The Importance of Place in a Groups Ethnic Identity - Assignment Example

Download file to see previous pages His work spans a broad range of subjects from ethnography among peasants in Algeria, to sociological analysis of nineteenth-century artists and writers, education, language, consumer and cultural tastes, religion, and science in modern French society. (p. 2)
Bourdieu’s major theoretical contributions to sociology are his notion of habitus and its associated concepts of social field and agency. Given the breadth of literature and uses of examples that Bourdieu produced in order to articulate these concepts, there is much room for interpretation of what they meant and how much social agency they afford to individuals. Nonetheless, this paper will explore the habitus, field, and agency in terms of the fluid dynamics of the current times.
In his dialogue with and his attempt to overcome pure objectivist thinking and pure subjectivist thinking, Bourdieu sought to clarify the dialectical relation between objective conditions and subjective conditions. He thus sought to clarify the dialectical relationship between characteristics of the material universe and the inner dispositions of the individual, between class conditions and feelings of class, between objective conditions and structuring dispositions. (Bourdieu 1990, p. 140) The concept which was most decisive for Bourdieu’s attempt to create dialectical relations between objectivity and subjectivity was the concept of habitus. According to Bourdieu:
Bourdieu considers gender as more important in terms of shaping identity than, say, the family (Bordieu sees the family as a fiction and a social artifact, a well-founded illusion because it is produced and reproduced with the guarantee of the state and operates as a central site of normalization and naturalization.). This underscores how past experiences figure in the concept of habitus. In a commentary, Beverly Skeggs explored this and to quote:
Bourdieu thus stressed that early experiences in life determine how people act later in life, which emphasizes these experiences in the formation of habitus. Through its systematic choices of information, places, events, and people, habitus will seek to protect itself against crises and critical challenges. ...Download file to see next pagesRead More