Bourdieu, Pierre (1930—2002) French sociologist. Born in Béarn, in south-western France, he completed his undergraduate degree at the École Normale Supérieure. He was called up for military service in 1956 and spent two years in Algeria. It was a transformative experience for Bourdieu, and rather than return to France after his tour of duty was over he stayed on for another two years, teaching at the University of Algiers. He returned to France in 1960. In 1964 he finally obtained a job in Paris at L’École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he remained for two decades until his elevation to the Collège de France. At the core of his work there are three concepts that, taken together, comprise the basic methodological apparatus Bourdieu conceived for himself very early on in his career and applied with increasing sophistication throughout the rest of his life: practices, habitus, and field. Bourdieu uses these three concepts to explore the interdependence of human agency and the environment in which people conduct their lives. Practice refers to the actual act of doing things; it is neither fully conscious nor unconscious, and it always takes place as an interaction with others. In turn, action is shaped by learned ways of doing things (habitus) and socially formed environments (fields). Bourdieu rejects the idea that human actors have complete freedom to do and think as they please. But he also rejects the idea that the structure of society functions as pure constraint. His work tries to chart a path between these two extremes. The field, as Bourdieu emphasizes throughout his work, is never fixed: it is the product of historical actions and held together by processes of social reproduction. His first attempt to sketch out his theoretical model in detail can be found in Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (1972), translated as Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977), which uses his fieldwork in Kabylia in Algeria as a springboard. An inveterate reviser (the English translations of his works are often dramatically different from the French originals), Bourdieu produced a second, more rigorous version of his method a decade later in Le Sens pratique (1980), translated as The Logic of Practice (1990). As is indicated in the French title of this work (and mysteriously lost in the translation), Bourdieu’s work focuses on identifying and articulating what he calls ‘practical sense’, or what he also calls the subjective understanding and manipulation of objective structures. Bourdieu’s logic of practice is in reality an attempt to come to grips with two paradoxes at the heart of social life: (1) all conscious action depends upon unconscious processes; and (2) individual actions always appear more strategic than they actually are because of the social field.Practical sense amounts to knowing how to ‘play the game’ (an analogy Bourdieu himself frequently uses). For instance, his analyses of both the art world and the academic world, Les Règles de l’art (1992), translated as The Rules of Art (1996), and Homo Academicus (1984), translated as Homo Academicus (1988), illustrate the importance of patronage, which, as Bourdieu argues, is in many cases more important than actual talent because it is perfectly possible for mediocre talents to rise to prominence in their respective fields by being adept at making use of its possibilities. This ‘know-how’ or gamesmanship, as it might also be called, is located in the ‘habitus’, a notion Bourdieu borrowed and adapted from Aristotle. The habitus is similar to the unconscious in that it is inaccessible to the conscious mind, but it is not an innate facility of the mind. The habitus is acquired by experience, but (paradoxically) also shapes that experience. It can be understood as a form of embodied sensibility, and it manifests as a disposition towards certain types of action. By field, Bourdieu means the relatively closed system of a specific commercial, professional, or social milieu and its internal set of rules, as, for instance, the paradox in both art and academia that the most valuable works are those which were produced without the intent to create value. Value, as Bourdieu demonstrated in what is undoubtedly his best known work La Distinction: critique sociale du jugement (1979), translated as Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984), is not simply a matter of assigning a price, but must always be considered in its cultural and social dimension. He extended this research in several ways: for example, in The Love of Art (1990) he looked at art gallery attendance and explored the way people assign and derive value from art. A prolific author of more than thirty monographs, Bourdieu wrote right up until his untimely death. In his last years, he found time to assume a more public role as an intellectual and write on more directly social matters. Typical in this respect is the massive collective project La Misère du monde (1993), translated as The Weight of the World (1999), in which Bourdieu and a large team of collaborators set out to record the voices of the socially repressed and to speak against the economic system that places them in such terrible conditions. Further Reading: L. Adkins and B. Skeggs Feminism after Bourdieu (2004) M. Grenfell Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts (2008). R. Jenkins Pierre Bourdieu (1992). J. Lane Pierre Bourdieu: A Critical Introduction (2000). L. Wacquant, Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics (2004).