His initial piece on sport and social class (Bourdieu, 1978) was one of the first commentaries by a major social theorist, apart from the oeuvre of Norbert Elias and his collaborator Eric Dunning, to take sport as a serious sociological issue. His broadening interests reflected his commitment to a wide-ranging sociology of culture, in the realms of education, art, the media, sport and around the general theme of symbolic power. His initial specialism was in anthropology, and his publications in the early 1960s addressed issues concerning gender relations and unemployment in peasant cultures in Algerian society, and were published in rural studies and sociology of work journals. For close to half a century he researched a range of anthropological and sociological topics and, as a consequence, has had an enormously influential impact across the academic world. It is a major contribution to current debates on the theory of culture and a challenge to the major theoretical schools in contemporary sociology.Pierre Bourdieu was one of the most influential social theorists of his generation, both in his home country France and throughout the international sociological community. The topic of Bourdieu’s book is a fascinating one: the strategies of social pretension are always curiously engaging. The social world, he argues, functions simultaneously as a system of power relations and as a symbolic system in which minute distinctions of taste become the basis for social judgment.
Bourdieu finds a world of social meaning in the decision to order bouillabaisse, in our contemporary cult of thinness, in the “California sports” such as jogging and cross-country skiing. The different aesthetic choices people make are all distinctions-that is, choices made in opposition to those made by other classes. What emerges from his analysis is that social snobbery is everywhere in the bourgeois world. Bourdieu bases his study on surveys that took into account the multitude of social factors that play a part in a French person’s choice of clothing, furniture, leisure activities, dinner menus for guests, and many other matters of taste. In the course of everyday life people constantly choose between what they find aesthetically pleasing and what they consider tacky, merely trendy, or ugly. Distinction is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind. France’s leading sociologist focuses here on the French bourgeoisie, its tastes and preferences.
Pierre Bourdieu brilliantly illuminates this situation of the middle class in the modern world.
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