An important sociologist who can be considered a folk hero: Who is Pierre Bourdieu?

French sociologist Pierre Felix Bourdieu was born on August 1, 1930, in Béarn, a rural town in southwestern France, as the grandson of a farmer grandfather and the son of a postman father.

Bourdieu attends high school in Pau, France. He then attends the Louis-le-Grand High School in Paris. He completed his higher education in the philosophy department of École Normale Supérieure, one of the most respected educational institutions in France, in 1954. He continues his education with the elite, whom he does not identify as one of them. However, it cannot be said that he had a happy school life as his friends made fun of his place and accent. He will say that these experiences in the following years brought him to the point where he is.

Pierre Bourdieu (1 August 1930 – 23 January 2002) was a French sociologist and public intellectual. Bourdieu's contributions to the sociology of education, the theory of sociology, and sociology of aesthetics have achieved wide influence in several related academic fields (e.g. anthropology, media and cultural studies, education, popular culture, and the arts). During his academic career he was primarily associated with the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris and the Collège de France.

Bourdieu, who started to work on philosophy, works with Lous Althusser, a philosopher in Marxist thought. It focuses on epistemology and the history of science. It positions itself against the dominant scientific current. The thinker manages to make a name for himself in the scientific context in a short time. Bourdieu's success in philosophy suddenly begins to evolve into the field of social sciences. Bourdieu's introduction to sociology takes place during the years he was in Algeria due to his compulsory military service.

Bourdieu, who was recruited into the French army in 1955, was sent to this country as a military officer for three years at the height of the Algerian War of Independence (1956-1962). Working in an academic position at the University of Algiers from 1958 to 1961, Bourdieu begins to lead scientific research in an academic group supported by the Algerian Branch of France, the Society for Demographic, Economic, and Social Studies.

Algeria offers him an important field of study, and his anthropological study of the villagers of Kabul gives him the opportunity to lay the foundations of his sociological theory. Bourdieu's fieldwork in Algeria is also the origin of the production of his most original contribution to sociology, such as habitus, field, capital, and strategy. In 1958, he published his first book, Sociology of Algeria, which included his sociological observations on Algerians, here.

After returning from Algeria, Bourdieu also made a definite return to sociology. Bourdieu, who was appointed director of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 1964, established a research center in 1968. In 1975, he published an academic journal called Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales. Again in these periods, he forms a research group that focuses on issues such as symbolic power and social inequality.

After the 1970s, he focused on various studies covering art, ritual, kinship, belief, science, intellectuals, language, social classes, and political institutions, while he was researching ways to reveal the contrast between structural objectivism and constructivist subjectivism and developing his own paradigm. Bourdieu expressed these thoughts for the first time in 1972 in his work called Outline of a Theory of Practice.

In 1982, Bourdieu was appointed president of the Collège de France (Institute of Education and Research), where he expanded his research to cover topics such as the experience of social pain in contemporary society, the social foundations of the economy, gender domination, and the state. In one of his basic works, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, published in 1979, he attempts to explain the concepts of habitus, capital, and field, which are his own conceptual triad. The International Sociological Association chooses this work of Bourdieu as one of the ten best sociological studies of the 20th century.

The concept of habitus, one of the important concepts of Bourdieu's sociology, is the state of reciprocity that both shapes the individual and is shaped by the actions of the individual. It describes the basic stock of knowledge that people have in their minds as a result of living in certain cultures or subcultures. Therefore, a working-class person will have the influence of this environment in his behavior. Thanks to habitus, the individual gains the ability to produce solutions in the face of different possibilities. Therefore, the individual both comes from a structured classification and constructs a classification that is in the process of being structured.

We can also explain habitus with examples from our lives. For example, the individual gets used to his own neighborhood or district; knows and internalizes where the market, patisserie, and bakery are. In time, he goes in the direction he wants without thinking. But someone who has just moved to the neighborhood cannot get used to where the market and other places are. At first, he is always confused, and over time he starts to internalize it and finds his directions easily. Here, habitus is the principle that provides solutions for the individual to get rid of the deadlocks he has reached as a result of difficulties, and for the individual to find his place in the social world.

When we talk about socialization, we cannot talk about only one socialization. There are types of socialization; political socialization, economic socialization, cultural socialization, and religious socialization. For Bourdieu, types of socialization represent the field.

Since each of the fields has its own internal logic and value potential, the rules of the game, which have sociological determinants, are in question in the operation of each field. The ongoing struggles in the fields are a struggle for socialization. Every area is a place of socialization. The boundaries of the fields vary from society to society. The economic sphere affects the religious sphere, and the religious sphere affects the cultural sphere. The struggle for survival in the field takes place within the framework of certain rules. Bourdieu uses the concept of "doxa" for these rules and "illusio" for the benefits to be obtained as a result of the struggle. In terms of socialization, doxa represents norms. The individual who socializes by adapting to the norms, on the other hand, realizes successful socialization as illusio.

Bourdieu uses the game metaphor to better understand the concept of space. In a game, there are players, their investments, interests, strategies, non-clear rules (doxa), and cards that everyone has. Players are a society in general. Their investments are bits of capital that they risk to meet their endgame prospect (illusio). The real capital is the cards each player has in their hand. The field is the place where this game is played and the power weight in the field and the chance of winning / losing differ according to the capital of the people. The strategies developed by the players during the game correspond to the concept of habitus.

He gathered the concept of capital under four main headings:

Economic Capital: It has been defined as a concept that separates social capital. Bourdieu saw this concept as inadequate. Because capital does not have a single economic entity.

Cultural Capital: The form of cultural capital has been defined as the knowledge acquired during the socialization process. Bourdieu, by dividing this cultural process into two, claimed that it would be gained as family life and school life.

Social Capital: Social capital adopts what the individual earns from the society in which he lives. It encompasses the individual's ties to society, group memberships, and the individual's obligations to himself.

Symbolic Capital: It claims that it is a representative concept by considering the common denominator of society. It reveals the symbolic truths on the objective reality of events. The symbolic society also welcomes values and beliefs through symbols. In this context, symbols are constructed in the minds of individuals.

Pierre Bourdieu succumbed to cancer in 2002 at the age of 71. He is an important sociologist who can still keep his name alive and can be considered a folk hero in his lifetime. He has always supported the struggle of blacks. He has never been only interested in the theoretical part of sociology at the desk, he has always been on the field. With this and many other features, he was appreciated and left a mark as a successful sociologist.