ABSTRACT
The appearance of the concept of fields in Bourdieu’s work can be traced back to Les Heritiers the study of French students and their relation to culture, published in 1964, whose English translation, The Inheritors was published in 1979. The intellectual field refers, according to Bourdieu, to the system of social relations within which creation as an act of communication takes place, such that the conceptual construction of the system facilitates assigning the sociology of intellectual and artistic creation its proper object and limits. The general points about fields that this example illustrates are the following: that fields are relatively autonomous structures of relations between agents that emerge in specific socio-historical contexts; that they are the site of struggles between agents, such as struggles for cultural legitimacy, with their own particular stakes and rewards and that these struggles have a certain logic of their own, influenced, nevertheless, by the general socio-historical situation.
