Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu (b. 1930–d. 2002) is widely regarded as one of the most influential sociologists and social theorists of the 20th century. He was an exceptionally productive researcher with a broad range of interests and a prolific writer: during his lifetime he published more than forty books and five hundred articles, essays, lectures, reviews, interviews, commentaries, films, and photography. His influence extends beyond sociology to philosophy, anthropology, education, geography, history, cultural studies, economics, political studies, feminist studies, science studies, and postcolonial studies. Bourdieu was born in a small village in the rural area of Béarn, in southwestern France, in a peasant sharecropper, later postman’s, family. He left his home region to pursue an academic education in Paris where he studied philosophy at the prestigious École normale supérieure (ENS). After graduation he was sent to Algeria to undertake his military service. Returning to France, he first had some teaching posts until he was nominated as director of studies at the (then) École pratique des haute études, in 1964; he also took over as director of the Centre de Sociologie Européenne. From this base, Bourdieu, with his collaborators, instigated a program of investigations into several aspects of cultural, social, and economic life, predominantly from the viewpoint of how they served in the reproduction of power and inequalities in French social life. Through his studies in the 1960s and 1970s, Bourdieu became first known as a sociologist of education. Childhood, as a topic or even an index word, hardly appears in Bourdieu’s published work. He did, however, register the phenomenon of childhood in some of his early, more methodological work when he referred to the (originally Durkheimian) notion of socialization, whereas “childhood” would have been for him “just a word,” similar to his response to the topic of “youth.” In his sociology of education, especially in his renown book Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (orig. 1970), written with his colleague Jean-Claude Passeron, children exist in the context of “pedagogic activity” within the family and the educational system. After Reproduction, Bourdieu’s focus widened to other fields of French social life. Unsurprisingly, the first uses of Bourdieu’s ideas in child(hood)-related studies were in the sociology of education, especially after the translation of Reproduction into English in 1977. Since the new field of childhood studies started to evolve in the mid-1980s, more Bourdieu-inspired studies have also emerged, with a broadening focus on children and childhood in social life.