CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 17,271Cultural Capital and Social ClassAnthropological Studies and InsightsContemporary Sociological Theory and Practice

The DOI matches its Crossref record.

The Logic of Practice

Bourdieu, Pierre·1990·Stanford University Press eBooks
DOI 10.1515/9781503621749
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Our usual representations of the opposition between the "civilized" and the "primitive" derive from willfully ignoring the relationship of distance our social science sets up between the observer and the observed. In fact, the author argues, the relationship between the anthropologist and his object of study is a particular instance of the relationship between knowing and doing, interpreting and using, symbolic mastery and practical mastery—or between logical logic, armed with all the accumulated instruments of objectification, and the universally pre-logical logic of practice. In this, his fullest statement of a theory of practice, Bourdieu both sets out what might be involved in incorporating one's own standpoint into an investigation and develops his understanding of the powers inherent in the second member of many oppositional pairs—that is, he explicates how the practical concerns of daily life condition the transmission and functioning of social or cultural forms. The first part of the book, "Critique of Theoretical Reason," covers more general questions, such as the objectivization of the generic relationship between social scientific observers and their objects of study, the need to overcome the gulf between subjectivism and objectivism, the interplay between structure and practice (a phenomenon Bourdieu describes via his concept of the habitus), the place of the body, the manipulation of time, varieties of symbolic capital, and modes of domination. The second part of the book, "Practical Logics," develops detailed case studies based on Bourdieu's ethnographic fieldwork in Algeria. These examples touch on kinship patterns, the social construction of domestic space, social categories of perception and classification, and ritualized actions and exchanges. This book develops in full detail the theoretical positions sketched in Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice. It will be especially useful to readers seeking to grasp the subtle concepts central to Bourdieu's theory, to theorists interested in his points of departure from structuralism (especially fom Lévi-Strauss), and to critics eager to understand what role his theory gives to human agency. It also reveals Bourdieu to be an anthropological theorist of considerable originality and power.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1515/9781503621749

Cites

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Items 201–300 of 1,038

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Bourdieu, P.
Venue
Stanford University Press eBooks
Publisher
Stanford University Press
Published
1990-06-01
DOI
10.1515/9781503621749
OpenAlex
W1543166800
Cited by
17,271
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 878 · 2025: 704 · 2024: 584 · 2023: 502 · 2022: 572 · 2021: 725 · 2020: 865 · 2019: 844 · 2018: 891 · 2017: 790 · 2016: 843 · 2015: 882 · 2014: 907 · 2013: 818 · 2012: 820
FWCI
55.93
Type
book
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
  • Stanford University Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
  • HAL (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Cultural Capital and Social Class
  • Social Sciences › Anthropology › Anthropological Studies and Insights
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice
Keywords
Pierre Bourdieu, practice theory, knowing and doing, observer-observed relationship, habitus, symbolic capital, objectivism and subjectivism, human agency, kinship, domestic space, ritual, classification, domination, Algeria, ethnography

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review