Content area
Full Text
Key Words
habitus, field, symbolic power, discourse, linguistics
Abstract
This paper synthesizes research on linguistic practice and critically examines the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu from the perspective of linguistic anthropology. Bourdieu wrote widely about language and linguistics, but his most far reaching engagement with the topic is in his use of linguistic reasoning to elaborate broader sociological concepts including habitus, field, standardization, legitimacy, censorship, and symbolic power. The paper examines and relates habitus and field in detail, tracing the former to the work of Erwin Panofsky and the latter to structuralist discourse semantics. The principles of relative autonomy, boundedness, homology, and embedding apply to fields and their linkage to habitus. Authority, censorship, and euphemism are traced to the field, and symbolic power is related to misrecognition. And last, this chapter relates recent work in linguistic anthropology to practice and indicates lines for future research.
READING BOURDIEU
The first challenge for a linguistic anthropologist reading Bourdieu is Bourdieu's own language. It is terse in papers like "The Berber House" (1973), dense and reflexive in the Outline (1977) and The Field of Cultural Production (1993), and willfully obscure in Reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron 1977). He argues against theoretical programs and their terminologies but advances his own program and terminology. His vocabulary derives from fields as diverse as economics, art history, literature, linguistics, philosophy of language, statistics, and social theory (particularly structuralist and Marxist), along with the layers of specific literature bearing on North Africa, French society, and history. Yet he rejects critical presuppositions that attach to the language in its own field (e.g., competition, monopoly, supply, demand, capital) (1985, p. 19). Throughout the writings he uses linguistic-semiotic terms, such as arbitrariness, generativity, invariance, and structure, but he dismisses much of the linguistics and semiotics from which they are drawn. He was also embedded in several debates over such basic topics as reason, intentionality, and political thought and was himself politically engaged. His linguistic wager was that he could absorb selected terms and concepts from other fields, while excluding much of the intellectual baggage they usually carry. The result is that readers unaware or unsympathetic to his wager will find Bourdieu's prose paradoxical, inconsistent, or opaque. It also opens him to withering criticism such as Hasan (1999),...