ABSTRACT
Bourdieu wrote at a timewhen the nation state was frequently elided with ‘society’ and when immigration from former colonies had not yet significantly challenged metropolitan assumptions. It is clear fromhis earlierwork onAlgeria that Bourdieu was deeply interested in questions concerning the relations between ethnicity and colonialism (Bourdieu, 1979), just as, in his later work, he was expressly concerned with the meagre cultural capital holdings of migrants (Bourdieu et al., 1999: 424). However, these concerns do not figure strongly in Distinction, which depicts the social as more-or-less entirely a nationally bounded entity, unaffected by trans-national flows of people and cultures. In Chapter 2 we noted that Bourdieu could not ask about the ethnicity of his respondents or their countries of origin. The consequent depiction of France as ethnically undifferentiated was matched by a corresponding focus on his respondents’ relations to a territorially bounded repertoire of cultural items. When Bourdieu asked his respondents whether they knew or liked particular named cultural items, his examples were, with the exception of films, exclusively European, andmainly French. All of the painters he asked about, fromLeonardo daVinci through to Picasso, belonged to the European high art tradition and, although the favourite musical works he included ranged across ‘highbrow’ and more popular works, they were all European. The favourite singers he asked about were all French except for Petula Clark who, although born in England, had, by the mid-1960s, married a Frenchman, lived in France, and sang and recorded mainly in French. Only his questions about films opened up an otherwise exclusively Euro-French cultural horizon to the influence of American culture by including films like Singing in the Rain and The Magnificent Seven alongside contemporary French films. This was because the films he listed were those showing in Paris at the time of his survey, and so reflected the role of international market forces more than his other questions.
