Biography Of Pierre Bourdieu: A Life Dedicated To Understanding Power Practices

Today we are going to expose a brief biography of Pierre Bourdieu, an influential figure in French intellectual life in the second half of the 20th century. His work is dominated by the sociological analysis of the reproduction mechanisms of social hierarchies.

Bourdieu is known for pioneering terms such as “symbolic violence”, “cultural capital” and “habitus”. Next, we will analyze his thinking and his main works.

The beginning of Pierre Bourdieu’s biography

Pierre Bourdieu’s biography begins with his birth on August 1, 1930 in Denguin (Pyrénées Atlantiques, France), in a poor house. He was an only child. His grandfather was a sharecropper and his father started out as a postman until he later became the postmaster. Pierre grew up in a small French town and studied at a nearby public school, before moving to Paris to study at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.

Young Bourdieu studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. After finishing his university studies, he got a job at Moulins High School. At this school, he worked as a philosophy teacher for a year. During this period, Bourdieu fulfilled his military obligations and, despite refusing to be trained as a Cadet Reserve Officer, managed to position himself in Versailles in the service of the psychological forces.

Pierre took advantage of his undeniable writing skills and acted in the administration of the General Assembly of Residence, under the command of Robert Lacoste. Between 1958 and 1960, Bourdieu conducted extensive ethnographic research during the Algerian war.

Bourdieu studied the conflict through the Kabyle people. The results of this study were published in his first book, Sociologie de L’Algerie ( Sociology of Algeria ). This work laid the foundations for his sociological reputation.

Work by Pierre Bourdieu

In 1960, after his stay in Algiers, Bourdieu returned to Paris and resumed his work as a professor at the University of Lille, where he worked until 1964. From 1964, Bourdieu held the position of Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études.

After the social upheaval of May 1968, Pierre founded the Center for the Sociology of Education and Culture. This center was linked to the Center for European Sociology, the research center he ran from 1985 until his death.

In 1975, he launched the interdisciplinary journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. This journal was important in transforming accepted standards of sociological production. In addition, the journal contributed to raising the scientific rigor of sociology. That same year, in collaboration with Jean-Claude Passeron, he published the book Os Hedeiros , a work that, without a doubt, is the basis of his success. Since 1981, he has been professor of the prestigious chair of Sociology at the Collège de France.

Bourdieu, in addition to his work as a professor, developed a great editorial work that allowed him to spread his thoughts. Recognition for his work did not take long to arrive and Bordieu received several national and international awards for his career.

In 1993, Pierre Bourdieu was the first sociologist to receive the Médaille d’or du Center National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). In 1996, he received the Goffman Prize from the University of California at Berkeley. Shortly thereafter, in 2002, he received the Huxley Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Bourdieu married Marie-Claire Brizard in 1962 and they had three children: Jerónimo, Emmanuel and Lauren. In the mid-1960s, he moved with his family to Antony, a southern suburb of Paris. He died of cancer in 2002. According to the Parisian daily Le Monde , Bourdieu was the most quoted French intellectual in the world’s press.

the cultural legacy

Bourdieu was an avid political activist and a staunch opponent of modern forms of globalization. His work employed methods spanning a wide range of disciplines: from philosophy and literary theory to sociology and anthropology. This scholar saw sociology as a weapon against social oppression and injustice.

Bourdieu used the weapons of the intellect to discover previously unknown mechanisms that contributed to perpetuating the separation and inequalities that existed between different social groups. He dedicated his life to fighting for a better world for everyone.

Bourdieu’s speech was accentuated in the last years of his life with new arguments against neoliberalism. Furthermore, he fought for civil society and the nascent world social forum.

This thinker was actively involved with unions and various NGOs. He remained close to immigrant defense movements and civic associations against neoliberal positions.

Perhaps one of the most significant steps that Bourdieu took was to contribute with two new concepts linked to sociology: habitus and field, in addition to reinventing the concept of capital.

His legacy for universal thought: symbolic capital

When analyzing Pierre Bourdieu’s biography, we see that he proposed a series of controversial concepts, which were criticized for their determinism.

A good example is the sociologist’s thesis that the school works by reproducing family, social and class differences. This function is performed when it selects and legitimizes the most culturally gifted individuals based on their family background. In this sense, according to Bordieu, the school is a means of social promotion, but, at the same time, it is an instrument of marginalization and discrimination.

Through this line of analysis, Bourdieu concludes that the social condition of the middle classes is based on resources extracted from the educational system, with their main capital being cultural.

Bourdieu distinguishes between economic, social and cultural capital. Social capital provides social bonds, prestige and belonging. In turn, social capital accumulates collectively, but in a highly selective and exclusive way.

For Bourdieu, all capital tends to become economic capital. The ultimate meaning of the accumulation of different types of capital is to improve the holding of symbolic capital.

Possession of different types of capital defines the person’s location on a map that draws different social spaces, also called fields. The social distances between the structures define the so-called social classes, which would “integrate” in particular, obeying the different distributions of economic and social capital.

These spaces or fields are occupied by agents with different habits and different capitals. They are agents for both the material and symbolic resources of the field.

Power theory: symbolic violence

Bourdieu postulated that the naturalization of the social world obeys a form of domination based on symbolic violence. According to Bourdieu, this symbolic violence is exercised by those who suffer it. They are the ones who perpetuate it, internalizing it as a feature of their own identity.

This premise proposes that this is the mechanism by which the forms of domination derived from the asymmetric distribution of capital are symbolically reproduced and naturalized.