Bourdieu viene a la ciudad: Pertinencia, principios, aplicaciones

Abstract

This article introduces the themes and contributions to the double “Events and debates” section on “Taking Bourdieu to Town.” I first establish the pertinence of Bourdieu’s sociology for students of the city by revisiting his early Béarn and Algerian work on power, space, and urbanization and linking it to his late dissection of social suffering in the French metropolis. Next, I spotlight four transversal principles that animate Bourdieu’s research practice and can fruitfully guide urban inquiry: The Bachelardian imperative of epistemological rupture and vigilance, the Weberian command to effect the triple historicization of the agent (habitus), the world (social space, of which field is but a subtype), and the categories of the analyst (epistemic reflexivity); the Leibnizian-Durkheimian invitation to deploy the topological mode of reasoning to track the mutual correspondences between symbolic space, social space, and physical space; the Cassirer moment urging us to recognize the constitutive efficacy of symbolic structures. I also flag three traps that Bourdieusian explorers of the city should exercise special care to avoid: The fetishization of concepts, the seductions of “speaking Bourdieuse” while failing to carry out the research operations Bourdieu’s notions stipulate, and the forced imposition of his theoretical framework en bloc when it is more productively used in kit through transposition.