ABSTRACT
Insofar as he was less a High Priest of social theory than a Master Craftsman of social research, Pierre Bourdieu’s analytical legacy should properly be understood in terms of its ability to uncover the logic and practice of particular social worlds. In this chapter, the universe of French gastronomy is considered as a distinctive field of practices. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s analytical methods I seek to demonstrate in a schematic (rather than systematic) way, the changing logic of the field of gastronomic practices in France. To do so I trace key aspects of its changing organizational structure and forms of representation through the two crucial periods of its development. In the first I outline the process by which the gastronomic field developed as an autonomous domain in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, achieving a sufficient coherence of practices, institutions, and representations to sustain itself as a distinctive social field. The second traces the process of erosion of that autonomy a century later, pointing to the new institutional arrangements and relations that have emerged to keep it afloat.
