Practice and symbolic power in Bourdieu: The view from Berkeley

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Wacquant L., Akcaoglu A.

JOURNAL OF CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY, vol.17, no.1, pp.37-51, 2017 (ESCI) identifier identifier

  • Publication Type: Article / Article
  • Volume: 17 Issue: 1
  • Publication Date: 2017
  • Doi Number: 10.1177/1468795x16682145
  • Journal Name: JOURNAL OF CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY
  • Journal Indexes: Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), Scopus
  • Page Numbers: pp.37-51
  • Keywords: Bourdieu, practice, social space, symbolic power, anti-theoreticism, epistemological vigilance, the state as supreme fetish, research pedagogy
  • Middle East Technical University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

In 2014-2015, Aksu Akcaolu was a visiting scholar in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he had come to work with Loic Wacquant on his research on the conservative habitus in contemporary Turkey (with the support of the TuBTAK 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.