ABSTRACT
Bourdieu’s biographical trajectory and the position he occupied in the French intellectual landscape are important to understanding the social and moral aspects of his work. As he himself acknowledged in his last writing, Esquisse pour une auto-analyse (2004), published posthumously, his biography gives a clue to the passion and commitment he invested in educational issues. In a somewhat heteroglossic style, inspired by the reading of “Bourdieu in America” (Wacquant, 1993), this chapter reflects on Pierre Bourdieu, the French intellectual, in the light of my own biographical trajectory-from my French educational training to my American teaching practice. It explains the enormous value given to literate language in French educational practice, the disciplinary and social class discrimination Bourdieu had to fight against, and the decisive impact the war in Algeria had on his intellectual development. Bourdieu’s five major concepts-habitus, field, capital, distinction, symbolic violence-are discussed in light of his personal experience with farmers in Kabylia and in his own community in the Béarn, and that experience is juxtaposed with my experience reading Bourdieu while teaching in America. Such an interweaving of biographical trajectories allows for an empathetic reading of Bourdieu, thus revealing a deeply humanistic aspect of his work that is often overlooked on both sides of the Atlantic. After reflecting on some of the reasons why Bourdieu has been misunderstood (or only too well understood) both in France and in the United States, the chapter ends on a discussion of what a Bourdieusian stance in literacy education might look like.
