BOURDIEU MEETS GRAMSCI

Michael Burawoy, Sociology, University of California-Berkeley

Taking Bourdieu seriously, to understand his theory we need to comprehend his own life
trajectory and the way he positions himself in the intellectual field, but not necessarily
following his own self-understanding. Thus, it is the hypothesis of this paper that Antonio
Gramsci represents Bourdieu's unrecognized other. Although Bourdieu ignores, dismisses
or on occasion appropriates Gramsci opportunistically, nonetheless Gramsci helps us
comprehend Bourdieu's own particularity -- a particularity inaccessible to Bourdieu
himself.
Bourdieu and Gramsci have remarkably parallel biographies, growing up in peasant
societies, children of local administrators (postman and clerk in land registration),
scholarship boys who by stint of will-power and intellectual prowess enter the university
where they study philosophy. They both become absorbed in shattering political
experiences among workers and peasants the one in Algeria and the other in Italy --
whereupon Bourdieu retreats to the academy while Gramsci turns to the political party.
At the end of their lives they cross-over -- Bourdieu is compelled to advance from the
academy into the public world while Gramsci is forced to retreat from politics into the
self-made skhole of the prison.
As intellectuals engaged with politics, their theories are propelled by a common
endeavor, namely to understand how human beings make history but not under
conditions of their own choosing. For Bourdieu it was a matter of transcending the
scholastic fallacies of objectivism (Althusser) and subjectivism (Sartre), for Gramsci of
finding political space between determinism (Bordiga) and voluntarism (Tasca). Their
driving concern, however, intersects with biographical divergences to shed light on how
they differently approach: (1) the cognitive framework of the subaltern (misrecognition
vs. common sense/good sense); (2) domination and subordination (symbolic power vs.
hegemony); (3) struggle (war of position in civil society vs. classification struggle over
habitus); (4) structural change (autonomization and market invasion of the scientific and
cultural fields vs. organic crises in the political realm); (5) the grounding of freedom and
universality (skhole of the academy vs. production relations in the factory); (6) the
intellectual (traditional vs. organic). We conclude that Bourdieu and Gramsci represent,
articulate, elaborate and defend opposed visions and divisions of the public intellectual.

THE LOGIC OF RISK: TRACING THE FIREFIGHTING HABITUS

Matthew S. Desmond, Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
In this paper I explain how one becomes a wildland firefighter through a process of
organizational indoctrination. The U.S. Forest Service does not prepare firefighters for
the dangers of the fireline by exposing them to rigorous training; instead, it cultivates
with them a disposition towards danger—an ‘illusion of self-determinacy’—so that
firefighters develop mental structures that mirror (though never exactly) the
organizational structures of the Forest Service. I trace the formation of the wildland
firefighting habitus through four stages of organizational indoctrination—historical,
disciplinary, symbolic, and mature—by drawing on ethnographic data acquired through
joining a wildland firefighting crew in Northern Arizona. Through this praxis-based
approach, I present an explanation for professional risk-taking that differs significantly
from Goffmanian-based social psychological accounts as well as those offered by
organizational theorists. In addition, by detailing the formation of an organizational
habitus, I improve upon Bourdieu’s sociological framework by demonstrating how
researchers can observe the development of a specific habitus, a task which Bourdieu
never fully undertakes.

Interests: Theory, working class occupations, racism and segregation.

Ongoing Work: "The Logic of Risk: Jottings from the Fireline:" book manuscript focused
on how wildland firefighters interpret and enact professional risk and how the
organizational frame of the U.S. Forest Service shapes their understanding.

FRANCE VS ALGERIA: SOCCER DRAMA AS AN IDENTITY ANALYZER

Beyria Fabien, Université de Toulouse (France)
Considering the common history between the two countries, the football game between
France and Algeria was full of expectations. But instead of a marvelous evening of sport,
we attended various symbolic transgressions: the Marseillaise (the French national
anthem) was whistled; the French team except Zidane was booed; some invocated Osama
Bin Laden and the game could not go to its end because of a general invasion. Whereas,
three years before, after its victory in the World Cup, the French team (composed with
almost the same players) was described by journalists, politicians and intellectuals as the
symbol of the “new France” united despite its ethnic diversity (Zidane being the symbol
of the integration à la française), the game France-Algeria implied a re-interpretation
which tended to highlight the disunity. Using Bourdieu’s theories I show that analyzing a
sport event such as France-Algeria requires going beyond its spectacular and
instantaneous aspects. Rather, it has to be located in the context of symbolic struggles in
which agents with specific positions and socializations in the social space are involved.
Basing the analysis on in-depth interviews with French men and women with Algerian
origins (from “the second generation”) who are all state workers (policemen and women
and social workers), I show that there are as many ways of perceiving France-Algeria as
there are ways of feeling and being French. Hence, the analysis should take this
complexity into account. At last, this article provides a reflexive thought about the links
that are made between sport and society.

Interests: sociology of sport, culture, race, gender. I am doing this research for my MA
and in order to try to publish an article in the International Review for the Sociology of
Sport.

“OAXACANS LIKE TO WORK BENT OVER”: THE NORMALIZATION OF

SOCIAL SUFFERING AMONG BERRY FARM WORKERS
Seth M. Holmes, University of California, Berkeley
This paper explores the overdetermined naturalization of social suffering and inequality
in the Pacific Northwest berry industry. Central to this analysis is the nexus of ethnicity,
class, and health in farm labor. The data for the paper comes from over fifteen months of
fieldwork migrating from the U.S. to Mexico and back with Triqui migrant workers from
the Mexican state of Oaxaca. These workers occupy the lowest rungs of various labor
hierarchies transnationally, including that of berry farms in Washington and Oregon. The
Pacific Northwest berry industry is segregated along lines of ethnicity and perceptions of
ethnicity. This social formation, at the same time, maps onto a hierarchy of suffering.
The lower a group is found on the labor ladder, the more bodily suffering, deterioration,
and violence inherent to their work. Yet, this hierarchy remains, as a rule, taken for
granted and unquestioned. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence proves useful
here. Each group in the berry industry - from White farm executives to White
administrative workers, U.S. Chicano field bosses to mestizo Mexican tractor drivers,
Mixteco raspberry pickers to Triqui strawberry pickers - perceives itself and other groups
through lenses dependent on and at the same time determinant of their location in this
social formation. Many of these perceptions embroil the bodies of those involved in
subtle and powerful ways such that the metaphor of bodily difference is the primary site
of symbolic violence, naturalizing this multi-layered ethnic-labor-suffering pecking
order.
---INTERESTS: political economy of health, symbolic violence, the clinical gaze
---ONGOING WORK (tentative title): “We Come Here to Give Away Our Strength”:
the social suffering of Triqui migrant workers in the U.S. and Mexico

“Drive On”: How Soldier’s Embody Ethical Dispositions

BRIAN LANDE
University of California, Berkeley

Based on a year and half of participant observation and training in a Reserved Officer
Training Corp battalion, this article explores the ways in which the soldier's lived sense
of ethics define distinctive practices of discipline and temporality. This serves to argue
that acquiring ethical expertise allows soldier's to enter into a sacred military world set
apart from the profane civilian world. The soldier's ethic, with its emphasis on the
incorporation of disciplinary practices and hence transformation of the body and a unique
sense of time tear the soldier away from the everyday world and creates a moral world in
which a responsible, dependable and above all honorable self can be cultivated. Whereas
most sociological research on morality tends to emphasize the following of rules, I use
Pierre Bourdieu's notion of ethos to explicate the practical mastery of ethical conduct that
soldiers acquire through a moral education. Thus in addition to learning rules soldiers
transform their bodies to cultivate ethical dispositions. To the extent that disciplinary
dispositions and the soldier's attitude toward time naturalize the military world and the
soldier's subordination to the institution, the military ethos also works as a mode of
symbolic violence.

Interests: forms of violence, social theory, pedagogy and the state

Ongoing Work: My dissertation will be a comparative ethnography of how states make
violence by looking at police pedagogy and practice in the United States and Sweden.
Through participation in and observation of police training and practices I will focus on
how state violence is learned and lived by the social agents who enact institutional
imprimaturs.
“Gameboy Equity” and the Schooling Divide: Thinking about Care, Consumption,
and Inequality
Allison Pugh, Sociology, University of California, Berkeley

Abstract:
The paper considers how parents and children construct childhoods amidst receding
public responsibility for children and the flourishing of privatized market solutions.
Based on three years of fieldwork and interviews with 60 parents and children in three
neighboring school communities that differ markedly by income, this project considers
consumption writ large - from sneakers to schools - as the material from which
childhoods are wrought. My preliminary findings suggest parents of widely disparate
means buy many of the same commodities for their kids, including expensive game
systems, but their practices differ in how they are used. Relying in part on Lareau's and
Holt's reworkings of Bourdieu, I am seeing the children's habitus grounded in how they
interact with the stuff of childhood, rather than great variance in what that stuff
comprises. On the other hand, parents of varying means do differ dramatically in their
context-setting consumption - the buying that determines schools, lessons, camps, after-
school care and other settings where childhood takes place. Low-income families of
color may move from the urban core for physical safety, but in my sample they keep their
children in urban schools, in sharp contrast to the upper-income whites, who move to the
suburbs expressly for the newer, whiter, "better" schools. Racialized fears about physical
and mental safety play a role in both practices. Only affluent African-Americans seek
out racialized and class "others" for their children, practicing a sort of "exposure
childrearing" distinctly at odds with the practices of other groups, and which I interpret as
cultural innovation, using Sherry Ortner's work on social change from empowered
subaltern groups. For this paper, then, I am working on bringing Bourdieu and Ortner's
insights together, so that I can incorporate and explain the different dynamics of
commodity consumption and context-setting consumption, describing how each kind
reflects and shapes social inequality.

Allison Pugh - INTERESTS: family; childhoods; race, class and gender inequality;
work, consumption - ONGOING WORK: "'I Want Your Tooth Fairy': Care,
Consumption and Inequality": how urban families use the commodities and contexts of
childhood to trade in the goods of dignity and hope, against a backdrop of racialized class
inequality

"The Autonomy and Subordination of Community Politics in the Urban Political

Process"
Michael McQuarrie, Sociology, New York University

This paper deploys Bourdieu's field theory in order to get analytical leverage on
community politics in post-Fordist U.S. cities. The dominant organizational form that has
emerged as an expression of neighborhood politics in these cities is the 'community
development corporation'. This form has been touted as a solution to a host of urban
problems and, as a consequence, has come to play a significant role in the
implementation of social policy. These organizations also muster significant symbolic
power from their roots in various movements for neighborhood autonomy and their
ongoing claims to represent the communities in which they are situated. However, on
close examination it is clear that few of these organizations have carved out the autonomy
necessary from local political apparatus or the local growth machine to enable a
distinctive neighborhood politics. Indeed, in urban contexts that desperately need the
active intervention of an engaged local citizenry these organizations have served to
silence this discussion. While community development corporations have some markers
of autonomy that we would expect to find in a field, the political effects of this autonomy
have been minimal. Instead, most CDCs have come to constitute dominated fractions of
the political field and are integrated into patronage networks on one hand and growth-
oriented elites on the other. In this sense, community development corporations constitute
an 'interstitial field' and should be analyzed as such rather than as a distinctive
autonomous organizational sphere.

Michael McQuarrie--INTERESTS: Urban Governance, State Restructuring, Public

Sphere. ONGOING WORK: "Backyard Revolution to Backyard Reaction: Low-Income
Housing Production and the Anti-Politics Machine": Social movements, social policy,
and neoliberal restructuring in the emergence of new modes of community governance.

Mapping the Chinese Field of Cultural Production: The Film Industry in the
Reform Era
Seio Nakajima, Sociology, U.C. Berkeley

Seio Nakajima - INTERESTS: economic sociology, sociology of culture, sociology of

film - ONGOING WORK: "Chinese Film Industry in the Reform Era: Genesis, Structure
and Transformation of the Field of Cultural Production Since 1978" (dissertation) :
economic sociological analysis of the emergence, stabilization, and change of the
Reform-Era Chinese film industry.

The rise of the Chinese film scene since the late 1980s has prompted thriving academic
studies on the topic. However, most, if not all, of the studies focus on film as "text" and
discussions on "institutional" aspects of film industry (e.g., how film is produced,
distributed, exhibited, and consumed) remain peripheral. I argue that exclusive focus
either on film texts or on industrial contexts is flawed if we are to fully grasp the structure
and dynamics of what I call the "contemporary Chinese film field." I attempt to provide
an approach sensitive both to the nature and content of cultural products (= film as "text")
and to the social arrangements and organization of production of those cultural products
(film as "institutions"), in relation to the specific empirical case of the emergence,
stabilization, and change in the film field in Reform-Era China. I attempt to accomplish
this task by "putting to work" two interrelated but distinct approaches in sociology: 1)
Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the "field of cultural production" and the 2) "theory of
fields" in economic sociology and organizational analysis. The key research question for
this paper is: What is the relationship between the textual content of films being produced
and the industrial system and organization of production, given the specific historical and
institutional conditions in China since the beginning of the Reform Era? My central
argument is that because film is a cultural product (= products being produced evoke
"meanings") and thus potentially relevant to the legitimacy of the party-state, the state
intentionally/unintentionally regulates the structure of the organization of production as
well as contents of cultural products being produced. My premise in this exploratory
paper is that these double roles of the state in regulating industrial systems as well as
contents are intricately interrelated and feeds into each other that the only adequate way
to make sense of the film field is to examine both in relation to each other.

Transformations of “reconciliation”: Putting Bourdieu to work in the interstitial

field of transitional justice
Jonathan VanAntwerpen, Sociology, UC-Berkeley

Following South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the repertoires of

“reconciliation” closely associated with that commission have resonated far and wide. In
the midst of global celebration and critique, discourses of “reconciliation” have come to
represent one of the leading traveling theories of our time, and the language of
“reconciliation,” if not its reality, has proliferated. How have these discourses of
reconciliation been transformed in the midst of their institutional reproduction and
transnational proliferation? Conceiving of different formulations of reconciliation as
stances taken within an emerging and “interstitial” field of transitional justice, this paper
will be concerned with transformations worked by the prominent theorists and
practitioners of transitional justice who have been reconciliation’s worldwide promoters
and critics. Located in different positions throughout a field whose boundaries and logic
are still being defined, these figures nonetheless share both a common discourse and a
common sense of what is at stake in the struggles over truth, reconciliation, and justice
that animate the field. At the same time, given the field’s emergent and interstitial
character, they each bring distinctive preoccupations and presuppositions to the work of
transitional justice, drawing on dispositions formed in a multiplicity of other, more
established fields. Based on comparative/historical and ethnographic research in both
Cape Town and New York City, where some of the most influential promoters and
detractors of reconciliation have been located, and improvising on a concept central to
Bourdieu’s theoretical research program, I will argue that the transformation of
reconciliation discourse can be best explained by attending to the dynamics of an
emerging and still unsettled field. I will thus seek to represent conflict, transformation,
and innovation within the field of transitional justice – and in particular, the innovative
transformations of discourses of reconciliation – as a product of the field’s distinctly
interstitial character, its location between and beside more developed and autonomous
fields.

Jonathan VanAntwerpen - INTERESTS: transitional justice, sociological theory, history

of sociology - ONGOING WORK: Truth commissions, transitional justice and moral
globalization: the historical development, proliferation and transformation of repertoires
of "reconciliation