#pierre bourdieu

[maaarine]

Dating apps and male beauty standards: Why are Tinder users so obsessed with height? (Ana Bulnes, El País, July 19 2022)

—

I'm fascinated by this line of reasoning

hugging a short man reminds her of hugging a child, and that's wrong and unappealing......

which means that the other way around is erotic to her, it turns her on to appear like a child-like figure to men?

she desperately needs to feel protected by the one man who's actually her #1 predator?

and god forbid he doesn't tower over her when she wears dumbass stilettos

at some point straight women need to get a fucking grip, no offense

—

Masculine Domination (Pierre Bourdieu, 1998)

“Surveys show, for example, that a large majority of French women say they want a husband who is older and also (quite coherently) taller than themselves; two-thirds of them even explicitly reject the idea of a husband shorter than themselves.

What is the meaning of this refusal to see the disappearance of the ordinary signs of the sexual ‘hierarchy’? (…)

Because these common principles tacitly and unarguably demand that, at least in appearances and seen from outside, the man should occupy the dominant position within the couple, it is for him, for the sake of the dignity that they recognize a priori in him, but also for themselves, that they can only want and love a man whose dignity is clearly affirmed and attested in and by the fact that he is visibly 'above’ them.

This takes place, of course, without any calculation, through the apparent arbitrariness of an inclination that is not amenable to discussion or reason but which, as is shown by observation of the desired, and also real, differences, can only arise and be fulfilled in the experience of the superiority of which age and height (justified as indices of maturity and guarantees of security) are the most indisputable and universally recognized signs.”

#mytxt #article #pierre bourdieu #masculine domination #book #weaker sex

[grandhotelabyss]

What makes an artwork highbrow? What makes another low?

Keeping in mind that this is a sociological rather than an aesthetic distinction, I believe the distinction hinges on how much you already have to know about art in general to appreciate any given work. As the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu writes:

A genre containing ever more references to the history of that genre calls for a second-degree reading, reserved for the initiate, who can only grasp the work’s nuances and subtleties by relating it back to previous works. By introducing subtle breaks and fine variations, with regard to assumed expectations, the play of internal allusions (the same one that has always been practised by lettered traditions) authorizes detached and distanced perception, quite as much as first-degree adherence, and calls for either erudite analysis or the aesthete’s wink.

This is most obvious in the case of a work that is both intensely allusive and extremely sophisticated in technique, like Ulysses, but it also applies to works of a radical simplicity or even contentlessness, like the writings of Gertrude Stein or the paintings of Jackson Pollock, where you have to know enough about art to know why this apparent non-art ("my toddler could paint that!") is actually very serious and meaningful art.

In practice, these distinctions don't hold. They don't hold aesthetically, because most actual practitioners say that the relevant distinction is not high and low but good and bad. But they also don't hold sociologically. The high-low distinction only applies after the mass literacy of the late 19th century, which generated both a mass culture industry and writers and artists who wanted to set themselves apart from this mass culture industry. The very same industry, however, produces such a proliferation of niche markets that even low-art genres become as complex and recursive in their own traditions as the high-art genres, such that you can't really just hand The Big Sleep or Dune or Watchmen to a person off the street anymore than you could with Ulysses. This is the symbolic import of the factoid I am always insisting upon: that this all comes from Poe, that Poe invents both Mallarmé and Lovecraft.

Then "middlebrow" as a concept presents problems of its own. A serious critic wants to scorn the middlebrow and uphold only the raw energy of the lowbrow and the radical intellection of the highbrow, but this standard is too severe. Anti-middlebrow critics get trapped in a hipper-than-thou spiral, or, to vary my image, they futilely chase an unreachable horizon of authenticity and difficulty. There is such a thing as middlebrow—we know it when we see it—but if you become obsessed with the idea, then soon you'll find that nothing is astringent enough for your taste. Anti-middlebrow critics may start by dismissing Our Town and The Grapes of Wrath, but they will inevitably end up writing "Against Ulysses."

Finally, these categories assume too much about who attends to what, and where and when and for what purpose. I quoted that Bourdieu passage above this summer in my Oppenheimer essay. Is Oppenheimer lowbrow, middlebrow, or highbrow? A film made for and sold to a mass audience through memes and sex appeal (lowbrow), a film full of Big Themes and Human Interest and Major Issues (middlebrow), a film formally ambitious, politically ambiguous, tragic in theme, and freighted with unexplained scientific, historical, political, and cultural allusions (highbrow)? I just don't think it's a very interesting question.

Do these categories explain why I read about Ulysses on Microsoft Encarta when I was 13 years old? (It included a recording of an Irish actress doing some of Molly Bloom's interior monologue.) I first checked the novel out of my suburban public branch library the summer of the same year and determined to read it, a task I admittedly didn't accomplish in full until later, when I was in college, just as Bourdieu would predict. But the ambition first found me in the lower-middle-class suburbs through a simple consumer conveyance rather than through any type of elite training.

I don't mean to sound a note of false populism here, to suggest that there's much hidden greatness in the morass of cranked-out junk clogging Amazon. It is, as I've written, "lonely at the top." My populist instinct, insofar as I have one, runs in the other direction: not "low art is actually great" but rather "great art is actually for everyone." (Or perhaps not "everyone" but "anyone." Not every single person but any single person capable of being found by it, which can't be determined in advance.) Still, the worth of a work of art is not extrinsically determined by the position it occupies in the social field, as the sociologists claim, but rather relies on its intrinsic merit in dynamic interaction with an unpredictable range of actual and potential audience members.

#pierre bourdieu #sociology of art

[thebusylilbee]

je suis en train de lire la BD La distinction, librement inspiré du livre de Pierre Bourdieu de Tiphaine Rivière, et cette page au milieu du livre où deux jeunes de milieu défavorisé discute de la nouvelle copine de l'un d'eux qui a des parents riches et.. multi-propriétaires (!!) m'a fait exploser de rire :

#j'adore #il est vraiment bien il expose clairement et simplement les principes clés de bourdieu #la distinction #bande dessinée #upthebaguette #french side of tumblr #french #bee tries to talk #pierre bourdieu #sociology

[swallowerofdharma]

Interesting thinkers from XX century war-consumed Europe

I wish more people were paying more attention to them, instead of studying and repeating ad nauseam the older views of men of the XIX century still considered figures of authority, like Hegel or Freud.

Feel free to add to it, as I definitely lack knowledge on east European thinkers and their legacies.

Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Carla Lonzi, Alice Miller, Pierre Bourdieu, Pier Paolo Pasolini

I’m linking brief articles available in English to give an idea of what they are writing about, but for certain ideas, it is often necessary to go to their books: some of the things they said can’t be fully understood out of the context of their longer dissertations.

Hannah Arendt, What remains? The Language Remains”, 1964

Simone Weil, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, 1940

Alice Miller, Preface from For Your Own Good, Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence, 1982

Pierre Bourdieu, The Forms of Capital, 1986

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Corsair Writings, 1973-1975

For Carla Lonzi I couldn’t find anything in English that was brief AND significant. But there is an English anthology of her writings under the title Feminism in Revolt, although I like the original title better “Let’s spit on Hegel”.

#hanna arendt #simone weil #carla lonzi #alice miller #pierre bourdieu #pier paolo pasolini

[buenoslibrosblog]

𝐎 𝐬𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐨́𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐨 𝐞 𝐨 𝐡𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐝𝐨𝐫 | ★★★★☆

Seguindo o fluxo de leitura dos livros técnicos (clássicos), cheguei ao fim deste material de relevância acadêmica. O que temos é uma publicação da editora autêntica de 2011 com o título original de “𝐿𝑒 𝑠𝑜𝑐𝑖𝑜𝑙𝑜𝑔𝑢𝑒 𝑒𝑡 𝑙’ℎ𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛”, tradução de Guilherme Teixeira e colaboração de Jaime Clasen. Posso dizer que “O sociólogo e o historiador” é um convite aos admiradores e atuantes na área de humanas, contendo em cada página uma imersão nas considerações de Roger Chartier e Pierre Bourdieu.

O livro de 134 páginas contém considerável aprofundamento intelectual, sendo possível uma releitura, com questões significativas em ambos os seguimentos. Basicamente, trata-se de reflexões, pontos de divergências e das responsabilidades nos campos de atuações, mediante suas respectivas disciplinas. O fator determinante de elaboração deste trabalho editorial é referente ao programa da rádio France Culture, levando o nome de “À voix nue”, com cinco encontros realizados em 1987.

Não existe mistério na leitura, o maior desconforto que o leitor poderá ter é obter informações nas linhas de pesquisas citadas pelos participantes. Vejo apenas pontos positivos caso exista necessidade na busca de maior conexão dos feitos de Bourdieu e Chartier. Recomendo também aos leitores que pensam em algum dia ingressarem nas graduações em sociologia e história, é um ótimo ponto de partida. O posfácio é todo dedicado ao debate de Roger Chartier com José Sérgio Leite Lopes, foi um evento realizado em 2002, um programa de Pós-Graduação em História Social da UFRJ.

@buenoslibrosblog

#books #bookstagram #livros #bookaddict #bookblr #bookstan #literatura #books & libraries #booksbooksbooks #comic books #sociólogo #sociology #history #história #pierre bourdieu #roger chartier #france #buenoslibrosblog

[sinigami]

Aslına bakarsanız, okulun bir özgürlük ve eşitlik kurumu olduğu inancı, gerçekte okulun, usulen benimsediği eşitliğe rağmen –hatta tam da bu biçimsel eşitlik yüzünden– muhafazakâr ve hakkaniyetsiz bir kurum olduğu gerçeğini görmeyi engelliyor.

(...)

Okulun sorumluluğu nedir? “Okul” derken okul sistemini kastediyorum, işleyişinde payı olanları değil. Toplumsal eşitsizliklerin idamesinde okulun sorumluluğu nedir? Hem okul karşısındaki eşitsizliklerin, hem de bizzat okulun aktardığı eşitsizliklerin… Bu soruyu layıkıyla sorduğumuzda, bilimin cevabı kuşkuya yer bırakmıyor. Okulun bünyesinde taşıdığı ve hem öğretmenlerde hem de öğrencilerde aradığı değerler; ayırt edici pedagoji yöntemleri (veya bazı öğretim türlerinde, yöntemsizliği); devreye soktuğu seçme ve değerlendirme ölçütleri; aktardığı kültürün içeriği – tüm bunlar, en ayrıcalıklı çocukların lehine, en ayrıcalıksız çocukların aleyhine işliyor. Bu da eğitim sisteminin tamamına hükmeden biçimsel eşitliğin fiilen hakkaniyetsiz olması sonucunu doğuruyor ve demokratik ideallere bağlılığını ilan eden bir toplumda, ayrıcalıkların, açıktan devredildikleri duruma kıyasla çok daha iyi muhafaza edilmesini sağlıyor.

(...)

Eğitim sistemi böylece, ekonomik ve –ondan da fazla– kültürel sermayenin aktarımına dayalı bir toplumsal düzene, eğitimsel liyakat ve kişisel yeteneğe dayalı bir düzen görüntüsü vererek ekonomik ve toplumsal eşitsizliklerin meşrulaştırılmasına katkıda bulunuyor. O halde, eğitimin özgürleştirme etkisinden söz ederken, mevcut haliyle okuldan mı yoksa olması gereken haliyle okuldan mı bahsettiğimizi açıklığa kavuşturmamız gerek. Mevcut haliyle okulun, toplumsal yapının değişmezliğinde çok büyük payı var. Tüm verilerin işaret ettiği üzere, sınıfsal hareketliliğin ve kültürel başarının birincil aracı olan okullaşmayla ilgili eşitsizlikler, toplumumuzda ekonomik eşitsizliklere kıyasla çok daha belirgindir. Kültürel yoksunluk, ekonomik yoksunluk kadar yoğun biçimde hissedilmiyorsa, bunun sebebi, kültür alanında mahrumiyet hissi ile mahrumiyetin kendisi arasında ters orantı olmasıdır: İnsan kültürden ne kadar mahrumsa, kültürden mahrum olma bilinci o kadar düşük olur.

#pierre bourdieu #dergi #eğitim

[sergio-elizondo]

El concepto de CAPITAL en el pensamiento de Pierre Bourdieu

Material audiovisual de mucho valor, y ello en muchos sentidos.

La claridad didáctica-explicativa del entonces académico Álvaro García - sociólogo, quien posteriormente fuera presidente de Bolivia - de pasar de la teoría abstracta a ejemplos concretos de la realidad de su país, es oro puro.

Conceptos abordados:

Campo Social

Habitus

Clase Social (= la suma de)...

Capital Económico +

Capital Social +

Capital Cultural +

Capital Simbólico.

Fuente de imagen: CREA

#pierre bourdieu #capital económico #capital social #Capital simbólico #habitus #campo social #dominación #capital cultural #Youtube

[guiltyonsundays]

Historians owe everything to sociologists and philosophers… sociologists I am kissing you on the mouth so gently

#literally where the fuck would we be without: #Patricia hill collins #kimberlé Crenshaw #gayatri chakraborty #gayatri spivak #michel foucault #judith butler #pierre bourdieu #antonio gramsci #W. E. B. Du Bois #jurgen habermas #as a historian…. we can’t theorise for shit #all we do is steal y’all’s theories and apply them to different historical contexts #academia #post grad #post graduate #history #sociology #humanities #social science #philosophy #Karl Marx #Marxism

[nicklloydnow]

“These findings were later echoed by the renowned French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in his 1979 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.

In his body of work, Bourdieu described how “distance from necessity” characterized the affluent classes. In fact, Bourdieu coined the term “cultural capital.”

Once our basic physical and material needs are met, people can then spend more time cultivating what Bourdieu called the “dispositions of mind and body” in the form of intricate and expensive tastes and habits that the upper classes use to obtain distinction.

Corresponding with these sociological observations, the biologist Amotz Zahavi proposed that animals evolve certain displays, traits, and behaviors because they are so physically costly.

(…)

So for humans, top hats and designer handbags are costly signals of economic capacities; for gazelles, stotting is a costly signal of physical capacities.

Veblen, Bourdieu and Zahavi all claimed that humans—or animals—flaunt certain symbols, communicate in specific ways, and adopt costly means of expressing themselves, in order to obtain distinction from the masses.

Animals do this physically.

And affluent humans often do it economically and culturally, with their status symbols.

A difference, though, is that human signals often trickle to the rest of society, which weakens the power of the signal. Once a signal is adopted by the masses, the affluent abandon it.

(…)

The yearning for distinction is the key motive here.

And in order to convert economic capital into cultural capital, it must be publicly visible.

But distinction encompasses not only clothing or food or rituals. It also extends to ideas and beliefs and causes.

In his book WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy, the author Michael Knox Beran examined the lives and habits of upper-class Americans from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

He writes that “WASPS” had mixed feelings about their fellow citizens.

These upper-crust Americans viewed ordinary Americans as “sunk in moronic darkness” and that “It is a question whether a high WASP ever supported a fashionable cause without some secret knowledge that the cause was abhorred by the vulgarians.”

This still goes on today.

In the past, people displayed their membership in the upper class with their material accoutrements.

But today, because material goods have become a noisier signal of one’s social position and economic resources, the affluent have decoupled social status from goods, and re-attached it to beliefs.

The upper class craves distinction.

(…)

A 2020 study titled “The possession of high status strengthens the status motive” led by Cameron Anderson at UC Berkeley found that relative to lower-class individuals, upper-class individuals have a greater desire for wealth and status.

In other words, high-status people desire wealth and status more than anyone else.

(…)

Expressing a luxury belief is a manifestation of cultural capital, a signal of one’s fortunate economic circumstances.

There are other examples of luxury beliefs as well, such as the downplaying of individual agency in shaping life outcomes.

A 2019 study led by Joseph Daniels at Marquette University was published in the journal of Applied Economics Letters.

They found that individuals with higher income or a higher social status were the most likely to say that success results from luck and connections rather than hard work, while low-income individuals were more likely to say success comes from hard work and individual effort.

Well, which belief is more likely to be true?

Plenty of research indicates that compared with an external locus of control, an internal locus of control is associated with better academic, economic, health, and relationship outcomes. Believing you are responsible for your life’s direction rather than external forces appears to be beneficial.

Here’s the late Stanford psychology professor Albert Bandura. His vast body of research showed that belief in personal agency, or what he described as “self-efficacy,” has powerful positive effects on life outcomes.

Undermining self-efficacy will have little effect on the rich and educated, but will have pronounced effects for the less fortunate.

It’s also generally instructive to see what affluent people tell their kids. And what seems to happen is that affluent people often broadcast how they owe their success to luck. But then they tell their own children about the importance of hard work and individual effort.

(…)

When I was growing up in foster homes, or making minimum wage as a dishwasher, or serving in the military, I never heard words like “cultural appropriation” or “gendered” or “heteronormative.”

Working class people could not tell you what these terms mean. But if you visit an elite university, you’ll find plenty of affluent people who will eagerly explain them to you.

When people express unusual beliefs that are at odds with conventional opinion, like defunding the police or downplaying hard work, or using peculiar vocabulary, often what they are really saying is, “I was educated at a top university” or “I have the means and time to acquire these esoteric ideas.”

Only the affluent can learn these things because ordinary people have real problems to worry about.

To this extent, Pierre Bourdieu in The Forms of Capital wrote, “The best measure of cultural capital is undoubtedly the amount of time devoted to acquiring it.”

The chief purpose of luxury beliefs is to indicate evidence of the believer’s social class and education.

Members of the luxury belief class promote these ideas because it advances their social standing and because they know that the adoption of these policies or beliefs will cost them less than others.

(…)

Why are affluent people more susceptible to luxury beliefs? They can afford it. And they care the most about status.

In short, luxury beliefs are the new status symbols.

They are honest indicators of one’s social position, one’s level of wealth, where one was educated, and how much leisure time they have to adopt these fashionable beliefs.

And just as many luxury goods often start with the rich but eventually become available to everyone, so it is with luxury beliefs.

But unlike luxury goods, luxury beliefs can have long term detrimental effects for the poor and working class. However costly these beliefs are for the rich, they often inflict even greater costs on everyone else.”

#henderson #rob henderson #luxury beliefs #luxury #psychology #bourdieu #pierre bourdieu #veblen #thorstein veblen #zahavi #amotz zahavi #beran #michael knox beran #class #status #status symbols #peacock

[maaarine]

Masculine Domination (Pierre Bourdieu, 1998)

"Masculine domination, which constitutes women as symbolic objects whose being (esse) is a being-perceived (percipi), has the effect of keeping them in a permanent state of bodily insecu­rity, or more precisely of symbolic dependence.

They exist first through and for the gaze of others, that is, as welcoming, attrac­tive and available objects.

They are expected to be 'feminine', that is to say, smiling, friendly, attentive, submissive, demure, restrained, self-effacing.

And what is called 'femininity' is often nothing other than a form of indulgence towards real or sup­posed male expectations, particularly as regards the aggran­dizement of the ego.

As a consequence, dependence on others (and not only men) tends to become constitutive of their being.

This heteronomy is the principle of dispositions such as the desire to draw attention and to please, sometimes perceived as coquettishness, or the propensity to expect a great deal from love,

which, as Sartre says, is the only thing capable of provid­ing the feeling of being justified in the particularities of one's being, starting with one's body. (…)

The influence of these institutions is undeniable, but they do no more than reinforce the effect of the fundamental relationship instituting women in the position of a being-perceived condemned to perceive itself through the dominant, i.e. masculine, categories.

And to understand the 'masochistic dimension' of female desire, in other words the 'eroticization of social relations of domination ('for many women, dominance in men is exciting,' as Bartky puts it),

one has to hypothesize that women look to men (and also, but secondarily, to the 'fashion-beauty complex') for subterfuges to reduce their 'sense of physical inadequacy';

and it can be assumed that the gaze of the powerful, which carries author­ity, especially among other men, is particularly able to fulfill this function of reassurance."

#pierre bourdieu #masculine domination #book #weaker sex

[bakaity-poetry]

#loic wacquant #Pierre Bourdieu #urban #Youtube

[thebusylilbee]

"The lengthy graphic training necessary to acquire the skills required by comics, especially in their 'realistic' form, with its battle scenes, moving crowds, chases, etc., as well as the length and meticulousness involved in the execution of each panel (on average, comics artists spend 6 to 9 hours a day at the drawing board to produce 1 to 4 panels a week), tend to favour workers endowed, by class habitus, with the values of 'diligence', 'seriousness' and 'hard work' and, correlatively, to discourage the "artistic" inclinations of teenagers from the upper classes who are relatively deprived of cultural capital - at least school certified cultural capital - who, on the other hand, find in photography, an activity where technical constraints are almost non-existent and working time is reduced to a minimum, the ideal terrain for showcasing their social capital, their "taste" and the "manners" they owe to their family heritage."

Source : Boltanski Luc. La constitution du champ de la bande dessinée. In: Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. Vol. 1, n°1, janvier 1975. Hiérarchie sociale des objets. pp. 37-59. [Original text in french, translation is mine]

okay so this quote is from an old academic article about comics and im sharing it bc oh my god that last part about rich kids with limited talent choosing photography to express their "artistic inclinations" inevitably made me think about Brooklyn Beckham's infamous photography book

#photography #brooklyn beckham #comics #art #culture #pierre bourdieu #sociology #art history #bee tries to talk #material culture

[funstealer]

Taste is first and foremost distaste, disgust and visceral intolerance of the taste of others.

Pierre Bourdieu

#Pierre Bourdieu #Q

[nibelmundo]

In each one of us, in differing degrees, is contained the person we were yesterday, and indeed, in the nature of things it is even true that our past personae predominate in us, since the present is necessarily insignificant when compared with the long period of the past because of which we have emerged in the form we have today. It is just that we don't directly feel the influence of these past selves precisely because they are so deeply rooted within us. They constitute the unconscious part of ourselves. Consequently we have a strong tendency not to recognize their existence and to ignore their legitimate demands. By contrast, with the most recent acquisitions of civilization we are vividly aware of them just because they are recent and consequently have not had time to be assimilated into our collective unconscious.

Pierre Bourdieu

#pierre bourdieu #history as illness #quotes #rousseau #habitus as embodied history #on the sentience of all things salient #words #under capitalism

[thecolourofguilt]

My bookshelf 😽📚 What I read when I am not promoting #TheColourOfGuilt 💙

#books and novels #sociology #pierre bourdieu #bookworms #bourdieu #black creators #writers #bell hooks #james baldwin #author #novel writing #nancy delautrecs #emotional intelligence #intellectualisation #mental illness #racism #crt #critical race theory #critical race studies #sociologie #web novel #feminism #feminisme #the fire next time #bookworm #bookshelf #bookshelves

[makingtheroadbywalking]

- Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power,  Pierre Bourdieu et al ‘systemic’ concerns plaguing the university include systems we’re a part of. teaching is a system. classroom learning is a system. that said, how do we cultivate this understanding collectively? how to not feel like you’re powerless, that this is how it’ll be?

#pierre bourdieu #academic discourse #academia #book quotes #universities