ABSTRACT
Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist whose work has been widely influential in both the social sciences and the humanities. Bourdieu received a scholarship that enabled him to attend the prestigious lycee Louis le Grand in Paris. Central to the concept of habitus is how Bourdieu conceives of the relationship between the structure and the agent. He theorizes habitus as an alternative to notions such as consciousness or subjectivity. Bourdieu defines the arena in which cultural capital flows and accrues value as the field of cultural production. This concept of field is related to habitus in that it is a structural social formation. Bourdieu employs the category of taste to describe how distinctions between high and low culture are made and justified. To conclude, it is clear that Bourdieu’s work has indelibly marked art historical discourse, especially his work on photography, the modern museum, and cultural capital.
