File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_2004/bourdieu.0405, message 1


Date: Thu, 13 May 2004 10:40:59 +0100
From: David Brake <david.brake-AT-cfrq.net>
Subject: [BOU:] Hello and question re Bourdieu and altruism


I am a PhD student at the London School of Economics studying weblog and 
personal home page creation using field theory and I am delighted to find 
this mailing list which I am sure will be very helpful in my wrestling with 
the application of Bourdieu to my field of study. (Note: I can read French 
reasonably well but am not all that fluent in writing it. By coincidence 
however my wife is French! I assume this list is predominantly in English...)

My first question is how can I account for altruistic behaviour in a field? 
A number of personal home pages appear to have been created solely to help 
others because the Internet acts as a "force multiplier" enabling people to 
help large numbers of others with little effort of their own. Bourdieu, 
however, appears very skeptical of altruism (eg. Outline of a theory of 
practice p. 22 - altruism's purpose is  "to compound the satisfactions of 
enlightened self interest with the advantage of ethical impeccability"). 
Does he discuss altruism in any more detail elsewhere? Do you think one can 
consider something a field that contains altruistic behaviour?

If people are interested and would like to know more I have written a short 
(3000 word) paper addressing this problem but I don't feel I have come to a 
satisfactory solution.

Does anyone have any ideas? And is anyone else out there applying Bourdieu 
to studies of the Internet or personal web publishing in particular?

David Brake, PhD researcher in Media and Communications, London School of 
Economics & Political Science
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media-AT-lse/study/mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm
Also see http://davidbrake.org/ (home page) and http://blog.org/ (weblog)
Author of Dealing With E-Mail - http://davidbrake.org/dealingwithemail/ 
gives ordering info and supplementary links

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