Reading Bourdieu in South Africa

Pierre Bourdieu is the quintessential theorist of domination and social order. South Africa presents an exemplar from the Global South—fractured, contested, disputative, disorderly, violent. This chapter examines Bourdieu’s concepts of order through the jagged realities of South African society, at the same time exploring South African society through the conceptual lenses provided by Bourdieu, and in the process rethinking both. The author uses this double reflection to rethink Bourdieu from a Southern perspective, recovering a potent passage from Bourdieu regarding the “margin of freedom” from the tyranny of habitus and field provided by the concept of symbolic power. The chapter reconstructs the concept of political field to provide for multiple overlapping, mutually unintelligible, and subversive fields of practice occupying the same social space, thus accounting for double meaning, ambiguity, violence, and subaltern agency in the making and unmaking of social order.