Customer Reviews

Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology)

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For anyone interested in cultural studies or in ethnology/ anthropology/ sociology, _Outline_ is a must read.

Bourdieu, a teacher of Foucault, has been rated France's 2nd most influential scholar (after Foucault) and for good reason. In _Outline_, Bourdieu provides a well-grounded introduction to his main concepts and gives a great deal of supporting detail to support his interpretations.

At times, his descriptions of the Kabyle culture seem to be far too long for persons who are reading him as a general social theorist. If you do not have a deep-rooted love of sociology or other culturally-immersive social sciences, you might prefer his _Logic of Practice_, which has less ethnology in it, or _Practical Reason_, which has nearly none.

If you are a student of culture, however, you will find these extended examples to be excellent background material and useful illustrations of Bourdieu's concepts.

In terms of writing style, Bourdieu is uneconomical, but the payoff is worth slogging through his difficult prose.

As far as I know, this is Bourdieu's best book; the rest is mainly an elaboration of this early work. It is indeed very dense, in large part because it is aiming to doing two things at once: write deep, insightful ethnography about Kabyle society, and simultaneously develop ever-deepening theory amazingly well exemplified by the ethnography. Achieving either of those goals is difficult; achieving both at once, as fully as Bourdieu did, is astonishing and unsurpassed.

How could anyone put Foucault above Bourdieu? Bourdieu has a rigorous sociology behind his work & provides a real theoretical groundwork to reconcile materialist, interpretive/symbolic and interactionist perspectives. Foucault on the other hand has led anthropologists down a slippery slope of prevarication, vagueness, grandstanding and an obsession with a hollow & impoverished idea of what constitutes a "critical" stance.