Bourdieu, Ethnography and Reflexivity

This chapter offers something by way of introducing Pierre Bourdieu in terms of who he was and what he accomplished. Bourdieu’s early work on education offers a kind of social topography of the student population, in a similar way as he had with Algeria, again with a commitment to find out just who they were. The chapter shows that something of the theoretical perspectives developed by Bourdieu in the course of his empirical, ethnographic studies. The degree to which the significance of reflexivity was playing itself out as a strand of Bourdieu’s work is noticeable from the way an entire section of the original French version of The Outline of a Theory of Practice is dedicated to “the observer observed”. Bourdieu insists that without reflexivity researchers are always prone to import their own primary – pre-reflexive – selves into the object of research, and then pass the whole thing off as science.