File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_2004/bourdieu.0405, message 3


From: Timo Lindman <timolindman-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: [BOU:] Hello and question re Bourdieu and altruism
Date: Thu, 13 May 2004 10:53:05 -0400




On May 13, 2004, at 10.40 am, Erik Hoogcarspel wrote:

> 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?').
>
Published in English as "Practical Reason:  On the Theory of Action" in 
the US by Stanford (perhaps Polity in the UK?)


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