Oeuvre pierre bourdieu biography

Oeuvre pierre bourdieu biography wikipedia

French philosopher, anthropologist, sociologist, and public intellectual, Pierre Bourdieu rose from the relative obscurity of provincial France to become one of the most influential thinkers in the social sciences. He was posted to Algeria as part of the French mission to pacify its rebellious colony.

Bourdieu stayed in Algeria from to to lecture at the University of Algiers and study the lives of the Kabyle people. He became known for an elegant series of structuralist accounts of Kabyle life, the most famous of which, The Kabyle House, not only describes how the layout of a typical Kabyle house encodes local cosmologies but suggests that these cosmologies are reproduced among Kabyle by the process of living in the house and inhabiting these meanings.

Bourdieu argued in his work La Reproduction that the French educational system operated to reproduce the French cultural system, and particularly class differences. He returned to the issue of class reproduction in his most important work, Distinction.