Edward LiPuma

Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives

Long a dominant figure in the French human sciences, Pierre Bourdieu has become internationally influential in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies. A major figure in the development of practice as an organizing concept in social research, Bourdieu has emerged as the foremost advocate of reflexive social science; his work combines an astonishing range of empirical work with highly sophisticated theory. American reception of his works, however, has lacked a full understanding of their place within the broad context of French human science. His individual works separated by distinct boundaries between social science fields in American academia, Bourdieus cohesive thought has come to this country in fragments. Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives provides a unified and balanced appraisal of Bourdieus varied works by both proponents and skeptics. The essays are written from the varied viewpoints of cultural anthropology, ethnomethodology and other varieties of sociology, existential and Wittgensteinian philosophies, linguistics, media studies, and feminism. They work around three main themes: Bourdieus effort to transcend gaps between practical knowledge and universal structures, his central concept of reflexivity, and the relations between social structure, systems of classification, and language. Ultimately, the contributors raise a variety of crucial theoretical questions and address problems that are important not only to understanding Bourdieu but to advancing empirical work of the kind he has pioneered. In an essay written especially for this volume, Bourdieu describes his own mode of intellectual production and the reasons he sees for its common misunderstanding.

Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity

The speed, intensity, and extent of contemporary global transformations challenge many of the assumptions that have guided the analysis of culture over the last several decades. Whereas an earlier generation of scholarship saw meaning and interpretation as the key problems for social and cultural analysis, the category of culture now seems to be playing catch-up to the economic processes that go beyond it. Economics owes its present appeal partly to the sense that it, as a discipline, has grasped that it is dynamics of circulation that are driving globalization — and thereby challenging traditional notions of language, culture, and nation. There is a certain historical irony to the contemporary discovery of the centrality of circulation to the analysis of the globalization of capitalism. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1969) inaugurated what would later be called the “linguistic turn” by applying Prague School linguistics to the analysis of circulation and exchange in precapitalist societies; by focusing on the structural analysis of the “total social fact” of exchange, he sought to overcome the dichotomy of economy and culture that is characteristic of modern thought. In hindsight, it can be seen that his use of phonology as the model for structural analysis raised fundamental issues about structure, event, and agency that con