Bourdieu on Bookshelves

"In fact, the position of the different fractions ranked according to their interest in the different types of reading-matter tends to correspond to their position when ranked according to volume of cultural capital as one moves towards the rarer types of reading, which are known to be those most linked to educational level and highest in the hierarchy of cultural legitimacy." (Bourdieu, Distinction, page 116)

In this morning’s edition of insidehighered.com, Scott McLemee has an article about professors’ bookshelves. I read the article as an affirmation of Bourdieu’s insights about the centrality of cultural capital and the display of markers of our cultural knowledge. He quotes journalist Ezra Klein as saying “Bookshelves are not for displaying books you’ve read. Those books go in your office, or near your bed, or on your Facebook profile. Rather, the books on your shelves are there to convey the type of person you would like to be. I am the type of person who would read long biographies of Lyndon Johnson, despite not being the type of person who has read any long biographies of Lyndon Johnson. I am the type of person who is very interested in a history of the Reformation, but am not, as it happens, the type of person with the time to read 900 pages on the subject.”

Although I’ve read plenty of Bourdieu, and although I realize that I’m caught in these webs of cultural capital acquisition and exchange just as much anyone else, I try to rise above it by only having books on my shelf that I’ve read or intend to read in the next year. But, now that I think about it, all of my books about Jonestown, and all of my books about movie stars from the 1920’s and 30’s, are at home. Could Bourdieu explain this shelving choice? Maybe I don’t want my colleagues to think that I’m obsessed with a so-called “death cult” when they walk into my office? Maybe I want to convey the impression that I just don’t have time for Jean Harlow or Greta Garbo (because I’m thinking about sociology all the time)?

But enough about me – what does your bookshelf say about YOU?

-- Brian

Elements of Bourdieu: Three Videos

Distinctions Create Class Boundaries


Jackson Pollock's Social Capital


Distinctions Have Consequences

Theme #3 (this time with more zombies)

Occasionally, I’ll use the blog to clarify a point in lecture. During our first class session, I noted that a central theme of sociological inquiry is the disruption of “doxa.” We know something is “doxic” or taken-for-granted when in response to “why are you doing that?” we say “because that’s just how you do it,” “that’s just what’s done” or “that’s just the way it is.” Our doxa allows us to drive on the right side of the road without really thinking about it every time we start our car. It also guides practices of greater social consequence like voting, dating, and job hunting. If we can shine a light on social processes most people don’t think about, or think about in a particularly narrow way, we will be in a better position to solve society’s core problems (or at least understand what they are).

In Shaun of the Dead zombies take over London and slowly turn other people into zombies. Eventually, the whole town is full of zombies except Shaun and a handful of others. They become responsible for doing whatever it is to kill all the zombies or to de-zombify them. The sociologist sees him or herself as a bit like Shaun. We see ourselves as pointing out the zombie threat that no one else sees or pays attention to, and we’re trying to snap people, organizations, and institutions out of their zombie-like tendencies and trajectories. By uncovering the doxic or taken-for-granted, sociologists try to wake people up out of their normal ways of thinking and behaving.

The other side of this analogy is that if you’re a zombie, being a zombie seems like a fine thing to be. You don’t even know you’re a zombie, really, you’re just doing your thing, eating brains, grunting at other zombies, hanging out at graveyards. Sociologists don’t point blame at the individual zombies. We’re more concerned with group-level zombie production, believing that if we can generate another perspective - someone from the outside with different information [research] and different ideas or arguments regarding that information [theory] - we can snap out of it.

Someone can probably point to an alternative linguistic history, but my understanding is that the term “doxa” came into vogue in American sociology after the translation of Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice in the 1970s. Here’s a reproduction of the diagram from that book. I’m a “visual learner,” so I find pictures and diagrams of abstract ideas immensely helpful. Maybe you do, too.

-- Brian