Bourdieu, Pierre (1930-2002)

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) is one of the great sociologists of the second half of the twentieth century. Born in the Béarn region of France, of modest origin, normalien and agrégé in philosophy, he left for Algeria in 1956 to do his military service in a country in the midst of colonial war. He was placed in the documentation and information service of the Minister-Resident. In 1958, he became professor assistant of sociology at the Faculty of Letters in Algiers and stayed there for two years. The Algerian surveys, carried out collectively, concern the sociology of unemployment and proletarianisation, the destructive effects of the colonial situation on the rural world and the anthropology of the cultural crisis in a society torn between tradition and modernity. His studies of Kabyle ethnology (on honour, house, kinship) constitute the ethnographic foundation of his theory of the social world. A teacher at the 6^th section of the EPHE (future EHESS) from 1964, he was elected professor at the Collège de France in 1981. He upholds a sociology of unveiling and a generalized materialism through a general economy of practices structured by the forms of capital (economic and symbolic). His theories of the practical logics of action (incorporated in the habitus and hexis, two notions that he generalizes in sociology), of modes of domination (with the notion of symbolic violence) and modes of reproduction, and of the division of social space into fields have been the subject of some thirty books and hundreds of articles.

Keywords: Sociology | Second half of the 20^th century | Algeria | Kabylia | Colonial situation