Reading Pierre Bourdieu in a Dual Context: Essays from India and France

322 Pages·2006·3.295 MB·English

by  Roland Lardinois, Meenakshi Thapan

ISBN 978-1-138-37671-7
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Reading Pierre Bourdieu
in a Dual Context

Reading
Pierre Bourdieu
in a Dual Context
Essays from India and France
Editors
Roland Lardinois
Meenakshi Thapan
LONDON NEW YORK NEW DELHI
First published 2006
by Routledge
512 Mercantile House, 15 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001
Simultaneously published in UK
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
Transferred to Digital Printing 2006
© Roland Lardinois / Meenakshi Thapan 2006
Typeset by
Astricks, New Delhi
www.astricks.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0-415-40114-3
Acknowledgements
T
his volume is based on a workshop held at the Department
of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics in February 2004.
The workshop received support from both India and France. In
France, we would like to express our thanks to the Maison des
Sciences de l’ Homme (MSH) in Paris, particularly to its Chief
Administrator at the time, Professor Maurice Aymard, and to Dr
Gilles Tarabout who was in-charge of the Indo-French pro-
gramme run conjointly with the MSH and the Indian Council
of Social Science Research (ICSSR), New Delhi. The workshop
was also financially supported by the École des Hautes Études
en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Centre d’ Études de l’ Inde
et de l’ Asie du Sud (CNRS) in Paris. In India, we would like to
acknowledge the generous financial support of the ICSSR and
the University of Delhi. The French Embassy in New Delhi
hosted a reception on the occasion and we thank Mr J.C. Tribolet
and the Cultural Office of the Embassy of France in New Delhi
for their warm support. We also thank the faculty and students
of the Department of Sociology who hosted this workshop over
two days with great interest and enthusiasm.
The editors would particularly like to thank the authors for
their patience and goodwill which has been of enormous help
in the preparation of this volume. We are grateful to Saloni
Zutshi who provided excellent research assistance during the
preparation of the volume. We also acknowledge the keen edi-
torial gaze of Vidya Rao and Nilanjan Sarkar; and finally, warm
thanks to Omita Goyal at Routledge for taking us on with
complete faith and certainty.

Contents
Introduction
The Uses of Bourdieu’s Social Theory:
An Interdisciplinary Perspective
Meenakshi Thapan and Roland Lardinois
1
The Crisis of ‘Imperial Societies’
Christophe Charle
56
Thinking the State with Bourdieu and Foucault
U.Kalpagam
77
Bourdieu’s Theory of the Symbolic:
Traditions and Innovations
Sheena Jain
103
The Field of Indian Knowledge in France
in the 1930s as Reality and as Fiction
Roland Lardinois
129
Literature and Politics:
The French Literary Field during
the German Occupation (1940–1944)
Gisèle Sapiro
154
viii Contents
Symbolic Violence, Masculine Domination
and Politicization of Gender:
The Case of the Vichy Regime (France, 1940–1944)
Francine Muel-Dreyfus
176
Habitus, Performance and Women’s Experience:
Understanding Embodiment and
Identity in Everyday Life
Meenakshi Thapan
199
Pierre Bourdieu and Anthropology:
From Kinship to Gift
Alban Bensa
230
Documents and Testimony:
Violence, Witnessing and Subjectivity in the Bombay Riots,
1992–1993
Deepak Mehta
259
Contributors
299
Index
302
Introduction
The Uses of Bourdieu’s Social Theory:
An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Meenakshi Thapan and Roland Lardinois
T
his book intends to reflect an encounter between Indian
and French scholars around the work of Pierre Bourdieu, its
understanding and the practical uses of its tools and concepts
in different case studies covering a range of ethnographic sites
from rural to contemporary India, France, Melanesia, as well as
an engagement with theoretical concerns and possibilities. Out-
side Europe, and particularly in the East, Bourdieu’s work is not
as known, except perhaps in Japan, where he lectured, and his
work is available in Japanese. Bourdieu never visited India but
Indian scholars have been reading his work for a long time; most
are unable to read him in French and rely mainly on English
translations as indeed do large numbers of scholars across the
world.
Pierre Bourdieu was born in 1930 in a small village in Béarn,
in the Pyrennees region of south-western France. His father, the
son of a sharecropper, was postmaster and then Head of a post
office while his mother came from a family of farmers involved
also in trading cloth. His rural and provincial origins were a
serious handicap when he wished to enter the most prestigious
academic institution in the highly competitive academic milieu
of Paris, and he was indeed a sort of ‘miracle of the school
system’, to use a phrase he coined when speaking of the children
coming from a working class or peasant background like himself.
After a brilliant performance in his secondary education in his