Bourdieu was born on August 1, 1930 in France. He was said to have been a "provincial, lower-class student first at Pau and then in Paris". He was very unhappy during those days. He later studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supreieure with classmates Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Bourdieu taught in a secondary school for a short while before completing compulsory military service in Algeria. While there, he did some fieldwork on Kabylian kinship, ritual and pre-capitalist economy. He also studied the effects of colonization and decolonization. In 1958, he published his findings in Sociologie de l'Algerie. In 1964, with co-author Abdelmalek Sayad, he published Le deracinement, which also dealt with that ethnography.
In the 1960's he became a research assistant, working with philosopher and
sociologist Raymond Aron.
Bourdieu also studied the French school system in the
1960's. Les heritiers : Les etudiants et la culture (The Inheritors),
co-authored with Jean-Claude Passeron in 1964, was their analyses of class
bias in higher education.
He said, “school
actually reproduces the cultural division of society in many visible and
invisible ways despite its apparent neutrality.” Bourdieu studied various power
structures in teaching.
“Sociology of education is not a secondary discipline. It is the core of any
sociology.”
As a professor at the academically
prestigious College de France, Bourdieu came to the attention of the public in
1993. He had co-written a 1000-page book, which was a collaboration with other
sociologists. Over 100,000 copies were sold in a very short time. The book,
La misere du monde, was a compilation of short sociological analyses and
long transcripts of interviews with inhabitants who in France were called
"difficult" or "sensitive neighborhoods".
Bourdieu
had made a speech against American cultural domination which President Jacques
Chirac referred to in a press release to intensify Chirac's Gaullist
orientation. Chirac also noted Bourdieu's interest in "the suffering of
the lower classes and "cultural diversity". Bourdieu was honored by
Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin when Jospin referred to Bourdieu's
"engagement against 'liberal globalization and the cultural and social
damages it causes'." Pierre Bourdieu is very serious in his
search for the “universal sociological process.” Bourdieu was called "an
intellectual cosmopolitan who made many key foreign-language texts in
anthropology, sociology, history, and philosophy available to the French
public". He had many author's books translated into French, such as
Radcliffe-Brown, Gregory Bateson, and Edward Sapir, to name only a few. He also
had Ernst Cassierer and Herbert Marcuse translated from German to French and
Mikhail Bakhtin from Russian to French. A very high value was placed on
the "international circulation of ideas" by Bourdieu. He was a prolific
author and highly regarded social scientific researcher in his own right.
His book, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste,
published in 1984, is considered to be the sixth most important twentieth
century social scientific work. In 1993, he received the CNRS Gold Medal and
later the RAI Huxley Memorial Medal and Lecture in 2000. Pierre Bourdieu died of cancer in
a Paris hospital on January 23, 2002. He was seventy one years old. “Bourdieu and the status of the post-modern self” by
Jeff Hannold http://www.concentric.net/~Jhonnold/writing/Bourdieu.shtml, Oct 5, 1999. “Homo
Academicus”
http://varenne2.tc.columbia.edu/www/hv/rev/bourdieu_academicus.html, Oct 14,
1999. “Philosophical
Perspective of Open Learning” by unknown
edtech.oulu.fi/openeng/mat/filosof.htm, Oct 14, 1999. Anthropology Today, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Apr., 2002) pp. 5-9. Theory and Society, Vol. 32, No. 5/6, Special Issue on the Sociology
of Symbolic Power: A Special Issue in Memory of Pierre Bourdieu (Dec., 2003),
pp. 519-528. Written by: Kendra Kay Engelstad Edited by: Lillian
Dolentz, 2008
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