Bourdieu and ethnography

reflexivity, politics and praxis

Henry Barnard

pp. 58-85

in: Richard Harker, Cheleen Mahar, Chris Wilkes (eds), An introduction to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1990

Abstract

The last two decades have witnessed an increasing sense of crisis in the central practical¹ activity of the discipline of social anthropology — the creation of ethnographies. The impasse that seems to have been reached has resulted in what one recent commentator (who is also a"participant") has been led to call a"failure of nerve" (Geertz, 1985:624). This chapter surveys the crisis, examines one peculiar development which pretends that the crisis does not exist, and then explores the work of Pierre Bourdieu. It will be argued that by "working on the working subject" (1984:511) in the very act of dealing with the objects of his scientific work, Bourdieu partially overcomes a series of obstacles that have stood in the way of other ethnographers. He has shown how ethnography can be reflexive without being narcissistic or uncritical; how to generate a critical ethnography of modern societies which overcomes the problem of defining an "authentic" group for the application of the ethnographic method; and he provides the theoretical apparatus appropriate for the new mode of analysis necessitated by his innovations in ethnography.

Cited authors

Bourdieu Pierre