The present volume consists of diverse individual texts, produced between 1980 and 1986, which take two forms: interviews in which Bourdieu confronts a series of probing and intelligent interviewers, and conference papers that clarify and extend specific areas of his research. Now that Bourdieu's work has achieved wide diffusion and celebrity, this is an appropriate time for this volume, a pause for retrospection and resynthesis, for corrections of misreadings and extension of previous insights, and for projection of the next stages (...) of his work. For this English edition, Bourdieu's celebrated inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Leçon sur la Leçon, has been added. The texts fall into two fundamental areas. The first area provides an overview of Bourdieu's central concepts, never before clearly explained. The second area clarifies the philosophical presuppositions of Bourdieu's studies and gives an account of his relations with the series of thinkers who formulated the problems in social and cultural theory that still preoccupy us: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Wittgenstein, Weber, Parsons, and Lévi-Strauss. Bourdieu's visions of these figures is personal and penetrating, and in his vivacious, spontaneous responses one sees at work a mode of thought that can in itself be a liberating tool of social analysis. Bourdieu applies to himself the method of analyzing cultural works that he expounds, evoking the space of theoretical possibilities presented to him at different moments of his intellectual itinerary. (shrink)

Synthesizing forty years' work by France's leading sociologist, this book exemplifies Bourdieu's unique ability to link sociological theory, historical information, and philosophical thought. It makes explicit the presuppositions of a state of 'scholasticism', a certain leisure liberated from the urgencies of the world. Philosophers have brought these presuppositions into the order of discourse, more to legitimate than analyze them, and this is the primary systematic, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic error that Bourdieu subjects to methodological critique. Pascalian because he, too, was (...) concerned with symbolic power, he refused the temptation of foundationalist thinking, attended to 'ordinary people', and was determined to seek the reason for seemingly illogical behavior rather than simply condemning it. Bourdieu charts a negative philosophy, whose intellectual debt to such other 'heretical' philosophers as Wittgenstein, Austin, Dewey, and Peirce, renews traditional questioning of concepts of violence, power, time, history, the universal, and the purpose and direction of existence. (shrink)

The metaphor of space/place has always been crucial to theological discourse. Throughout its history, theology has expressed itself in spatial images correlative to its concomitant culture. The phenomenon of globalization makes possible a revolution in the concept of space/place. It is this transformation which we seek to examine in order to bear out some methodological consequences for theological reflection. This article consists in three parts. First, we explore the notions of space in two contemporary theorists of globalization – Anthony Giddens (...) and David Harvey. We have seen that both Giddens’ “empty spaces” and Harvey’s “compression of time and space”, even as they partly describe the present-day global situation, are also deficient if only considered individually. In a second step, we propose to integrate into the analytical framework Raymond Williams’ concept of “placeable social identities” as establishing a complementary relationship between Giddens and Harvey. In this powerful spatial metaphor, Williams has argued for the primacy of real “placeable” communities of peoples where meaning is constantly constructed and negociated. His assertion of identifiable settlements and rooted communal identities is an antidote to the often ideological talk of the high-speed movement and constantly shifting identities in globalization. But these are not nostalgic identities since in their borders, they constantly reshape their own meanings and valuations as they interact with contemporary global challenges. In a third move, we examine two spatial views of the church , two ways of doing theology) as response to globalization: Milbank’s “enclave” and Schreiter’s “World Church”. While Milbank’s discourse of the “difference” of the Christian traditions echoes the postmodern sensibilities of a globalized world, his concept of the Church as “enclave” also reminds us of a reactionary persecuted Church which hides behind its mantle the rhetoric of universalism characteristic of an isolated minority. Schreiter’s “World Church” is much more open; but his concern for “universality” and “catholicity” almost erases the asymmetry and disruption which the global culture has done to Two-Thirds of the world population. Beyond Milbank and Schreiter , we conclude by suggesting that Williams’ placeable social identities may thus provide a metaphor for theorizing spatiality in a global world that would be consistent with liberative theological methodology. (shrink)