Subject: Re: discussion group
Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2001 14:16:29 +1030


Well, Neil et al, I have some questions for you.

I have some queries regarding applying Bourdieu's theoretical framework to
other peoples ethnographic material - I am but a humble Honours student and
as yet have not done my own field work. Therefore, discussion group bullies
can feel free the chew me up and spit me out.

I am wondering whether anyone can help me with their thoughts on the process
of the movement of social groups from being undifferentiated to
differentiated societies, an isue that may be important regarding the
process of globalization. This is an area of Bourdieu's work - the degree of
autonomy of fields and of differentiation of societies - that I see as being
quite ambiguous and unclear, and as far as I know quite unexplored (if I am
wrong I would love to have some references).
In his early work on the Kabyle adjusting to the new economic order, would I
be correct in saying that he was in effect examining a (relatively)
undifferentiated society's abrupt introduction to participating in fields
that are relatively autonomous? (I believe he had not developed his notion
of field at this time)

I am wondering , as an extreme example, can (what have been called) cargo
cults and millennial movements be understood as the result of
undifferentiated societies (I will stop writing 'relatively') embracing
forms of capital that have emerged from differentiated societies (be it
material goods/economic capital or spiritual/religious capital), which
results in these valued resources being seen as inextricably tied to other
forms of capital - as they would be in undifferentiated society where
religious and ecological, moral, economic and kinship relations are
inextricably linked. Maybe the misrecognition that occurs in these
'movements' is a kind of commodity fetishism, or capital fetishism, in which
the reification of certain resources is a result of them being seen as
necessarily indicative of ones position in the field of power - in contrast
to differentiated societies where forms of capital possessed stand in
competion and autonomous to other fields and their respective forms of
capital, used in competing to maintain or improve ones standing in the
social order.

So my questions are: To what degree do undifferentiated societies have
undiffentiated forms of capital? Are valued resources conflated as being
understood as just a kind of abstract of 'power' which is misrecognized, for
example, as 'honour' etc.?
Or, is this an overly simplified understanding of capital in
undifferentiated societies? I imaging maybe different people have different
resources at their disposal that are reconginize as distinct valued
resources - is it just a distinction between cultural and economic capital,
e.g. temporal/material and religious?  Or, are forms of capital conflated
(undifferentiated)?

Justin.

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