Our usual representations of the opposition between the "civilized" and
the "primitive" derive from willfully ignoring the relationship of
distance our social science sets up between the observer and the
observed. In fact, the author argues, the relationship between the
anthropologist and his object of study is a particular instance of the
relationship between knowing and doing, interpreting and using, symbolic
mastery and practical mastery--or between logical logic, armed with all
the accumulated instruments of objectification, and the universally
pre-logical logic of practice.
In this, his fullest statement of a theory of practice, Bourdieu both
sets out what might be involved in incorporating one's own standpoint
into an investigation and develops his understanding of the powers
inherent in the second member of many oppositional pairs--that is, he
explicates how the practical concerns of daily life condition the
transmission and functioning of social or cultural forms.
The first part of the book, "Critique of Theoretical Reason," covers
more general questions, such as the objectivization of the generic
relationship between social scientific observers and their objects of
study, the need to overcome the gulf between subjectivism and
objectivism, the interplay between structure and practice (a phenomenon
Bourdieu describes via his concept of the habitus), the place of the
body, the manipulation of time, varieties of symbolic capital, and modes
of domination.
The second part of the book, "Practical Logics," develops detailed case
studies based on Bourdieu's ethnographic fieldwork in Algeria. These
examples touch on kinship patterns, the social construction of domestic
space, social categories of perception and classification, and
ritualized actions and exchanges.
This book develops in full detail the theoretical positions sketched in
Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice. It will be especially
useful to readers seeking to grasp the subtle concepts central to
Bourdieu's theory, to theorists interested in his points of departure
from structuralism (especially fom Lévi-Strauss), and to critics eager
to understand what role his theory gives to human agency. It also
reveals Bourdieu to be an anthropological theorist of considerable
originality and power.
