ABSTRACT
Like many other academic literary intellectuals and cultural studies researchers and theorists during recent decades, the author has found the multifaceted sociology of Pierre Bourdieu useful in her teaching and research. The three main sociological concepts that Bourdieu developed over four decades include “habitus”, “cultural capital” and ‘field”. Bourdieu's critics agree with the author on this observation. These analytical tools designed to solve problems as well as to develop research projects typically puzzle Bourdieu's first-time readers. Like others in the Anglophone world, the author first encountered Bourdieu's special terminology in his Outline of a Theory of Practice, a text on ethnographic methods translated in 1977 and fairly widely known among literary and cultural critics of the time and still probably the best jumping-off point for Bourdieu's methodology. These concepts are not only useful and illuminating for cultural analysis, but are indispensable to assessing Bourdieu's later wide-ranging criticism of globalization.
