ABSTRACT
Pierre Bourdieu is widely acknowledged as one of ‘the most influential social theorists of his generation, both in his home country of France and throughout the sociological community’ (Tomlinson, 2004: 161). During his career, Bourdieu researched a wide range of sociological and anthropological issues. He is perhaps best known for his extensive work concerning the maintenance of a system of power by means of the transmission of a dominant culture. One of his central themes was that culture and education are central in the affirmation of differences between social classes, and in the reproduction of those differences. Importantly, Bourdieu’s writing is an argument for an integrated analytical approach, where history, anthropology and sociology all overlap in the cultural analysis of practice (Tomlinson, 2004). For Bourdieu (1986: xiv), then, it is possible to ‘observe and understand everything that human practices reveal only when they are seen in their mutual relationship . . . as a totality’.
