relation to the defining aspects of social reality, such as social organisation, hierarchy and action. Initially more concerned with structure, social theorists did not delay in providing the counter argument that was agency, sparking the structure/agency debate that is still relevant in social thinking today. More recently, attempts to synthesise the two have been made, where in this essay, Pierre Bourdieu’s take on the matter will be explored. On the one hand, social theorists present the concept of…
Pierre Bourdieu was somewhat of a contemporary theorist who drew on the works of Marx, Durkheim, and Levi-Strauss. He believed that social life was not driven by economics, but instead was a form of exchange, and forms of domination well outside the economy. Bourdieu’s main focus was symbolic violence. According to our lecture notes, symbolic violence is “power which manages to impose meanings and to impose them as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are the basis for its force…
Another significant privilege was my inexperience of racialized social control in my educational capital. Racialize social control is the regulation and repression of a certain race (Rios, 30). To illustrate, my high school was divided into two; the top floor was the magnet program and the rest of the school was for regulars. The schools physical structure depicts the social class within the school system that students are categorized into. Ironically, I was enrolled in the regular school, but because…
The subject of social class within the educational system seems to be the elephant in the room. Issues of race, gender, discrimination and making safe places are addressed constantly within the pedagogy yet we ignore the realities of social stratification, especially when it comes to the classroom and the curriculum we are expected to teach. According to Bourdieu, the education systems of western societies function in such a way as to legitimatize class inequalities (Bourdieu, 1977). Success in…
concludes by stating that our food affects culture and vice versa in a never-ending cycle. In “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste”, Pierre Bourdieu discusses how the people in power dominate the idea of taste, an aesthetic concept. He theorizes that aesthetics is what creates class-based social groups and distances one class away from another. He emphasizes that it is the social origin, more than economic capital that produces aesthetic preferences. He elaborates that people are born…
Pierre Bourdieu was an acclaimed French sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher, who is still noted today as being one of the most prominent and influential intellects in recent years. He is famous for his contributions to many subjects and areas, and much of his work is still considered today as being classics. His work is considered to be some of the most innovative and groundbreaking bodies of theory and research in contemporary social science. He is still prominent today for his many great…
Focus Area - Education and Social Inequality Explain how the four components of thinking sociologically assist in understanding this area or domain. Traditionally Australians have believed in and conveyed the myth of Australia as a fair , egalitarian society without excess wealth or poverty, however we are definitely not a classless society. Australia's education system has been and remains one of the most unequally distributed social resources and could possibly be regarded as the main source…
Introduction from: Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste by Pierre Bourdieu ©1984 Introduction You said it, my good knight! There ought to be laws to protect the body of acquired knowledge. Take one of our good pupils, for example: modest and diligent, from his earliest grammar classes he’s kept a little notebook full of phrases. After hanging on the lips of his teachers for twenty years, he’s managed to build up an intellectual stock in trade; doesn’t it belong to him…
Pierre Bourdieu’s theoritical contribution to contemporary debates and the long-term history of anthropological thought: Practice theory since its development by Bourdieu has become a fundemental tool used by anthropologists to examine other societal structures. The theory provides a new anthropological lens in which to examine why a society has developed in a particular way. Due to practice theory being developed as a response to past anthropologcal texts in which Bourdieu critiqued for being to…
Social Class and Inequality Social inequality has been defined as a conflicting status within a society with regards to the individual, property rights, and access to education, medical care, and welfare programs. Much of society’s inequality can be attributed to the class status of a particular group, which has usually been largely determined by the group’s ethnicity or race (Macionis & Gerber, 2006). The conflict perspective is an attempt to understand the group conflict that…