from bourdieu to cultural sociology

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DOI: 10.1177/1749975510397861 2011 5: 3Cultural Sociology

Marco SantoroFrom Bourdieu to Cultural Sociology

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From Bourdieu to Cultural Sociology

Marco SantoroUniversity of Bologna, Italy

AbstractThis paper offers an account of Bourdieus rise to sociological stardom in the last 30 years, giving special attention to the transnational dimensions of this process. It discusses the scope and relevance of his work to the field (in the making) of cultural sociology, showing how he contributed to its current form. It also presents the articles which constitute the contents of the journal special issue. The paper insists on the importance of assessing both the virtues and limits of Bourdieus intellectual legacy through the means of historicization and sociological self-understanding, these being preconditions that allow the furthering of the progress of reason which Bourdieu himself located as at the core of scientific endeavours.

KeywordsBourdieu, cultural sociology, sociology of culture, cultural production, cultural consumption, intellectual legitimation, sociological theory

Introduction

Pierre Bourdieu was the author of almost 30 books and 400 articles and oral publica-tions.1 A decade after his death in 2002, these contributions continue to engage readers inside and outside of sociology. Yet Bourdieu is not big news today. While his right to a place in 20th-century sociologys pantheon is generally granted, one might be tempted to say that hardly anything new could be added to what has already been said or written over the last few decades about him and his work. This is not the view put forward here or in the other papers which follow. For all his success and impact, Bourdieu is, and will probably remain, like Erving Goffman, a very controversial figure for both his numerous detractors and his sympathizers, the latter themselves being very heterogeneous in nature. There is no consensus today as to what the true significance of his work may be.2

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Corresponding author:Marco Santoro, University of Bologna, Dipartimento di Discipline della Comunicazione, via Azzo Gardino 2340122 Bologna, ItalyEmail: [email protected]

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4 Cultural Sociology 5(1)

But paradoxically a lack of consensus would not have deterred Bourdieu himself, for he was someone who famously praised the capacities of la crise to foster heterodoxy in social science and thus intellectual development and progress (Bourdieu, 1988). We might even say that the success of Bourdieus sociological contribution is directly pro-portional to the debate and controversy it has been able, and continues to be able, to generate and foster, even against his own reputation. Indeed, this is what makes his leg-acy still worthy of discussion and analysis even after the thousands of pages written about it over the last decade. This is also what this special issue is meant to do: to create a venue where we can discuss some of the less debated and more controversial issues to do with Bourdieus work, especially with respect to cultural sociology. In what follows, I will first offer a brief account of Bourdieus rise to sociological stardom, with special attention to its truly transnational dimensions. Then I will discuss the scope and rele-vance of his work to the field (in the making) of cultural sociology. Finally, I will present the articles which comprise the rest of the special issue.

How to Become a Dominant (French) Sociologist

A relatively marginal character in the sociological world landscape still in the 1970s, Bourdieu saw his scholarly reputation increase exponentially from the mid-1980s onwards, propelled in large part by the English translation of La Distinction in 1984. Originally published in 1979 but based on research materials collected in the 1960s and on research already published in journals since the early 1970s, this book had a lasting impact on two research fields then in the making, each differently located in the global sociological field. These were the sociology of consumption, already strong in the UK, and the sociology of culture, which had been on the rise in the US since the mid-1970s, but only fully crystal-lized in the 1980s as a recognizable specialism in the sociological landscape (marked, for example, in the founding of a dedicated section in the American Sociological Association).

Distinction was not the first book authored by Bourdieu to be made available in English and to impress English-speaking readers. At least two others had been translated which had some impact in specialized networks and research programmes. Reproduction, a book Bourdieu co-authored in 1970 with his early collaborator Jean-Claude Passeron, very soon acquired the status of a landmark in education studies and the sociology of education. Outline of a Theory of Practice, published in 1977 and developed from a revised English translation of a book that had appeared in French in 1972, was Bourdieus first attempt at systematic theorizing of his previous, mainly ethnographic, researches in Algeria and rural France. Distinction addressed issues to do with cultural choices and tastes that were of wider appeal and were less esoteric than the topics broached in both of these early works, dealing with the practices and classifications of modern, Western people, rather than the apparently exotic rituals and strange myths of the Berbers. The impact of the book was pretty much immediate, with favourable reviews by well-known scholars like Mary Douglas, Anthony Giddens and Jon Elster. The election as professor of sociology at the Collge de France in 1980 had already been a clear indication that Bourdieus star was rising very high indeed. But nobody, I suspect, would have predicted in those years what Bourdieu would become in the following two decades as an author, as an intellectual, and as a symbol.


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Bourdieu became in the 1990s the most eminent French sociologist, as far as opinion outside of France was concerned. According to data collected in 2008 from the ISI Web of science (Santoro, 2008a), Bourdieu was in the period after 1990 the most quoted soci-ologist in the world, much more quoted than giants of contemporary social sciences like Goffman, Giddens, Habermas, Bauman, Coleman, Elias and Luhmann. It seemed that the humbly-born Bourdieu son of a village postman had succeeded in consecrating himself as an academic intellectual in a manner no other social scientist had been able to do in the same historical period.

It is no easy task to explain this huge and largely unforeseen success, especially as regards the many mechanisms and the many locales that the escalation of Bourdieus reputation has involved and encompassed. Bourdieus success and popularity became a global phenomenon, one thoroughly transnational in nature. If something like a truly global cultural economy does indeed exist, Bourdieu became one of its more markedly successful symbolic goods, at least in the academic sub-system of that economy. Translations of his works constitute a notable industry in itself, with divisions in many countries, as translations into Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, Finnish, Swedish, Greek, Catalan, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arab, Turkish and Hebrew, among other languages, attest (Sapiro and Bustamante, 2009).

The number of texts devoted to the elucidation and critical discussion of Bourdieus work increased greatly from the 1990s onwards, as did attempts to apply Bourdieus ideas to countries beyond France from Australia to the US, from Germany to Finland, from Great Britain to India, from Canada to Japan to Turkey, from the Netherlands to Hungary, from Laos to Poland, and so on (e.g. Bennett et al., 1999; Eyal et al., 1999; Lardinois and Thapan, 2006; Rehbein, 2007; Bennett et al., 2009; Zarycki, 2009). His sudden and untimely death in January 2002 acted as a further catalyst, being followed by a flow of obituaries, conferences, books and journal special issues devoted to him and his works, coming from a wide array of disciplines like sociology Bourdieus elected source of disciplinary identity at least since 1962 anthropology, archaeology, geogra-phy, history, political science, linguistics, science studies, literary criticism, cultural stud-ies, education, social work, medicine, and so on (see Santoro, 2008a for a lengthy bibliography, and for supplementary evidence the texts collected in Santoro, 20089; see also Goodman and Silverstein, 2009; Silva and Warde, 2010; Paolucci, 2010). Not con-fined to sociology nor indeed to the social and human sciences, Bourdieus studies and ideas on education, art, inequalities, media and politics, among many other issues, have influenced, inspired or concerned in the last few years varied artists, writers, playwrights and film-makers, as well as administrative bodies and political leaders, including even such unlikely figures as an intellectual revolutionary turned nationalist warlord in an ex-Soviet state (Derluguian, 2006).

This huge influence of the man and his works constitutes a sociological puzzle in itself, a puzzle that cannot be evaded by cultural sociologists, involving as it does vexed questions as to the construction of reputation and the aura of fame. We may well ask why Bourdieu?, as the title of a recent book by one of his ex-students puts it (Heinich, 2007). Why Bourdieu, his tortuous style of writing notwithstanding? Why Bourdieu, his strong Frenchness notwithstanding? Why Bourdieu, if certain prominent social scientists (e.g. Goldthorpe, 2007) have been and still are so dismissive toward him and his work?



Nathalie Heinichs answer to such questions in the book just mentioned is based on two arguments. First, Bourdieus success came out of his personal charisma being coupled with a talent in capturing generations of devoted students (see also Boltanski [2007] on this point). Second, Bourdieus career was a complex intellectual posture that merged scientific aura, political relevance and encyclopaedic knowledge. I will now try to expand this account a little, integrating it with some insights from the type of sociology of ideas that Bourdieu himself endeavoured to forge through his writings in the sociology of science, philosophy, and of sociology itself (Camic and Gross, 2001).

Bourdieus high levels of success in the social scientific field can be seen as a function (or an effect) of a complex mixture of strategy, contingency and the appeal of scholar-ship. Being both a gifted cultural entrepreuner and a sociologist of knowledge and science, Bourdieu was well aware that ideas do not circulate by their virtues alone or because of some mysterious inner force, but instead are socially driven and structured in complex ways. It is well known that he solicited some of his students to spread his ideas in their respective countries. In the US, Michle Lamont was asked to do this,3 as was Lic Wacquant, who in fact acted and is acting as a spokesperson for the Bourdieusian worldview. In other countries the same role has been played by people like Franz Schulteis in Germany and Anna Boschetti in Italy. What these scholars have tried to do is to circulate the ideas of Bourdieu through lessons, seminars, thesis supervision, tran-slations, book reviews, prefaces, and their own publications. Bourdieus strategy of pre-sentation of his ideas also contributed to their impact, while contributing at the same time towards fostering strong resistance from scholars who considered those ideas as being either at odds with their own intellectual projects or as direct attacks upon them. We can mention here figures such as Raymond Boudon, Jon Elster and other Rational Choice theorists, neofunctionalists like Jeffrey C. Alexander, and symbolic interactionists like Howard Becker. Bourdieus style of writing was certainly not describable as pacific in tone, and it rarely leave the reader feeling indifferent, but rather either highly excited or strongly disappointed. This explains the chiasmatic structure of his audience: while we find both passionate followers and harsh critics, it is much rarer to encounter an attitude of detached or apathetic reception.

As a structural feature of temporality, and one recently underlined by historical socio-logists like Andrew Abbott and William H. Sewell, contingency is not a secondary factor in accounting for a scholarly trajectory and its temporal success. Indeed, Bourdieus 40-year-long intellectual biography intersected, intercepted, and fostered at least four or five different turns in the social sciences: the historic turn, the practice turn, the cogni-tive turn, the cultural turn and possibly the postcolonial turn too. In some cases his role was active, in the sense that his ideas contributed directly to the turn and its subsequent influence on scholarly activities. This is the case with the practice and cultural turns (Ortner, 2005; Schatzki et al., 2001; Bonnell and Hunt, 1999; Friedland and Mohr, 2004). Less direct, but still important, was Bourdieus impact on the other three turns (McDonald, 1996; DiMaggio, 1997; Lizardo, 2005; Puwar, 2009). These turns apart, another shift contributed to the rising star of Bourdieu. We may call it the return of Grand Theory, not because Bourdieu is really a Grand Theorist (indeed, he was not, or he thought he was not), but because it was in this manner that he has been frequenly read and received by many scholars, especially inside sociology, and Anglo-American sociology in particular.


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William Outhwaite has recently attempted to document an ongoing process of canoniza-tion in UK sociology, focusing on the work and intellectual status of four influential scholars Giddens, Bauman, Beck and of course Bourdieu. He argues that:

Alongside the revival of interest in the classics, contemporary sociological theory, too, became more ambitious and speculative in the 1970s, with a shift of hegemony from the USA to Europe and an explosion of interest in Althusserian Marxism, Frankfurt School critical theory, British Wittgensteinian philosophy, French structuralism and the work of Michel Foucault, Bourdieu and others. What Quentin Skinner called The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, in a BBC radio series in 1983 and an edited volume in 1985 which documented this shift, meant that the classics seemed less like remote ancestors and more like older contemporaries. (Outhwaite, 2009: 1031)

If a process of canonization is a strong tendency in current sociology, and not just in the UK, there is no doubt that Bourdieu was among those who benefitted from it. However, it should be made clear that Bourdieus project as a sociological theorist is not, and never has been, the building of some Grand Theory but instead, as correctly seen by Camic and Gross (1998), the construction of general analytical tools concepts, local explanatory propositions, interpretive frameworks, culturally sensitive guidelines, etc. to be used in empirical social research for the study of empirical problems. This is one major reason Bourdieus contribution was not limited to general social theory and such epochal issues as globalization or individualization, but interacted with more professionally-based and analytically-oriented programmes like the new economic sociology (Swedberg, 2003). This would distinguish Bourdieu from sociologists less oriented to empirical social analy-sis and more engaged in macro-social theorizing and even social prophecy (a temptation Bourdieu always avoided) like Bauman and Beck, and possibly Giddens too.

We may add that Bourdieus ideas and works are appealing in themselves (although we have to acknowledge the social roots of all interpretaions of ideas), as they are textured and stylized semiotic objects open to reading, evaluation, assessment and use by their readers. This is what we have to infer from the number and often high reputation of scho-lars who have devoted their attention to these texts and the ideas contained therein. An incomplete list would include highly reputed scholars like Mary Douglas, Axel Honneth, Anthony Giddens, Jon Elster, Raymond Williams, Paul DiMaggio, Richard A. Peterson, Aaron Cicourel, Craig Calhoun, Scott Lash, Jeffrey Alexander, Michle Lamont, and more recently Howard Becker and John Goldhtorpe. The fact that some of these writers were, and still are, suspicious and critical (sometimes even highly critical) of these ideas and works is not a good reason to neglect the potential impact of their writings on Bourdieus fame: even strong criticism can contribute to a scholarly reputation. Also the fact that this criticism was often the product of genuine misunderstanding has contribu-ted to further enhancing the circulation of Bourdieus name, as misunderstandings foster response, repair-work, further commentary, and so on (Alexander, 1995; Gartman, 2007; Goldthorpe, 2007; DiMaggio, 2007; Lizardo, 2008).

How can we conceptualize the appeal of Bourdieus ideas? Lamont (1987) has suggested the concept of adaptability for explaining the success of Derridas ideas in the United States. I suggest this concept can be analytically refined through Michael



Schudsons (1989) now-famous reflections on mechanisms of cultural influence and symbols effectiveness. He posits the five Rs: resonance, retrievability, rhetorical force, institutional retention, and resolution. There is little doubt Bourdieu forged his texts and ideas to make them resonate with a series of issues located at the centre of the social sciences since the classical period, and intersecting at least two different disciplines (sociology and anthropology), while also resonating with at least two others (history and economics). As a prolific writer whose work had been translated into many languages since the 1970s, and thanks also to his personal networking skills, his ideas became rela-tively easy to find, that is, they have been retrievable. Also, his many seminars, confe-rence presentations and interviews contributed to the diffusion of his ideas and texts. Rhetorical force was ensured by his writing style, which could be very engaging (or enraging). Institutional retention was provided in France by the use of his ideas by insti-tutional committees (e.g. in census research) and his public lessons at the Collge de France. This also happened abroad, by the acceptance and incorporation of Bourdieusian notions in seminars and curricula, and in publications produced by reputed scholars in leading departments for example, in the US case, Paul DiMaggio at Harvard and then Yale and Princeton, Craig Calhoun in North Carolina and then NYU, Lic Wacquant at Chicago and then Berkeley, Rogers Brubaker at UCLA, and so on. As to resolution, I would suggest that Bourdieus ideas and writing style helped focus many issues at stake in intellectual life, elaborating on these and indeed even creating new issues that became the subject of discussion and controversy.

I would add that one of the main virtues of Bourdieus ideas is that they are also affor-dable, that is, they provide instruments and conceptual tools flexible enough to be stretched by people in such a way as to become applicable to many different topics and locations. To be sure, Bourdieu himself has shown the wide applicability of his ideas to a wide range of topics, from education to religion, from sport to science, from fashion to the state, from economic development to intellectual change. But the field of objects subjected to a Bourdieusian approach nowadays goes well beyond the range of Bourdieus original interests, wide as it was. It seems nothing escapes the toolbox Bourdieu forged. One of the challenges contemporary social scientists like to accept is to test that toolbox against ever more various research objects. An analysis of the sociological literature that makes use of Bourdieus work could easily find articles and books on such different and sometimes unexpected topics as migrant entrepreneurs, masculinities, social inclusion policies, refugees, charity, materiality, risk negotiations, national character, smoking, creative professionals, festivals, Mafia, and many others. Even if Bourdieus impact has spread all over sociology, it is clear that it is mainly in the burgeoning field of cultural sociology (or the sociology of culture, as it has long been labelled) that Bourdieus teachings, insights, and legacies have really found their home. Why this is the case is another interesting puzzle I will now address.

Bourdieus Relevance to the Field of Cultural Sociology

The intellectual biography of Bourdieu is now relatively well known, partly thanks to his autobiographical writings (which were preceded by a whole series of interviews), but also to research conducted on him and his research group(s) after his death. (Especially


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insigthful for its focus on the creative and collective dimensions of Bourdieus research practices is Heilbron, in press.) We know how and where he passed from philosophy to ethnology and sociology (this occurred in Algeria during the war against France); how he accepted and then rejected Lvi-Strausss structuralism and how important was his phenomenological training and his exposure to the French tradition of historical episte-mology from Bachelard to Canguilhem.

Less clear is the influence on him of Raymond Aron, presumably the first reputed sociologist he had relations with, but we can presume from their autobiographical writ-ings that the relation was an important one, especially for the younger man. It was prob-ably through Aron that Bourdieu began to consider as sociologically promising the application of the ethnological tools he experimented with while in Algeria to modern, industrial societies, having tested them in the rural society he grew up within. Indeed, it was after Arons seminar on the role of images in industrial society that Bourdieu began to work sociologically on photography, the subject of his first sociological research in the realm of cultural practices.4 It was while in Arons Centre de Sociologie Europenne that Bourdieu acquainted himself with Max Webers legacy and German sociology in gen-eral, and that together with another philosopher-turned-sociologist, Jean-Claude Passeron, conducted his first researches on education and the academic environment, later devel-oped and expanded into a political sociology of symbolic forms (as Lic Wacquant once labelled it). It was while still working as a researcher in that centre that he begun to collect data for his masterpiece, La Distinction, which would be published in 1979 but was first elaborated and thought through in the 1960s. In 1968, in the wake of the Parisian student rebellion, Bourdieu emancipated himself from Arons patronage what had remained of that early relationship and founded a new research centre concerned with the sociological study of culture and education, the two being strongly inter-twined for him.

This means that, while US sociologists were reacting against Parsonianism (and the influential but unsatisfying cultural theory inscribed in it), and while various structural versions of the discipline were in the making (including network analysis theory as prac-tised and pioneered by Harrison White), Bourdieu in France was putting culture both high and low, as both canon and way of life at the core of a whole research programme around which a series of specific research projects would coalesce. To be sure, Bourdieu was not alone in this move, and not only because he had been working with a research team in what was clearly a collective project. In 1964 at the University of Birmingham in the UK, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies had been created by a literary critic, Richard Hoggart, strongly attuned to social research, having Stuart Hall as his assistant, the same role Bourdieu played in Raymond Arons centre. At about the same time in the US, Clifford Geertz, who had been an early student of Parsons, was elaborat-ing his subsequently influential brand of symbolic anthropology. But as these two exam-ples make clear, this movement toward a new centrality of culture was more a matter for disciplines at the border of sociology than for sociology as a discipline itself. Simply put, culture was too stigmatized a concept because of its strategic relevance in Parsonian functionalism and the increasingly strong criticism levelled against it since the 1950s to be accepted as a benchmark and a solid base for sociological work after 1968. One might say that only the sociology of science avoided this situation, as the early work in



this field by Diana Crane testifies. In this case, it was not Parsons but Robert K. Merton, together with non-sociologists like Thomas Kuhn and Derek de Solla Price, who set the agenda. It is not a surprise that culture could be resurgent in a place not so distant from Merton but clearly antagonistic with respect to Parsons.

It was a student of Alvin Gouldner, himself in turn a student of Merton, namely Richard A. Peterson, who was probably the first American sociologist to notice Bourdieus research on culture, to foresee its potentialities, and to make it a strategic reference-point for a new research programme devoted to the production of culture (Peterson, 1976).5 It is also not surprising that the first attempt to present Bourdieu as the author of an impor-tant and possibly highly useful oeuvre for US sociologists was Paul DiMaggio (1979), an early collaborator with Peterson, who was at that time undertaking his PhD at Harvard on a topic and with an approach strongly indebted to Bourdieus educational sociology. It was, however, after the English translation of La Distinction in 1984 that Bourdieus name really began to travel into the wider territories of American sociology.6 As recently noted by Michle Lamont (2010: 134), the timing was propitious: the late eighties and nineties were a period of exceptional growth for cultural sociology in the United States.

The Culture Section of the American Sociological Association was founded in 1986, under the leadership of Vera Zolberg, Gary Alan Fine, Richard A. Peterson, and many others (including Lamont herself), and quickly grew to include over 1,000 members, becoming the largest section of the ASA. Lamont adds that the work of Bourdieu did a lot to stimulate this interest and has had a lasting influence. As Lamont comments, this increased influence

... occurred at the expense of symbolic interactionism, which it partly absorbed. Cultural sociology also grew at the expense of cultural studies, which has flourished in literary studies, American studies, communications, and cultural anthropology, but less in sociology. While widely considered an isolated and marginal specialty of sociology in the early 1980s at the time of the publication of Howard Beckers Art Worlds (one of the milestones of the subfield) the sociology of culture had become mainstream by the mid-nineties, with many of the top departments hiring in the field []. The growing popularity of multi-method approaches, including in the training of graduate students, contributed to this sea change and to the decline of the polarization between quantitative and qualitative research, a decline also facilitated by the diffusion of Bourdieus work.

If we consider that cultural sociology is still today one of the fastest growing areas of the American Sociological Association, attracting a larger number of graduate stu-dents than any other section and that its influence is spreading across a range of special-ties, from economic sociology to the sociology of organizations, from the sociology of education to the sociology of social movements, from comparative historical sociology to urban sociology, from gender studies to network analysis all specialties that can be said to have taken or being in the process of taking their own cultural turn then we have an idea of what impact Bourdieu had, and still is having, on American sociology.

Such a disciplinary-wide but at the same time fragmented appropriation cannot be without risk of misunderstaning or misappropriation. As Lizardo shows in his paper in this issue, the way Bourdieu has been read and incorporated into the burgeoning field of US cultural sociology is not necessarily faithful to Bourdieus original conception of


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culture, and in any case is different from the way he has been read and used among anthropologists, especially cognitive anthropologists. Bourdieu himself often remarked on how the appropriation of his work in the US had been very fragmentary, decontextua-lized and even de-temporalized, that is, without consideration of the chronological deve-lopment of his thinking and his publications. This is a process which happened in the UK with, arguably, even more force. Here the trajectory of Bourdieu has been mediated less by disciplinary organizations and professional dynamics inside the sociological field, and more by influential centres of interdisciplinary cultural production (like the Birmingham-based CCCS), certain journals (especially Media, Culture & Society and Theory, Culture & Society), some publishing houses (like Polity, founded by scholars, Giddens among them, who were attuned to Bourdieus work even if not necessarily able to agree with him about everything), and in general a system of relatively less bounded disciplines (in comparison to the US) which were strongly oriented toward theorizing, often in postmodernist fashions. We have already seen the process of the canonization of Bourdieu together with a few other scholars at work among British sociologists under the banner of Grand Theory. But this is just one consequence of an academic appropria-tion which has been marked not only by decontextualization and detemporalization but also by depoliticization. According to Derek Robbins (2008), the main effect of a pattern of reception which depoliticized Bourdieu was the stimulation of an opposite process, involving attempts to restore something like a real Bourdieu, understood as a truly radical and engaged thinker. The stories of Bourdieus reception in Germany, in Spain, in Finland and elswhere in Europe show many similarities to these patterns, even if contin-gencies and specific aspects of field organization obviously matter too in this regard.7

Apart from these local variations, it is arguable that if such phenomena as cultural sociology and cultural sociologists exist at all, this is in large part due to the influence of Bourdieu and his studies of photography, the literary field, the fashion world, artistic perception, cultural tastes, and so on. Indeed, the agenda of cultural sociology presup-poses so many topics Bourdieu studied, and so many concepts he developed (e.g. cultural capital, cultural field, practices), that we can even say that cultural sociology would not have come to exist at all without his contribution, or at least would be very different from what it currently looks like.

Clearly, this is not the whole story, as different research programmes exist inside cul-tural sociology, and this also has to do with its ongoing vitality and effervescence. No doubt Bourdieu has little or no currency in the strong program set forth by Jeffrey Alexander, and Philip Smith, an enterprise which has in part defined itself through the rejection of Bourdieu (Alexander, 2003). I am not sure Bourdieu has nothing to offer to the strong program, the views of its proponents notwithstanding (but see Smith, 2004). A sense of structure, clearly one of the main features of Bourdieus sociological model, is something any strong program in the sociological game could not lack. And it is well known that Saussurean linguistics, which are pivotal for the strong programs analysis of culture structures and codes, is among the crucial ingredients of Bourdieusian socio-anthropology too, albeit not necessarily the most important part. If structuralism provides a bridge between Bourdieu and the strong program, we should also recall some interest-ing and revealing parallels between Bourdieu and one of the main reference points of the strong program, the work of Geertz (Goodman and Silverstein, 2009). As Alexander has



pointed out in one of the few appreciative passages he devoted to Bourdieu, the latter has indeed demonstrated in his anthropological studies the possession of the musicality necessary for engaging in thick descriptions of the kind Geertz famously advocated.

The issue of Bourdieus contribution to sociological and cultural theory has been recently addressed by David Gartman in an article with the evocative title The Strength of Weak Programs, clearly a response to Alexanders strong attack on Bourdieu some years earlier (Gartman, 2007; Alexander, 1995, 2003). After reviewing some of the usual criticisms addressed to Bourdieu, and showing their inadequacy, Gartman discusses what he sees as real failures in Bourdieus sociological work. Pivotal among them is Bourdieus inability to ground autonomous, critical knowledge that could provide criti-cal leverage against the existing social order. One implication of this inability is Bourdieus weak, if not actually non-existent, theory of social change. This is a strange, though common, criticism to address to a sociologist who possessed a strong conception of temporality, and who constantly insisted on the importance of a genetic approach to social analysis. Development and genesis are crucial ingredients of Bourdieus social theory (Calhoun, 1993, 2006). Even if his work has focused mainly on the factors which account for the reproduction of existing social and cultural structures, this does not mean that his theoretical framework is not able to explore and account for factors of innovation and change. Every genesis is at the same time a change in existing structures and genesis is a recurrent term even in the titles of Bourdieus works. As Sewell (1992) has shown in a seminal essay, Bourdieus theory of structure includes the possibility of change. And as Steinmetz shows in his article in this issue, all of Bourdieus main concepts are intrinsically temporal.

More interesting is the second implication of the supposed inability of Bourdieu to ground autonomous and critical knowledge, that is, his failure reflexively to account for his own intellectual career and the product of this career, i.e. his critical theory. As Gartman (2007: 412) puts it, in his discussion of Alexanders criticism:

Bourdieu cannot reflexively account for himself and his own critical theory, as Alexander has charged ... That is, he cannot give a creditable sociological account of how it is that he, coming from a particular background and standing in a particular position in the intellectual field, has been able, unlike most other intellectuals, to penetrate the misrecognitions of class reproduction and offer an objective theory that exposes the true workings of society. Biographical accounts tell us that Bourdieu comes from a lower-class background, the son of a peasant-turned-postal-worker in Deguin, a small town in Southwestern France ... How is it, then, that a child with a lower-class and provincial habitus was able to reach the pinnacle of the French academic field, given that his own theory postulates that the practical dispositions imbued by such backgrounds disadvantage their holders in scholastic fields, which privilege theory over practicality, form over function? Bourdieu has generally refused to engage in such personal reflexivity, preferring instead to focus on reflexive accounts of the origins and dynamics of entire fields So ultimately Bourdieu cannot account for his own social trajectory without invoking the type of conscious choice that his theory denies is possible.

What Gartman seems to forget is that Bourdieu has never assumed a crystallization of habitus, always underlining that habitus, albeit durable, is operated by the many various


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fields the agent finds placed along his or her trajectory. Like any other agent, the young Bourdieu was made aware of his dispositions, those formed though his primary experi-ences and acquisitions in a tiny and remote village of Southwestern France, through social interactions in a different field than his familiar one, namely the educational field, which he was permitted to attend not because of his dispositions but because of an insti-tutional system (with its own distinct history) which permitted even the son of a farmer-turned-postman in a small village to be supported in his schooling because of his apparent talent. Indeed, what Bourdieu usually neglected to include in his model, especially in his early studies of education, is exactly the kind of social life that occurs at the level of those microfields like the classroom, the atelier, the cine-club, and even the settlement camps like those in Algeria during the revolution, the sites where much of his fieldwork on Kabyloa was carried out (Goodman and Silverstein, 2009). How can we account for Bourdieus early success as a student without consid-ering what happens in the classroom, or other such concrete situations where people interact and express themselves through daily intercourse? Once this failure is acknowledged, what critics usually neglect to recall is the sympathy Bourdieu had for scholars working on this level of social life, on the micro-contexts where social interaction happens. One of the curious neglected themes in current secondary litera-ture on Bourdieu is his closeness to, and esteem for, Goffman, the discoverer of infinitesimally small social phenomena, as Bourdieu labelled him in his posthumous eulogy for the colleague he had met while in the USA at the beginning of the 1970s (Bourdieu, 1983). Gartmans critique does not do Bourdieu full justice, in this and related matters.

It is not my intention to argue here for a more hermeneutically sensitive revision of Bourdieus brand of sociology, in which for example Merleau-Pontys existentialist phenomenology is restored and strengthened as a crucial original source, but also deployed as a resource for an advancement and betterment of Bourdieus theoretical legacy (e.g. Crossley, 2001). Phenomenology was indeed an important resource for Bourdieu he began his academic career as a philosopher-apprentice confronting Husserlian analysis of temporal structures. So too is psychoanalysis, which underpins his socio-analysis, a resource perhaps insufficiently exploited by Bourdieu, although not impossible to incorporate further into his position. Such a move would involve heading towards the construction of what George Steinmetz has labelled a neo-Bourdieusian theory (Steinmetz, 2006). We can easily agree there is no deep analysis of cultural codes in his texts, and when there is something like a code analysis, as in his celebrated studies on the Kabyle house and rituals, it is more cognitive than emotion-ally sensitive. Nor was his attention to narrativity enough to satisfy the expectations of scholars attuned to literary criticism (Smith, 2004). But attention to the depth and strength of meanings could easily be enlarged, especially as this is implicit in the kind of socio-analysis and cultural analysis Bourdieu practised in some of his best studies. This would involve moving beyond his claims of practising a rigorous and objec-tively scientific kind of social analysis towards a more hermeneutically rich position. There is more than a weak program in Bourdieus oeuvre, and it is this more, this surplus, that this special issue tries to highlight.



This Special Issue

There is more than reductionism, failed synthesis, and misrecognized objectivism in Bourdieus legacy. We cannot just write off his position as a supposedly weak theory of culture. Can we really say emotions are not really present in the work of Bourdieu, when suffering was one of his recurrent research objects, and the carnal body one of his stra-tegic places to investigate social logics (Wacquant, 2004)? Can we really say deep mean-ings are absent in Bourdieu, when he presents most of his major works as exercises in a social version of psychoanalysis (recall here the beginning of La Distinction), and when his research can be labelled empirical existential analytics (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1993)? There is certainly in Bourdieu a strong rhetorical pretension of science easily readable, and sometimes misinterpreted, in almost neo-positivist terms, even if his grounding in epistemology is the work of French scholars belonging to so-called critical rationalism like Bachelard and Canguilhem who were critical of positivism and strongly sensitive to historicity and temporality (see Sismondo, this issue). But if we take these claims as more rhetorical than reflecting and capturing the richness and originality of his concrete research practices as insightfully described by Heilbron (in press) we can easily discover the strength which is behind the claimed weakness. Indeed, we can be sure that even the weakness vs. strength opposition would have dissatisfied him as one of the typical scholastic dichotomies in need of dialectical overcoming.

There are many good reasons to consider Bourdieus conceptual framework one of the most insightful and strategically useful we have today for doing sociology, especially a sociology attuned to actors, their relations, institutional grounds, space and historicity, a framework theoretically dense but empirically-grounded. Not least among these reasons is the common language that Bourdieu provided sociologists with, a useful resource for a discipline where major confrontations are often fostered by the difficulties scholars have in understanding and managing different conceptual languages. Many of the criti-cisms usually addressed against Bourdieu have little solid foundation, as we have observed above, and as some of the contributors to this special issue confirm. As there is a place for further change in his theoretical framework, so there is a place for creativity in the reconceptualization of habitus as a matrix of practices (Dalton, 2004). If a real weakness is present in this multilevel framework, this has to be located not at the level of the habitus or field concepts which could indeed be further refined and made more consistent than they are at present but in the relation between actors logics (their dif-ferent habitus) and the logics of fields, which we might say are conceived of in overly direct and insufficiently dialectical ways. Fields do not exhaust the structural location of actors and their practices. A mediating term is needed to account for the great variety of practices in the same field and with respect to very similar habitus. This is situation, strangely omitted by Bourdieu, especially considering the close relation between Bourdieu and Goffman, the sociologist who more than any other defined situations as a key category for sociological analysis. Situation seems a necessary middle term between habitus and field. People never act directly in fields, but always in field-specific situations, or in situations embedded at the intersection of (usually many) fields. An interesting case in point is the example of the fitness gym, recently analysed by Sassatelli (2010) with the aid of the ethnographically-grounded concept of modulations of the habitus, a context and situation characterized by the presence of different habitus and


Santoro 15

structural locations, analysis of which makes more evident the contingent ontological complicity between habitus and fields, demanding explicit efforts to theorize their situ-ated and localized dialectics.8

As Bottero and Crossley point to in their paper, for Bourdieus continuing relevance in cultural sociology, situations and situated interactions (which are more than just inter-actions) have to be integrated into his meso-level framework. This would contribute not only to a better and sounder field analysis, but would also leave room for grasping in their full range and situational intricacies those meaning-making processes which are at the heart of contemporary cultural sociology, and that have in situated interaction their most typical foci and loci. The move I am suggesting is similar to that proposed by Steinmetz in one of the most interesting attempts to build a neo-Bourdiesian theory (which I read as significantly different from a post-Bourdieu theory see Born, 2010), in that it builds on Bourdieus achievements without negating his seminal contribution, and moves further towards the explicit integration of psychoanalytical concepts and models already implicit in the conceptual fabric of Bourdieus sociology. Despite Bourdieus rapprochement with psychoanalysis at the level of his language and occasionally at a more systematic theoretical level, he never fully acknowledged the implications of Freudian or Lacanian theory for his own theoretical approach. He did not recognize that Freudian and Lacanian theory could help him to avoid the problem of sociologism, that is, of reducing the process of the incorporation of the social into the individual to a mere conveyor belt for, or simple reflection of, logics of social power. Psychoanalysis offers a much richer array of concepts for analysing the idiosyncratic sense that different indi-viduals make of shared social conditions, and the paradoxes of unconscious agency and unconscious strategy (Steinmetz, 2006).

Bourdieu was well aware of this unconscious dimension of social life, but for some reason he neglected to incorporate in his model the tools elaborated by the special sci-ence of the unconscious. Similarly, we can guess he was well aware of situations as medium between habitus and fields, but chose not to integrate this level in his sociologi-cal models, probably because this was not his main project (and also because of Goffmans ongoing work in this area). This is not a good reason, of course, for precluding in the present day the integration of these concepts with a broadly Bourdieusian approach. This is, after all, how (social) science proceeds, by building on previous work, selecting what is worthy, integrating what is useful, and neglecting what looks weak or wrong. This is the best way to interact with Bourdieus work without making him a prophet and his fellowship a sect, as Lizardo has pointed out.

Bourdieus concepts should be appropriated, dismembered and used and modified as the analyst sees fit, rejecting what they do not need, or find to be in contradiction to evidence. I think his work should be mined without any contamination worries. Scholars should pick what is useful to them and the analytical problem at hand as they deem appropriate, as has already been done so productively by a variety of scholars beginning with DiMaggio and most recently in the exemplary work of Illouz and Lareau. In fact, precisely because against his own wishes the concepts that he developed continue to be thought of as belonging to some overarching grand theory, rather than being pragmatic interventions aimed at understanding the social world, I think that this has not yet been done enough. Bourdieus works are full of useful sensitizing concepts, empirically-testable hypotheses and suggestions for research. I hope that they



continue to become a rich resource for scholars with similar interests in understanding the workings of the social world (Lizardo, 2008: 13).

To be sure, this free and practical appropriation and instrumental use of Bourdieus notions is not without risk. After all, this is one of the main causes of the confused, and confusing, interpretation of Bourdieus work that cultural sociology exhibits according to Lizardos paper presented here. This is why I would add that we have to commit to work on Bourdieu as we would do with a sociological classic. It is probably too early to grant Bourdieu this title, even if many would agree with it. Let us wait for a few years and see what transpires. In the meanwhile, we should not be honouring an opus operatum (a finished, closed-off monument), but should be faithful to a certain modus operandi: to approach his work as if it were that of a sociological classic. This means studying it, analysing it, dissecting it, interpreting it, reconstructing it, and criticizing it, understand-ing it as a work embedded in its time, with a temporal structure, and created in a particu-lar historical context. Interpreters should radically historicize Bourdieu and his work. To historicize the social sciences was one of the methodological injunctions Bourdieu never tired to repeat. Only in this manner can the social sciences make real progress.

This is not, however, the main assumption driving this special issue and the selection of its authors. Before introducing the reader to the papers which follow, a caveat there-fore is due: as the editor, I am not necessarily in agreement with all of the claims and arguments the texts collected here make. My objective in inviting, selecting and review-ing these papers was not to produce a final picture of what I think is the right or even the best Bourdieu, but to provide a venue for debating and confronting different approaches to a corpus that is extremely rich but also complex, not always consistent, and with inevitable limits. Understanding the limits of Bourdieus oeuvre sometimes also the limits of his interpreters is one of the objectives of this special issue, as is making some steps along the path of reason that Bourdieu constantly advocated.

The papers collected here represent a wide and diverse spectrum of intellectual posi-tions, modes of reception, and general attitudes toward Bourdieus legacy. We can say that Bourdieus impact on current social research, both in theory and empirical investiga-tions, has generated an array of intellectual positions which can be summarized as being of at least five types: total endorsement, selective appropriation, constructive criticism, critical rejection, and negation.9 Incorporation through obliteration (Merton, 1975) should be distinguished from negation as a form of hidden or disclosed reception. True negation means to act as if Bourdieu had never existed and had never produced anything worthwhile.

The following papers could be read in general as representative of the second and third positions, the two attitudes that better fit the aims of this special issue. The pool of scholars, all sociologists, who contribute here are not all recognized as cultural sociolo-gists, even if the work of even those least close to the field (e.g. Swedberg in economic sociology) easily and frequently intersects with it. The main objective is not to offer a comprehensive analysis of Bourdieus legacy to cultural analysis (see Silva and Warde, 2010), but rather to provide creative and forward-looking diagnoses of Bourdieus socio-logical work in relation both to particular research fields sociology of science and technology (Sismondo), music studies (Prior), historical sociology (Steinmetz),


Santoro 17

economic sociology (Swedberg) and also to certain topics and conceptual categories considered important for cultural sociology the concept of culture (Lizardo), the idea of art world (Bottero and Crossley) and temporality (Steinmetz).

The papers offer original contributions to a growing literature on Bourdieus legacy and reception, while demonstrating that today it is almost impossible to do research in many fields without engaging in some fashion with Bourdieus work. So if an economic sociologist or a historical sociologist wants to systematically incorporate culture into their analysis, it seems inevitable that they will have to turn to Bourdieu in one way or another. But what exactly is this cultural element that any sustained contact with Bourdieus work seems to transmit to sociological research? How can we assess its sig-nificance? How should we account for its boundaries and limits? This is indeed the topic of Lizardos paper, which reviews the complex reception of Bourdieus anthropological and sociological work, closely examining some unacknowledged strands of Bourdieus thinking on culture. The basic argument of the paper is that the anthropological reception of Bourdieus work is more faithful to the tenets of his late-career intellectual develop-ment, while the sociological image of him as a Saussaurean culture theorist with a Weberian power twist is misleading. For Lizardo, the current double status of Bourdieu as both a post-cultural (in anthropology) and a cultural theorist (in sociology and cul-tural studies) is artificial, and that cognitive anthropologists are correct: Bourdieu is a post-cultural (i.e. practice) theorist, for whom the semiological conceptualization of culture as a system of elements connected by arbitrary relations of significance is redu-ced to a minimum, in favour of seeing culture as a system of action and perception that is acquired in a tacit state through tacit mechanisms. Thus while it might be sociologi-cally correct to refer to Bourdieu as a dominant presence in cultural theory today (in the sense that this domain is currently understood and codified), this presence has to be reco-gnized analytically for what it is, that is as at least an ambiguous presence since Bourdieus work offers one of the most powerful (if not yet fully understood in cultural sociology) critiques of the culture concept in social theory. There is a positive aspect in Lizardos critique, as it points towards a still-to-be-developed post-cultural stance, one that takes cognition, experience and the body seriously.

One of the paradoxes of the literature on Bourdieu is that it contains on the one hand a view of his work as out of history, as insensitive to historical time and historical change, while on the other hand for some intepreters he should be acknowledged as one of the most historically-oriented sociologists and his work understood as a profoundly histori-cal sociology (Calhoun, 1993). The main source of this conundrum is the early success of Reproduction, a book which even in its title seems to negate history and change. However, history is not only a common reference and object for many of Bourdieus writ-ings, it is also deeply integrated in Bourdieus framework even as a social reproduction theorist, a label that itself captures only a small section of his work. As Steinmetz argues, all of his concepts and tools are deeply historical, and temporality is a structural feature of his conceptualization of social life, including his explanatory model of social repro-duction. The reasons for this strong historical orientation are traced back by Steinmetz to the beginnings of sociology in France, and above all to Durkheim, that classic author labelled as unhelpful for historical sociology by such an influential figure as Charles Tilly. As Steinmetz indicates, in fact history and sociology are two faces of the same coin for



the whole stream of French social research to which Bourdieu belongs. Steinmetz argues for a new historicism as one aspect of Bourdieus legacy, an epistemological posture strongly attuned to the role of contingency and events in social life, including social transformations, an orientation already made visible in the famous chapter on 1968 in Homo Academicus (Bourdieu, 1988).

After culture and history, it is the turn of structure. Bottero and Crossleys article addresses an issue which no serious sociologist of culture, and of art especally, can escape: the relationship between Bourdieus concept of field (of cultural production), and Howard S. Beckers concept of (art) world. The relations between the two concepts and corresponding methodological approaches are well known, and recently discussed by Becker himself (Becker and Pessin, 2006). While Becker focuses his approach on patterns of concrete, visible interactions, Bourdieu moves beyond interaction toward what he conceives of as the deeper and stronger structures, made up of objective rela-tions, which exist and produce effects independently, and even in spite, of concrete interactions. These are clearly two different epistemological stances, interactionist and structuralist, which divide the field of sociology of the arts. While the first is appealing because of its empirical strength and anti-determinist posture, the second looks attractive exactly because it promises to go beyond the visible and to capture the hidden logics at work, a promise clearly appealing for critical sociology. But objective relations are not easy to identify, in part because it is not always clear what Bourdieu means by this term. What Bottero and Crossley suggest for saving the empirical soundness of Becker without losing the Bourdieusian promise of a deeper and firmer sociological approach is network analysis, a move suggested by Beckers vocabulary (he often describe worlds as net-works of interpersonal relations), as well as by Bourdieus orientation towards structural properties. The rationale behind their move is the methodological insight that, from the observation of concrete interactions, it is always possible to reconstruct positions and relations among positions, but the reverse is much less easy, if not impossible. Bourdieu has implicitly to ground upon interaction his notion of a structured space of positions (i.e. field). The distribution of capitals is the key for defining positions, but capital is exchange value, and this implies exchange, which is a form of interaction. Their argument is strengthened by the results of two case studies on British music scenes in the 1970s and 1980s. Even if some readers may respond that the compatibility of structural network analysis with Bourdieus field analysis is not entirely new (e.g. Sapiro and Bustamante, 2009), Bottero and Crossleys paper has the merit of directly addressing one major con-ceptual and methodological issue in current sociology of culture, too often bypassed by practising researchers, with detailed arguments and a practical solution.10

The other papers deal with specific but strategic sites of social analysis: economic sociology, science studies, and the sociology of art, music in particular. One of the lead-ing exponents of the new economic sociology, Richard Swedberg, was the first in this research stream to notice the importance and potential relevance of Bourdieus contribu-tion to the sociological analysis of economic life. His focus is on what he calls the eco-nomic sociologies of Bourdieu, in the plural. Bourdieus contribution to sociological analysis of the economy is not only rich and complex, but also there is a shift in his analysis from the early (empirical) studies on work and workers in Algeria, to subsequent analysis of the French housing market, where the concepts of capital, habitus and field


Santoro 19

were already fully elaborated. A central message of Swedbergs piece is that Bourdieus work on the economy characteristically focused on the cultural dimensions of eco-nomic life, and eager to find and underline the economic dimensions even in high cul-ture fields is a multi-dimensional resource still to be exploited, in the same way that Bourdieu mined the complex oeuvre of Max Weber.

Sergio Sismondos approach to Bourdieu is less enthusiastic and clearly more critical as we might expect from a post-Mertonian sociologist of science.11 An exponent of so-called Science and Technology Studies (STS), his attitude towards Bourdieu is a mixture of appreciation and distance: appreciation because of the pioneering role Bourdieu played with respect to the development of a post-Mertonian sociology of science, and for the legitimation he provides to ongoing attempts to develop sociology of science; but distance too, because of the inability of Bourdieu to capture or at least to appreciate the many accomplishments STS scholars have made, including the inclusion of non-human actors in sociological models, and the construction of a strong empirical evidential base for the sociology of scirence. While Bourdieu can be defended, I think, from some of the charges raised, Sismondos arguments against Bourdieu should be taken seriously, not only because they represent current thinking in STS, but also because they point to an intrinsic weakness of Bourdieus sociology of science, namely its reluctance to engage seriously with the results of ethnographic research on the practices of scientists working in concrete organizational settings, whose autonomy from the market cannot be taken for granted but neither can be simply denounced.

Nick Priors article deals with Bourdieus contributions to music sociology as both a driving force for sympathetic scholars and as a foil for critical, post-Bourdiuesian ones. He describes the shift from an earlier production of culture approach to a truly Bourdieusian one in the 1980s, and the subsequent turn toward what he calls a post-Bourdieu moment, explored and discussed through a reading of the recent work of three influential music sociologists (Born, Hennion and DeNora). Contrary to what happens in the fields of economic sociology and of science studies, where Bourdieus contribution is important but still to be fully exploited, in music sociology as more generally in the sociology of art Bourdieu has inspired a whole generation of scholars, Bourdieusianism becoming orthodoxy in certain quarters. This situation has led to the development of an ever stronger stream of post-Bourdieusian sociology of art, which claims to be more attuned to the aesthetic and the sensuous dimensions of human life than was Bourdieu, but which is relatively disinterested in those issues of power and structural inequalities which are the central focus of critical sociologies like Bourdieus. Priors article is important not only as it offers an insightful reading of post-Adornian music sociologys debt to Bourdieu (who, as is well known, never devoted any sustained attention to this art, even though he has a music lover himself), but also because it makes explicit the perils of a post-critical music sociology, which risks losing its sociological strength (and disci-plinary identity) through capturing those aesthetic qualities which sociology had previ-ously consciously bracketed in order to accomplish its mission of sociologizing art through demystification.

While there are good reasons to push the research frontier beyond a critical sociol-ogy which is unable to specifiy the active contribution of music (and cultural forms more generally) to human social life, this still would not be a good reason to lose the



valuable contributions that this kind of sociology has already offered, and thus to forget what lessons it has to teach a post-critical perspective. There is no reason to neglect power and social determination because of a stronger sensitivity to issues of aesthetic quality, meaning and value judgement. The challenge for future scholars is to try to have both.

Notes

1. See Delsaut and Rivire (2002) for a somewhat dated but very scrupulous bibliography. Oral publication is a term coined by R. K. Merton to identify those intellectual productions whose form and life is mainly dependent on oral communications (e.g. conferences, lessons, semi-narial interventions, interviews, etc.), including those subsequently published as journal arti-cles or book chapters. Bourdieus bibliography has many items like these.

2. See Lamont (2010: 133): Bourdieu had invited me to help diffuse his work in the United States, just as he did with Lic Wacquant a few years later and this collaboration resulted in the influential and canonical Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, published in 1992.

3. On the centres early activities, including this seminar, see Centre (1962). 4. Peterson was one of the main actors in the launch of the sociology of culture in the US in the

1970s (and then in Europe in the 1990s), and the contributor of seminal research topics like the link between market organization and cultural diversity, consumption as autoproduction, taste omnivorousness, and more recently genre trajectories (Santoro, 2008a). Peterson should also be acknowledged for his talent in identifying and selecting sources of inspiration, and in acting as a gatekeeper in the academic marketplace of ideas.

5. A major role could have been played in this process by Brubaker (1985), the first thorough attempt by a US sociologist to chart Bourdieus sociological theory, linking it with the clas-sical heritage. One should also note the link between US sociology and Europe provided by the journal Poetics, where some early translations of Bourdieus pieces in cultural sociology appeared, and where a whole mini-industry of secondary literature on Bourdieu has been growing since the 1980s.

6. I have documented and discussed how these contingencies can impact on a national field. using a case I know personally, i.e. Italy (Santoro, 2009). In this case, what has to be explained is not Bourdieus rise to a dominant position, but on the contrary the resistances to him being received positively by sociologists.

7. But for the integration of Bourdieus concepts of field and habitus with Goffmans analysis of situated interactions and psychoanalysis, see respectively Green (2008b) and Green (2008a), with specific reference to the erotic sphere and to sexuality.

8. I here expand a classification advanced by Silva and Warde (2010). On the range of Bourdieus receptions in different countries and times, see various issues of Sociologica (www.sociologica.mulino.it) devoted to the global circulation of Bourdieus ideas, as well as to my introduction to the same symposium (Santoro, 2008b).

9. For a clearly different reading of the relations between field analysis and social network analysis (SNA), captured in their epistemological autonomy even if potential complementa-rity, see Fourcade (2007).

10. Indeed, Merton and Bourdieu met together in the 1990s, and from their correspondence (which I consulted at Columbia Universitys Library, where the R. K. Merton papers are collected and preserved), it appears that the former had a very good opinion of Bourdieus sociology of science qua sociology. The personal meeting between the two scholars has clearly to do with the reinterpretation of Mertons legacy and intellectual personality (or habitus) that Bourdieu included in his last important contribution to the field (Bourdieu, 2001).


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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Johan Heilbron, Michle Lamont, Omar Lizardo, Paolo Magaudda, Roberta Sassatelli, Phillip Smith and especially David Inglis.

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Marco Santoro is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Bologna. Co-founder and co-editor of the journals SociologicaItalian Journal of Sociology online and Studi Culturali, heis also an associate member of the Centre de sociologie europenne (Paris). His research interests include the sociologies of intellectuals, music, professions, the cultural analysis of the mafia, and the history of sociology.

from bourdieu to cultural sociology

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