File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_2004/bourdieu.0405, message 2


Date: Thu, 13 May 2004 16:40:58 +0200
From: Erik Hoogcarspel <jehms-AT-xs4all.nl>
Subject: Re: [BOU:] Hello and question re Bourdieu and altruism


David Brake wrote:

> 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?
>
You'll find the most elaborate answer probably in 'Raisons Pratiques' 
(Ed. du Seuil - Paris 1994 - sorry, I don't know the English title and 
even not if it has been translated) ch. 5: "Un acte désinteressé, est-il 
possible?'('Is a desinterested act possible?').

hth

erik
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