Best 26 quotes of Pierre Bourdieu on MyQuotes

Algeria is what allowed me to accept myself.

If the sociologist has a role, it is probably more to furnish weapons than to give lessons.

In stamping photography with the patent of realism, society does nothing but confirm itself in the tautological certainty that an image of reality that conforms to its own representation of objectivity is truly objective.

I often say that sociology is a martial art, a means of self-defense. Basically, you use it to defend yourself, without having the right to use it for unfair attacks.

I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why are they so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence.

Only in imaginary experience (in the folk tale, for example), which neutralizes the sense of social realities, does the social world take the form of a universe of possibles equally possible for any possible subject.

Practice has a logic which is not that of the logician.

Photography itself is most frequently nothing but the reproduction of the image that a group produces of its own integration.

Symbolic violence is violence wielded with tacit complicity between its victims and its agents, insofar as both remain unconscious of submitting to or wielding it.

Television enjoys a de facto monopoly on what goes into the heads of a significant part of the population and what they think.

The difficulty, in sociology, is to manage to think in a completely astonished and disconcerted way about things you thought you had always understood.

The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden.

The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects.

The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need for words, and ask no more than complicitous silence.

The point of my work is to show that culture and education aren't simply hobbies or minor influences.

The point of my work is to show that culture and education arent simply hobbies or minor influences. They are hugely important in the affirmation of differences between groups and social classes and in the reproduction of those differences.

You cannot cheat with the law of conservation of violence: all violence is paid for, and for example, the structural violence exerted by the financial markets, in the form of layoffs, loss of security, etc., is matched sooner or later in the form of suicides, crime and delinquency, drug addiction, alcoholism, a whole host of minor and major everyday acts of violence.

As if femininity were measured by the art of 'shrinking'... women are held in a kind of invisible enclosure (of which the veil is only the visible manifestation) circumscribing the space allowed for the movements and postures of their bodies (whereas men occupy more space, especially in public places). This symbolic confinement is secured practically by their clothing by their clothing which (as was even more visible in former times) has the effect not only of masking the body but of continuously calling it to order.

El juego político es un asunto de profesionales para impulsar, sobre todo entre la gente menos politizada, un desapego fatalista, favorable, evidentemente, al mantenimiento del orden establecido.

Femininity is imposed for the most part through an unremitting discipline that concerns every part of the body and is continuously recalled through the constraints of clothing or hairstyle.

Music is the 'pure' art par excellence. It says nothing and has nothing to say. Never really having an expressive function, it is opposed to drama, which even in its most refined forms still bears a social message and can only be 'put over' on the basis of an immediate and profound affinity with the values and expectations of its audience. The theatre divides its public and divides itself. The Parisian opposition between right-bank and left-bank theatr, bourgeois theatre and avant-garde theatre, is inextricably aesthetic and political.

Such competence is not necessarily acquired by means of the 'scholastic' labours in which some 'cinephiles' or 'jazz-freaks' indulge. Most often it results from the unintentional learning made possible by a disposition acquired through domestic or scholastic inculcation of legitimate culture. This transposable disposition, armed with a set of perceptual and evaluative schemes that are available for general application, inclines its owner towards other cultural experiences and enables him to perceive, classify and memorize them differently. . . . In identifying what is worthy of being seen and the right way to see it, they are aided by their whole social group and by the whole corporation of critics mandated by the group to produce legitimate classifications and the discourse necessarily accompanying any artistic enjoyment worthy of the name.

Taste is first and foremost distaste, disgust and visceral intolerance of the taste of others.

The essentially contradictory phrase 'legitimate autodidacticism' is intended to indicate the difference in kind between the highly valued 'extra-curricular' culture of the holder of academic qualifications and the illegitimate extra-curricular culture of the autodidact.

The history of the transformation of myth into religion (ideology) is not separable from the history of the constitution of a corps of specialized producers of religious rites and discourses, i.e. the progress of the division of religious labour, which is itself a dimension of the progress of the division of social labour, and hence the division into classes.

Thus, for an adequate interpretation of the differences found between the classes or within the same class as regards their relation to the various legitimate arts, painting, music, theatre, literature etc., one would have to analyse fully the social uses, legitimate or illegitimate, to which each of the arts, genres, works or institutions considered lends itself. For example, nothing more clearly affirms one's 'class', nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music.