Bourdieu on Bourdieu

learning the lesson of the leçon

Ian Duncan

pp. 180-194

in: Richard Harker, Cheleen Mahar, Chris Wilkes (eds), An introduction to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1990

Abstrakt

In 1982 Pierre Bourdieu took up the Chair of Sociology at the College de France, following the death of its incumbent, Raymond Aron. His inaugural lecture, Leçon sur la leçon, ¹ which might be glossed as "lecture on lecturing", is a meditation on his roles of inaugural lecturer and of professional sociologist, setting forth his understanding of the nature of his discipline, or science as he prefers to call it. For Bourdieu, as pointed out in Chapter 1, being a sociologist entails a strict reflexivity, for sociologists must treat themselves in the same way as they treat the objects of their research. The idea of reflexivity has been explored since the late 1970s by some anthropologists who are concerned to overcome the conventional separation between anthropologist and informant. Paul Rabinow writes

Cited authors

Aron Raymond

Rabinow Paul

Bourdieu Pierre