Bourdieu’s Dyad: On the Primacy of Social Space and Symbolic Power

Author(s):  
Loïc Wacquant
Keyword(s):  
2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Loïc Wacquant ◽  
Aksu Akçaoğlu

In 2014–2015, Aksu Akçaoğlu was a visiting scholar in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he had come to work with Loïc Wacquant on his research on “the conservative habitus” in contemporary Turkey (with the support of the TÜBİTAK Science Program). In this dialogue, he invites Wacquant to explicate the philosophy and pedagogy of his celebrated Berkeley seminar on Pierre Bourdieu. This provides an opportunity to revisit key conceptual nodes in Bourdieu’s work, to spotlight its anti-theoreticist cast as well as the influences of Bachelard and Cassirer; to clarify the relationships between social space, field, and symbolic power; and to warn against the seductions of “speaking Bourdieuese.”


1998 ◽  
Vol 93 (1) ◽  
pp. 94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Julian Smith
Keyword(s):  

1989 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Bourdieu
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Karl von Holdt

Pierre Bourdieu is the quintessential theorist of domination and social order. South Africa presents an exemplar from the Global South—fractured, contested, disputative, disorderly, violent. This chapter examines Bourdieu’s concepts of order through the jagged realities of South African society, at the same time exploring South African society through the conceptual lenses provided by Bourdieu, and in the process rethinking both. The author uses this double reflection to rethink Bourdieu from a Southern perspective, recovering a potent passage from Bourdieu regarding the “margin of freedom” from the tyranny of habitus and field provided by the concept of symbolic power. The chapter reconstructs the concept of political field to provide for multiple overlapping, mutually unintelligible, and subversive fields of practice occupying the same social space, thus accounting for double meaning, ambiguity, violence, and subaltern agency in the making and unmaking of social order.


Author(s):  
Yonah H. Matemba

AbstractThis article analyses the complexities of religious identity and stakeholder discourse concerning religious education (RE) reform in Scotland and Malawi. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of ‘social space’, it explicates the extent to which religious identity and conflicts over symbolic power in the social space of RE reform engender polarised debates imbricated by entrenched ideological positions because agents’ discourse in the social space draw on elements of their particular culture, tradition, spiritualties, and theologies. A comparative analysis of qualitative data from Scotland and Malawi reveals stakeholders’ reflections, frustrations, and insights on the conflicting nature of religious identity in the discourse of RE reform in a social space where symbolic struggles are inimical to the production of common sense. Despite the data arising from two countries with different socio-cultural contexts—one African and religiously conservative (Malawi), the other European and secular-liberal (Scotland)—the findings reveal similar challenges regarding how agents engage with RE reform in the social space, and the complications that religious identity engenders in that dynamic.


Asian Survey ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Gorman

This article explores the relationship between netizens and the Chinese Communist Party by investigating examples of “flesh searches” targeting corrupt officials. Case studies link the initiative of netizens and the reaction of the Chinese state to the pattern of management of social space in contemporary China.


This book offers new conceptual vocabularies for understanding how cultures have trespassed across geography and social space. From the transformations of the meanings and practices of charity during late antiquity and the transit of medical knowledge between early modern China and Europe, to the fusion of Irish and African dance forms in early nineteenth-century New York, the book follows a wide array of cultural practices through the lens of motion, translation, itinerancy, and exchange, extending the insights of transnational and translocal history. The book challenges the premise of fixed, stable cultural systems by showing that cultural practices have always been moving, crossing borders and locations with often surprising effect. The chapters offer striking examples from early to modern times of intrusion, translation, resistance, and adaptation. These are histories where nothing—dance rhythms, alchemical formulas, musical practices, feminist aspirations, sewing machines, streamlined metals, or labor networks—remains stationary.


1970 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Heru Kurniawan

Literasi ekologi sosial Islam adalah interaksi manusia dengan lingkungan alam, teknologi, dan sosial yang didasarkan pada prinsip dasar Islam. Rekonstruksi literasi ekologi sosial Islam yang bisa direkonstruksi adalah prinsip dasar Islam yang menegaskan posisi manusia sebagai “pemimpin” yang diberi “amanah” untuk mengelola “bumi” atau “lingkungan alam dan sumber daya alam” sebaik-baiknya. Rekonstruksi literasi ekologis inilah yang kemudian akan diaktualisasikan pada masyarakat. Proses aktualisasi adalah kegiatan aktual dalam menanamkan kesadaran ekologi sosial Islam pada masyarakat yang mana dilakukan dalam ruang sosial keluarga, masyarakat, dan sekolah yang diorganisasi oleh negara melalui kebijakan dan peraturan per undang-undangan. Dengan proses rekonstruksi dan aktualisasi yang terstruktur ini, maka negara akan aktif membangun kesadaran ekologis sosial Islam dengan aktif dan terstruktur dengan baik guna mewujudkan basis kesadaran, ilmu pengetahuan, dan tata nilai ekologi sosial Islam pada masyarakat. Literacy on Islamic social ecology is the human interaction with the natural environment, technology, and social which is based on the basic principles of Islam. Reconstruction of literacy on Islamic social ecology that can be reconstructed is a basic tenet of Islam that affirms the human position as a "leader" by "mandate" to manage "Earth" or "natural environment and natural resources" as well as possible. Reconstruction of ecological literacy is then to be actualized in society. The process of actualization is actual activity in instilling awareness of the social ecology of Islam in the society which is done in the social space of families, communities, and schools organized by the state through policies and regulations. With the process of reconstruction and actualization, then the state will actively build social-ecological awareness of Islam in order to realize a base of awareness, knowledge, and values of Islamic social ecology in society.


Author(s):  
Ruslan Rafisovich Hasanov

On the basis of the archetypic analysis of development trends of a conflictological paradigm the author’s model of minimization of conflict potential in modern society is offered. Institutional construction is the basis for model that is harmonized with a factor of societal identity.It is noted that the problems of social conflicts, according to data from monitor- ing studies of the Ukrainian school of archetype, are increasingly shifted into the sphere of interpersonal relations. It is stimulated by the progression in society of so-called self-sufficient personalities, the “subjectification” of the social space, and at the same time narrowing down to the solution of entirely specific situations in which there is a collision of the interests of two or more parties.Instead, in order to find the optimal solution for resolving the conflict, it is necessary to have interdisciplinary knowledge, in particular understanding of the deep nature of such conflicts. Collision of points of view, thoughts, positions — a very frequent phenomenon of modern social life. In order to develop the correct line of behavior in various conflict situations, it is important to adequately under- stand the nature of the emergence of the modern conflict and the mechanisms for resolving them in substance. Knowledge of conflict nature enriches the culture of communication and makes human life and social groups not only more calm, but also creates conditions for constructive development. It is proved that in modern life one can not but agree with the statement that an individual carries first re- sponsibility for his own life and only then for the life of the social groups to which he belongs. And while making decisions within the framework of modern mecha- nisms (consensus), the properties of human psychology such as extroversion, emo- tionality, irrationality, intuition, externality, and executive ability will not at least contribute to such a task.That is why in the author’s research attracted attention to the archetypal na- ture of the conflict — the primitive images, ideas, feelings inherent in man as a bearer of the collective unconscious.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document