Pierre Bourdieu (1930 – 2002)

Although I'm now focussed on a totally different aspect of my research, namely the design, I'm still grappling with the knotty issue of what the core focus of my research actually is now. However, it is clear to me that I need to carry out a deep study of notions of 'community' and one possibility in exploring community more deeply is the idea of the 'symbolic community'. And this is where the name of Pierre Bourdieu has popped up in two different contexts, one an article about Identity and Citizenship, the other a talk about Discourse Analysis. The former noted Bourdieu as being an important theorist with regard to identity and, particularly, boundaries; the latter identified - amongst others - of his concept of 'symbolic domination', which struck me immediately as being a possible missing element in Communities of Practice theory (ie, power), which might tie in nicely with 'symbolic community'.

Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, andsymbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life. His work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment or forms in social dynamics and worldview construction, often in opposition to universalized Western philosophical traditions

The first sentence of Language and Symbolic Power is witty enough to encourage me to read on, despite what has been called Bourdieu's 'circularity' : "In the Essay on the Introduction of the Concept of Negative Grandeur in Philosophy, Kant imagines a man who is miserly by ten degrees and who strives towards brotherly love by twelve degrees, in contrast with another man who is miserly by three degrees and capable of a generous intention by seven degrees, and who produces an act marked by four degrees of generosity."

Review: "Linguists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, folklorists converge more and more today in studies of situated discourse. The link between the dynamics of situations and the dynamics of society as a whole goes largely neglected. For that articulation one needs the resources of a social theory. Here Bourdieu′s analyses of symbolic power and practice are our best resource; one might say they are indispensable. The starting point is not the uniform language of educational elites and formal linguists, but expressive styles; not social structure as fixed and given, but fields and fractions in which identities are ever–contested; power as collusion as well as compulsion; configurations that theory not only discloses but also effects; all in all, a perspective that is both sceptical and empirical, broad yet subtle, engaged and insightful." Professor Dell Hymes, University of Virginia