Bourdieu’s Béarnais Ethnography

Abstract

Bourdieu was born in Béarn, in the south-west of France. He conducted fieldwork there, publishing the results in 1962. He returned twice to that fieldwork in articles that developed several of the central concepts, concerns and approaches deployed in his major writings. Bourdieu reflected increasingly on the place of biography in the construction of both social and sociological knowledge, invoking his autobiography as a key to explaining his ideas. These articles on Béarn therefore form a privileged corpus for understanding Bourdieu's oeuvre, providing access to the link between biography and theory, and a means of grasping what is at stake in a reflexive sociology. The aim of this article is threefold. First, to consider the contribution of Béarnais material to the development of Bourdieu's thought. Further, to offer a critique of his use of that material from the perspective of an anthropologist who has worked in the region, and who is familiar both with the kinds of materials and also the earlier accounts on which he was drawing. And last, to indicate ways that Bourdieu's reading of the local materials influences the character of his wider theoretical concepts.