Pierre Bourdieu 1930 – 2002
Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher whose work fundamentally reshaped the twentieth-century social sciences. Drawing on long ethnographic work in Algeria during the war of independence and on extensive empirical study of French education and culture, he developed the concepts of habitus, field, and cultural capital that have become standard vocabulary in sociology, education, and anthropology. Distinction, his analysis of how taste operates as a marker and reproducer of class, is one of the most cited social-science books of the late twentieth century. He was a public intellectual of considerable political weight in his last years.
Key facts
- Nationality
- French
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Continental
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Pierre Bourdieu:
“The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need of words, and ask no more than complicitous silence.”
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Attributed to Pierre Bourdieu:
“Habitus is the embodied history of social position.”
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Attributed to Pierre Bourdieu:
“Cultural capital is at least as decisive as economic capital in shaping life chances.”
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Attributed to Pierre Bourdieu:
“Symbolic violence is exercised most powerfully when it is not seen as violence.”
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Attributed to Pierre Bourdieu:
“Sociology is a martial art.”