Layers of life sure to provoke

It is probably the case that most of the people who are familiar with Pierre Bourdieu's work have long since made up their minds what they think about it. His work has been categorised by reference to intellectual subject. For some, Bourdieu is the anthropologist who, in the 1970s, most coherently broke free from the dominating control of structuralism. For others, he is the educational sociologist whose ideas had some influence on the May events of 1968 in Paris while, again, for others, as the author of Distinction , he is the supreme sociological analyst of recent French culture and taste. For many, though, the categorisations are much less precise. Bourdieu? Isn't he the man who developed the idea of "cultural capital"? Oh yes, that idea goes down well with Quality Assurance when we are trying to explain our poor student retention rates. Isn't he the man who talked about the cultural arbitrariness of the curriculum, relating curriculum contents to the power positions of the institutions within which they are transmitted? Oh yes, but we had better play that down. That kind of relativism could sabotage bench marking. Many of Bourdieu's key concepts, in other words, are deployed opportunistically in ways that ultimately conflict with his intentions. They have been reduced to conceptual sound bites that give a pseudo-legitimacy to ideological positions with which they really conflict.

It is hardly surprising that Bourdieu has increasingly turned towards political engagement and direct action. It must be soul-destroying to find that ideas that were generated in anger and social commitment end up as aspects of unreflecting common speech, to find that concepts that were devised to expose and treat discrimination and disadvantage end up as placebos or opiates, dulling our consciousness of wrongs and inequalities that still persist.

Even actions, of course, are subject to distortion and false framing. After a flurry of activity in Paris in the summer of 1998 associated with the publication of Bourdieu's La Domination Masculine , his name momentarily reached the attention of the British press. The Times carried an article with the headline "Insults fly in Left Bank cafes as intellectuals court screen fame", and The Economist carried a discussion entitled "Dominators and dominees", which was overshadowed by a photograph of Sartre with the caption: "They don't write tomes like his nowadays." It is obviously an important element of British political complacency that intellectualism should either be mocked or consigned to hefty irrelevance.

This review, then, is a plea that The Weight of the World should be read without prejudice. Use a reading of the text to get behind conceptual short-cuts and actually consider whether the Bourdieu you thought you had neatly sewn up and compartmentalised might still speak to our condition. For over a decade, Bourdieu has been insisting that his texts are not so much representations of objective reality as instruments for improving our own self-understandings. The English preface to the translation of Homo Academicus (1988) spelt this out and Bourdieu has returned to the point in the essays collected in Practical Reason (1998). The Economist commented that Bourdieu's "most readable work is probably La Misère du Monde , which mainly lets others - France's down-and-under - speak for themselves". It does not do this. It represents both the words spoken by the "down-and-under" to different members of a team of academic researchers and also the sense which those members seek to make of their encounters. As such, the text tries to raise questions both about the observed social circumstances and about the implications of a process whereby the dominant characterise the conditions of those they observe, generate interpretations of the behaviour of those they dominate, and, ultimately, prescribe policies designed to engineer social inclusion.

Methodologically, there is here a consistency and continuity of intention that links the work of Bourdieu and his collaborators in The Weight of the World with the work that Bourdieu began when, as a "colonial" social anthropologist undertaking fieldwork among Algerian tribes during the Algerian war of independence in the late 1950s, he sought to represent indigenous values and practices. The key question now is whether there still are equivalent indigenous values and practices in contemporary societies that await the Socratic or "maieutic" liberation that Bourdieu purports to offer - whether social movements can actualise new forms of democratic participation that do not necessarily conform to the paradigms of politicised participation prescribed by politicians and political scientists.

Like a Virginia Woolf novel, The Weight of the World juxtaposes a range of perspectives on situations - "points of view", Bourdieu calls them, in which the "point" or source of the view is inseparable from what is viewed.It juxtaposes transcripts of interviews and detached glosses of the interviewees and their situations provided by the interviewers. Bourdieu's team, working in the early 1990s, was made up of colleagues with most of whom he had worked for 20 years or more. There is a tacitly shared perspective but there are also differentiated, individual perspectives. Researchers talk informally about the people they interviewed. There was no "sample" and sometimes the points of contact between interviewers and interviewed are familiar or randomly and ostentatiously unscientific, but, at the same time, in the reported encounters and the glosses there is the unarticulated presence of decades of academic work. At the back of Abdelmalek Sayad's account of a displaced family and the transcript of his interview with "the inhabitants of a working-class district" lie his sociological analyses of the experiences of emigrants from North Africa and of their situation in France. At the back of Remi Lenoir's interviews with a young female police inspector and with a judge are his detailed sociological analyses of the French judicial system and of the professional training of the judiciary. Bourdieu skilfully makes an absorbing narrative out of layers of elective affinity - between the researchers themselves and between researchers and the objects of their research interest.

The book is grouped thematically around issues which could be labelled "immigration", "housing, "social services", "crime and order", "labour relations" and "education", but, by concentrating on life stories or career trajectories, the "issues" are exposed for what they are - crudely segregated classifications of phenomena of multiple deprivation that relate inadequately to the lived experience of those who suffer. The "educational" section begins with an essay by Bourdieu and Patrick Champagne entitled "Outcasts on the inside". They give an overview of the transformations in the French school system that have occurred since the 1950s.

They suggest that the widening of access to further and higher education may have eliminated the initial exclusion or self-exclusion of disadvantaged social groups from continuing education but, in doing so, it generated an internal exclusion. Disaffected students listlessly prolong their studies precisely because they are aware of the position of their institutions in the hierarchy of institutions and of the associated status of the awards that they will eventually receive. On Bourdieu's part, this scenario is a logical extension of his 1960s work and he is poignantly aware of the extent to which his earlier research may have constructed the situation that he now observes. The question, however, is whether this is a response to the situation of the young man he interviews or whether the interview corroborates an a priori systemic conceptualisation.

Bourdieu gives a brief pen portrait of a 19-year-old Beur called Malik before offering an interview with him entitled "My life's okay", that was conducted in June 1991. The interview elicits many facts about Malik's life, about his school career, his attitudes to teachers and to learning, about his semi-literate Algeria-born father, about his brother, his father's divorce, the places he had lived and where he now lives, his relations with friends, brushes with the police, his plans to open a water-sports centre in Vietnam, to take off for a week to jet ski in the west of France, and to go to Spain with his girlfriend. Malik comments that "careers scare me" and says of money that "it lets you make up for some dreams with material things... it's the compensation; I don't really want it, I want to live, and not make up for something".

As Bourdieu's gloss comments: "Malik is 19 and has already 'lived a lot'." What we have here are graphic details of student experience which resonate with the litanies of misery and hardship often exposed to us at assessment time in "mitigating circumstances". We have to decide how these relate to the much-emphasised demand of students for vocational courses and we have to take a position about the way in which Bourdieu draws upon his past understanding to decipher the present. If we approach The Weight of the World without preconceptions about its provenance, it cannot fail to be provocative. We have to make the space to be provoked.

Derek Robbins lectures in politics and anthropology, University of East London.