Is a Participant Objectivation of Elites and Symbolic Power Possible?

Abstract

The ethnographic account is a supremely ex post facto product of the actual uncertainty of life. (…) The subjects stand too square in their self-referenced world. The method is also patronising and condescending-is it possible to imagine the ethnographic account upwards in a class society? (Paul Willis, Learning to labour) As suggested by this epigraph from Paul Willis, can participant objectivation, through ethnography of the dominant classes, be a tool for social scientists? This question not only implies examining the feasibility of the investigation inherent to particular types of fieldwork, but also means questioning what produces an asym-metric social position and how our professional habits structure our research practices on this type of object. The sociology of elites has been historically structured around key issues and preferred methods. Its major issues are known: the circulation and renewal of elites 1 , their more or less welded character (Mills 1956), the creation of an aristocratic taste (de Saint Martin 1993) and a bourgeois ethos (Sombart and Esptein 1913; Davidoff and Hall 1987), the strength of family socialisation, the role played in social reproduction by a selective school system, the importance of minimal differentiation and distinctive practices, etc. (Veblen 1934). 2 1 A classic theme of Italian sociology. See in particular Vilfredo Pareto, The rise and fall of elites, 1901. 2 For a review of those approaches, see Jean-Pascal Dalloz, Sociology of elite distinction. From Theoretical to Comparative Perspectives, 2009. To combine statistics with ethnography and qualitative methods is especially important when one tries to mobilize a sociology of dispositions, uses the notion of habitus and tries to open the black box of “symbolic capital”. Without ethnography, how to analyze this located authority and this specific form of capital that dominant agents produce and experiment in their daily activities? Ethnography of the field of power should particularly focus on the dispositional adjustments and seek to describe the system of correspondences between models of achievements provided by different institutions (the “good” boss, the “good political leader”) to link them with the already known features of aristocratic or bourgeois tastes. This is one of the strengths of ethnography: not only signal the outline of a culture (the culturalist trap), but concretely show how whole areas of social practices are articulated.