Rupture and Crisis. Reading Bourdieu through crisis, reading crisis through Bourdieu
Call for paper, Special Issue of «Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia», edited by MARCO PITZALIS (University of Cagliari, Italy) and ELLIOT B. WEININGER (Suny Brockport, NY, USA)
Nearly 20 years after his death, the work of Pierre Bourdieu remains the object of a prevailing interpretation, one encapsulated by a single word: «reproduction». The relations between capitals, field, and habitus are understood as a circle enclosing individuals in a sort of eternal return. Individuals are, indeed, doubly imprisoned: by objective structures and by the constraints of collective dispositions. Thus, it is assumed that the myriad of concepts introduced by Bourdieu lead inexorably to «structuralist» and «holistic» analyses (Boudon 2010; Fabiani 2016) of social phenomena, and to findings of social continuity and perpetuation of power relationships (DiMaggio 1979; Jenkins 1982; Goldthorpe 2007; Burawoy 2012). On this reading, Bourdieu’s thought admits «dynamic» elements – strategy, struggle, even revolution – only to the extent that they can be subordinated to «static» outcomes.