267
Book
ReviewHomage
To BourdieuPierre
Bourdieu: agent provocateur. Michael Grenfell, 2004. London: Continuum; ISBN:
0826467091, paper, 214 pp., £12.60
SAGE Publications, Inc.200510.1191/0967550705ab035XX
MariaTamboukou
University of East London
This
book is presented as a comprehensive account of Bourdieu's life and work; however, I found that although it offers an excellent overview of Bourdieu's
work, it draws very little on his life, perhaps respecting Bourdieu's own
reluctance to expose his private self. As its subtitle `agent provocateur'
indicates, the book focuses on Bourdieu's intellectual and political intervention
in the public sphere as a conscious attempt to resist given social realities
and propose concrete changes. Although downplay- ing the private, the book
starts with Bourdieu's biographical account, particularly focusing on his
experiences of school, which would form his reproduction theories in the sociology
of education from the very beginning of his work. Bourdieu's own trajectory
from philosophy as the discipline in which he graduated to his subsequent
interest in anthropol- ogy, sociology and ultimately politics maps his wider
project of philoso- phizing sociology and using it as an intellectual platform
from which to criticize politics and not rarely intervene actively in national
and global policy making. Indeed throughout his work, Bourdieu tried to reconcile
what Grenfell has identified as `a chronic antipathy between the disci- plines
of sociology, philosophy and anthropology' (p. 13). The extent to which he
was successful in doing that has yet to be discussed and debated, as the book
explicitly limits its aim to a commentary of Bourdieu's over- all project
rather than critically engaging with it. As Grenfell states in his Introduction,
the aim of the book is homage to Bourdieu and his radical politics (p. 4).
The book comprises three parts, including seven chapters, the Introduction
and the Conclusion. Part One is the shorter section of the book, mainly outlining
Bourdieu's biography with a very useful postscript where Bourdieu's main theoretical
concepts are briefly presented. As such it provides a very good beginning
to the subsequent discussions and could be ideal for any sort of introductory
sessions to Bourdieu's work. The second part presents Bourdieu's sociological
work in three chapters focus- ing on Algeria, Education, and Media and Culture
respectively. Each chapter is carefully situated within the social, historical
and political con- texts that created the milieus within which Bourdieu's
work, ideas and books emerged and developed. There are always connections
to his own
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life
at the time, but again it is all about his public life as an `engaged intellectual'.
Grenfell shows how Algeria spanned the whole of Bourdieu's career and formed
the basis of the development of his theory of praxis. Although Bourdieu's
impact on the sociology of education has been widely documented and discussed
and indeed Grenfell's contribution in this area has been pivotal, what this
chapter particularly highlights is Bourdieu's life-long fascination for the
role of education not only in how individuals make sense of the world but
perhaps more importantly in how through education they can be empowered to
intervene in its making/changing. The last chapter of Part One clearly presents
how Bourdieu's sociological analyses of Media and Culture are both deeply
embedded in the important role that art and culture have held historically
in French society and highly critical of the social conditions of cultural
production and consumption. The section on Bourdieu's analysis of cul- tural
resistance once again creates a link to the main aim of the book, highlighting
Bourdieu's political persona. Finally, the third part of the book looks into
how economics and philosophical thought have shaped the development of Bourdieu's
ideas and analyses, concluding with a chapter on specific acts of resistance.
This last part mainly addresses Bourdieu's theoretical and political stance
in the last decades of the twentieth century, highlighting his concrete formulation
of a sociological philosophy. Globalization, the New Poor, neoliberalism and
the role of the intellectuals are all themes that are discussed in this section
in relation to how they were integrated in Bourdieu's project. Of particular
importance is the last chapter of this section and indeed of the book, where
Grenfell focuses particularly on Bourdieu's theory of knowledge and the philo-
sophical questions it opens up in examining the relation between subjects,
their social realities and the possibility of gaining scientific knowledge
about the world. Overall the book succeeds in its aim, namely in being a homage
to Bourdieu's work and although it cannot be argued that it offers some- thing
distinctive in Bourdieu's scholarship, it does form an excellent panorama
of Bourdieu's work, ideas and concepts, which makes it a recommended reading
for anybody interested in being introduced to Bourdieu's work.