight of Algerians
>under French colonialism, were also implicit rebukes to the
>Parisian establishment. 
>
> "I thought that the French didn't understand a thing about what
>was happening in Algeria," he said, "in large part because the
>intellectuals holding forth on the issue didn't know anything about
>it." 
>
> The last thing he wanted or expected, Mr. Bourdieu insists, was to
>become part of the intellectual establishment. He said he rebuffed
>overtures from the College de France for three years in a row.
>Finally, in 1981, he relented. 
>
> "It was a horrible trial for me," he said. "I didn't want to join
>the College mostly because of this idea that I was going to become
>a big deal. My father died the same year and I think I linked these
>two events psychologically. I had six months of virtual total
>insomnia." 
>
> The worst part of the ordeal, he said, was delivering his
>inaugural address, a centuries-old tradition in which incoming
>members present a speech   in his case, also published on the front
>page of Le Monde   to the entire College and various dignitaries,
>an audience that in Mr. Bourdieu's case included towering figures
>like Levi-Strauss and Foucault as well as the mayor of Paris and
>the French ministers of culture and education. 
>
> "Up until that very afternoon, he thought he wasn't going to
>go,"said Loc Wacquant, a sociologist at the University of
>California at Berkeley and a close friend. "It was like Sartre
>refusing the Nobel Prize. He just could not bring himself to
>participate in this ritual of public consecration."
>
> In the end Mr. Bourdieu overcame his revulsion and delivered his
>address. Its subject? A sociological critique of the cultural value
>placed on inaugural lectures.  
> 
>     
>
>
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