Bourdieu's social theory

Author: Gao Xuanhang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-12-01
Features: Bourdieu is one of the most cited contemporary French anthropologists, sociologists, and thinkers in Western academia over the past 40 years. Since the 1960s, he has actively engaged in the innovation of theoretical and methodological approaches in the humanities and social sciences, attempting to break the fixed dualistic thinking model of subject-object in Western tradition and establishing a unique intellectual style and new research perspective of "structuration." His works are extremely rich and profound. The author of this book explains and analyzes the basic framework, main concepts, and critical explorations of Bourdieu's social theory in an accessible and fluent style. It focuses on explaining the most crucial categories such as "cultural reproduction," "habitus," "field," "capital," and "symbolic power of language," and provides detailed analyses of central issues in modern society, including the reproduction of cultural privileges in school education, the legitimization of power, lifestyles, and cultural taste in contemporary consumer society. This not only helps students, postgraduates, and teachers in humanities and social sciences in China to further study Bourdieu's social theory but also aids in understanding the fundamental issues of contemporary Western society.